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Wolsey. Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth

The tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
These many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride
At length broke under me and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye:
I feel my heart new open'd. O, how wretched
Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favours!
There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,

That sweet aspect of princes, and his ruin,

More pangs and fears than wars or women have :
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,

Never to hope again.

Let's dry our eyes: and thus far hear me, Cromwell;
And, when I am forgotten, as I shall be,

And sleep in dull cold marble, where no mention
Of me must more be heard-say, I taught thee,
Say, Wolsey, that once trod the ways of glory,
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honour,
Found thee a way, out of his wreck, to rise in;
A sure and safe one, though thy master miss'd it.
Mark but my fall, and that that ruin'd me.
Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition:
By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then,
The image of his Maker, hope to win by it?

Love thyself last cherish those hearts that hate thee;
Corruption wins not more than honesty.

Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace,

To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not :

Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,

Thy God's, and truth's; then if thou fall'st, O Cromwell,

Thou fall'st a blessed martyr. Serve the king;

And, prithee, lead me in:

There take an inventory of all I have,

To the last penny; 'tis the king's: my robe,

And my integrity to Heaven, is all

I dare now call mine own. O Cromwell, Cromwell!

Had I but served my God with half the zeal

I served my king, He would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

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GAINST a regimen of sackcloth and fasting, the body and the soul of Henry revolted. At the close of the Diet of Tribur, he had scarcely completed his twentysixth year. Degraded, if not finally deposed, hated and reviled, abandoned by man, and compelled by conscience to anticipate his abandonment by God, he yet, in the depths of his misery, retained the remembrance and the hope of dominion. The future was still bright with the anticipations of youth. He might yet. retrieve his reputation, resume the blessings he had squandered, and take a signal vengeance on his great antagonist. And amidst the otherwise universal desertion, there remained one faithful bosom on which to repose his own aching heart. Bertha, his wife, who had retained her purity unsullied amidst the license of his Court, now retained her fidelity unshaken amidst the falsehood of his adherents. Her wrongs had been such as to render a deep resentment nothing less than a duty. Her happiness and her honour had been basely assailed by the selfish profligate to whom the most solemn vows had in vain united her. But to her those vows were a bond stronger than death, and indissoluble by all the confederate powers of earth and hell. To suffer was the condition-to pardon and to love, the necessity-of her existence. Vice and folly could not have altogether depraved him who was the object of such inalienable tenderness, and who at length. learnt to return it with a devotion almost equal to her own, after a

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bitter experience had taught him the real value of the homage and caresses of the world.

In her society, though an exile from every other, Henry wore away two months at Spires in a fruitless solicitation to the Pope to receive him in Italy as a penitent suitor for reconcilement with the Church. December had now arrived; and, in less than ten weeks, would be fulfilled the term, when, if still excommunicate, he must, according to the sentence of Tribur, finally resign, not the prerogatives alone, but with them the title and rank of Head of the Empire. No sacrifices seemed too great to avert this danger; and history tells of none more singular than those to which the heir of the Franconian dynasty was constrained to submit. In the garb of a pilgrim, and in a season so severe as, during more than four months, to have converted the Rhine into a solid mass of ice, Henry and his faithful Bertha, carrying in her arms their infant child, undertook to cross the Alps, with no escort but such menial servants as it was yet in his power to hire for that desperate enterprise. Among the courtiers who had so lately thronged his palace, not one would become the companion of his toil and dangers. Among the neighbouring princes who had so lately solicited his alliance, not one would grant him the poor boon of a safe conduct and a free passage through their states. Even his wife's mother exacted from him large territorial cessions as the price of allowing him and her own daughter to scale one of the Alpine passes, apparently that of the Great St Bernard. Day by day, peasants cut out an upward path through the long windings of the mountain. In the descent from the highest summit, when thus at length gained, Henry had to encounter fatigues and dangers from which the chamois-hunter would have turned aside. Vast trackless wastes of snow were traversed, sometimes by mere crawling, at other times by the aid of rope-ladders, or still ruder contrivances, and not seldom by a sheer plunge along the inclined steep; the Empress and her child being enveloped, on those occasions, in the raw skins of beasts slaughtered on the march.

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At Canossa there appeared the German Emperor, not the leader of the rumoured host of Lombard invaders, but surrounded by a small and unarmed retinue-mean in his apparel, and contrite in outward aspect, a humble suppliant for pardon and acceptance to the communion of the faithful. Long centuries had passed away since the sceptre of the West had been won by Italian armies in Italian fields, and Henry declined to put the issue of this great contest on the swords of his Milanese vassals. He well knew that, to break the alliance of patriotism, cupidity, and superstition, which had degraded him at Tribur, it was necessary to rescue himself from the anathema which he had but too justly incurred, and that his crown must be redeemed, not by force, but by submission to his formidable antagonist. And Hildebrand! fathomless as are the depths of the human heart, who can doubt that, amidst the conflict of emotions which now agitated him, the most dominant was the exulting sense of victory over the earth's greatest monarch? His rival at his feet, his calumniator self-condemned, the lips which had rudely summoned him to abdicate the Apostolic crown now suing to him for the recovery of the Imperial diadem, the exaltation in his person of decrepit age over fiery youth, of mental over physical power, of the long-enthralled Church over the long-tyrannising world, all combined to form a triumph too intoxicating even for that capacious intellect.

The veriest sycophant of the Papal Court, even in that superstitious age, would scarcely have ventured to describe, as a serious act of sacramental devotion, the religious masquerade which followed between the high priest and the Imperial penitent; or to extol, as politic and wise, the base indignities to which the Pontiff subjected his prostrate enemy, and of which his own pastoral letters contain the otherwise incredible record. Had it been his object to compel Henry to drain to its bitterest dregs the cup of unprofitable humiliation -to exasperate to madness the Emperor himself, and all who would resent as a personal wrong an insult to their sovereign-and to transmit to the latest age a monument and a hatred alike imperishable, of

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