egree in which literary judgment may be
biassed by political prepossession. In the absence of other testimony
one might almost stamp a writer as Royalist or Parliamentarian according
as his verdict inclined to Charles I. or Bishop Gauden. In fact, it is
no easy matter to balance the respective claims of two entirely
different kinds of testimony. The external evidence of Charles's
authorship is worth nothing. It is almost confined to the assertions,
forty years after the publication, of a few aged Cavaliers, who were
all morally certain that Charles wrote the book, and to whom a fiction
supplying the accidental lack of external testimony would have seemed
laudable and pious. The only wonder is that such legends are not far
more numerous. On the other hand, the internal evidence seems at first
sight to make for the king. The style is not dissimilar to that of the
reputed royal author; the sentiments are such as would have well become
him; the assumed character is supported throughout with consistency; and
there are none of the slips which a fabricator might have been thought
hardly able to avoid. The supposed personator of the King was
unquestionably an unprincipled time-server. Is it not an axiom that a
worthy book can only proceed from a worthy mind?

"If this fail,
The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble!"

Against such considerations we have to set the stubborn facts that
Bishop Gauden did actually claim the authorship that he preferred his
claim to the very persons who had the strongest interest in exploding
it; that he invoked the testimony of those who must have known the
truth, and could most easily have crushed the lie; that he convinced not
only Clarendon, but Charles's own children, and received a substantial
reward. In the face of these undeniable facts, the numerous
circumstances used with skill and ingenuity by Dr. Wordsworth to
invalidate his claim, are of little weight. The stronger the apparent
objections, the more certain that the proofs in Gauden's hands must have
been overwhelming, and the greater the presumption that he was merely
urging what had always been known to several persons about the late
king. When, with this conviction, we recur to the "Eikon," and examine
it in connection with Gauden's acknowledged writings, the internal
testimony against him no longer seems so absolutely conclusive. Gauden's
style is by no means so bad as Hu