EIKflN BAMAIKH.* WE remember to have heard of a man

who conceived the notion of testing the average Briton's acquaintance with English history by perpetually asking people,—" Who wrote Ebtio Barukoteg Putting the query in season and out of season, with a malignant pur- pose of exposing the rottenness of modern education, this individual accumulated a very considerable bulk of answers, ranging between the superior and inferior limits of Plato and Bishop Butler. These results supplied him with a steady source of gratification, until in an unhappy moment he ventured to assay, in company, the edu- cation of a clergyman, a schoolmaster whom he suspected of the unsoundness he delighted to detect. The parson answered modestly, "I don't know ;" and then the detector, with affected concern at that which pleased him inwardly, expressed, with some tinge of severity, his surprise that a gentleman, a schoolmaster, and nurtured at Oxford, of all places in the world, should be ignorant upon such a subject. The clergyman turned to bay :—"Pray, Sir," he said, "do you know who wrote Etzeoy BacAnci"? Fancy Dr. Donald- son asked if he could conjugate r6Tra) ! The questioned questioner replied, "mildly, but firmly," that he believed he was aware of the writer of Etzos.w BatriXtzi. "Well, then, Sir," the parson per- sisted, "who do you say did write it ? " " Why, Charles I., of course." And the parson thereupon begging to be informed whether he was in possession of any new evidence elucidating a question which had been the subject of so very long a controversy as the authorship of Etzoiy BouriXoci), the unfortunate critic had the mortification of becoming aware in public, for the first time, that the query which he had picked out to fling at all comers was one which two centuries had left unanswered.

A man may be very well informed for all practical and most theoretical purposes, without having any ideas on such a question as this ; and yet the time was when this controversy was waged as bitterly as the battle between Bentley and Temple over Phalaris. For any reliable evidence which has ever been brought to bear on it, the authorship of Ebccsdi, BacriXot4 is almost as uncertain as as that of Junius, with this difference, that the paternity of Junius has gone tolerably at large, while EWA, BacriA.rxii has been fathered upon two persons only, King Charles 1., and Dr. Gauden, successively Bishop of Exeter and Worcester after the Restora- tion. It is a common fate of questions having any relation to State matters to be made shibboleths, a practice which was carried to a climax of absurdity some few years ago, when a considerable number of members of the then Opposition evinced an unaccount- able desire to make a party question of Mr. Jevons's theory about the coal supply. So it was once an article of faith with a certain class of opinionists to hold that the work which Messrs. Parker and Co. have now thought proper to reprint was an undoubted emanation from the royal brain of Charles I., and to regard any- one who might venture to argue the contrary much as the late Mr. Charles Waterton regarded "Dutch William and the Hano- verian Rat." It is not presumptuous to say that the strife between Royalists and Roundheads has been laid by this time. The Protector has his worshippers, and we still meet with young ladies who adore the Cavaliers ; but the last of the " Divine-right " theorists is believed to have expired with the gentleman who so gloriously misquoted Shakespeare :— * EtzcZn Baa./Xixi) : the Portraiture of His dlojesty King Charles I. A Now Edition, Oxford and London : James Parker and Co. "There's a divinity doth hedge our kings, Rough-hew them how we will."

People in general have quietly accepted the conclusion that, at any rate, the Stuarts being a dynasty who proved themselves practically unable to govern England, it is not necessary at this distance of time to say any more about them. Thus, in the words of the popular sentiment, difference of opinion no longer alters friend- ship ; and thus the dispute about the authorship of Elxioy BatuXixi has become, except among a few enthusiasts, a thing of the past.

The first edition was published ten days after the King's execu- tion, and the controversy followed quickly. The subsequent editions are numbered by scores and fifties, and the writers who took up the authorship question are utterly unnumberable, attacking, refuting, replying to, and completely exposing each

other with prolific diligence and unflagging acrimony.. Milton wrote an Iconoclast, or Etxtsoy-Smasher; Dr. Wagstaffe trumpeted

on the other side ; Dr. Walker, who had been Gauden's curate at Booking, in Essex, purported to give an account of the actual composition of the piece by his former rector ; Burnet believed that Gauden was the man ; Hume assigned the book to the King ; Sir J. Mackintosh to the Bishop ; Dr. Wordsworth, the predecessor of Whewell at Trinity College, Cambridge, supported the King's pretensions, in a volume entitled " Who Wrote Ebtioy Bacikrzir Immediately after the appearance of Wordsworth's performance, somebody wrote up on the screens at Trinity :-

' Who wrote Who Wrote Elzt4 BacAncir

I,' said the Master of Trinity, With my metaphysics and my divinity,'

I wrote Who Wrote Elzo;s,

This was ascribed to Benjamin Hall Kennedy, at that time (1824) a fellow of St. John's. Hallam appended to his Constitutional History a long note on the question, in which he as- serted confidently that Gauden must have been the author ; he grounded his belief on certain resemblances which he detected in the known works of Gauden, coupled with the improbability that Gauden would venture to claim the authorship in the certainty of a false claim being exposed. The controversy has now died out, though every now and then it flashes up fitfully amid the barter of small antiquarian and literary wares in Notes and Queries.

The materials for settling the answer to this or any similar question are far more available at this day than they were a hundred years ago. Now that public and private collections of records and documents are so readily accessible, and above all, now that the public collections are being day by day so admirably indexed, it is probable that a well-informed and intelligent inquirer might clear up the matter after all. A definite " Yes " or " No " to the claims of Charles I. would be an interesting historical fact. The task would be difficult, but with the aids which the last twenty years have supplied it may be less hard than it appears. The mass of evidence is enormous, and comprises matters of every degree of flimsiness, from apocryphal utterances of Oliver Cromwell to oracular statements from "persons of quality" whose names are not known. At present this bulk is embarrassing, from its very size ; but an intelligent man, thoroughly acquainted with the period, and shrewd enough to marshal, digest, and disentangle the details, would probably soon reduce it within a very much smaller compass.

Gauden was a divine who attached himself to the Royalist side, and as a pamphleteer attacked the Army and the Commonwealth party. He got his promotion after the Restoration, was made Bishop of Exeter in 1660, and coveted the see of Winchester, but had finally to content himself with Worcester. Among the evidence relied on in his favour (if it can be considered in a man's favour to be suspected of a gross fraud) are certain letters, which purport to have been found many years after Gauden's death among the papers of one North, a connection of the family by marriage. One of these is from Gauden's widow to her son John, in which she calls the book a jewel, and says Gauden hoped to make a fortune by it. Mrs. Gauden also makes a long statement, to the effect that Gauden wrote the book, meaning it to be found among the King's papers when be was detained prisoner at Hohnby ; that he showed it to Lord Capel, who approved, but said it must not be put out without the King's permission (which was very proper of Lord Capel) ; that a copy was sent to the King by the Marquis of Hertford, and read to him by Duppa, Bishop of Salisbury, and that the King was pleased with the production, but required time to consider ; that the Marquis of Hertford never knew what became of that copy of the MS., but that Gauden, having another copy, got it printed by Mr. Symonds, minister of Rayne, near Bocking. There are two other papers in this lot which are very much

relied on by Hallam,—(1) a letter dated 28th December, 1661, from Gauden to Hyde, then Lord Chancellor, to the effect that what he (Gauden) had done was for the comforting and encouraging of the King's friends and exposing his enemies, and that "what was done like a king should have a kingly retribution ;" (2) a letter dated March 13, 1661, from Hyde to Gauden, saying, "The particular you mention has indeed been imparted to me as a secret ; I am sorry I ever knew it, and when it ceases to be a secret it will please none but Mr. Milton." These documents ought not to be received for what they purport to be, without strict investigation. They seem to have been first put forth by Toland and E. Ludlow, both very anxious, as anti- Royalists, to father ElzWv Batanci upon Gauden. Hallam, apparently without inquiry, assumes both that the documents are genuine, and that F.ban, BcoArzi is the subject alluded to. It is noteworthy that Clarendon never quotes from EtzeZei Baaatzi. Rushworth does.

The account purporting to be given by Walker, Gauden's quondam curate, differs in some particulars from Mrs. Gauden's. He says Gauden showed him the whole design, with the heads of chapters, when as yet unfinished ; that Duppa was privy to the work, and wished that it should touch on the ordinance against the Common Prayer-Book, and the denying of the King his chaplains, which Gauden had passed over because he had never been one of the chaplains, and did not much care for the Prayer-Book ; that Gauden sent a copy by the Marquis of Hert- ford to the King in the Isle of Wight, but that he was never cer- tain whether or no it ever reached him. A story, which might be consistent with either hypothesis, is that of Dr. E. Hooker, who says Symonds told him that the King gave the MS. to him (Symonds) with his own hand just before his execution. Burnet says the Duke of York told him, in 1673, that the book was Gauden's ; there appear to be some inaccuracies coupled with this statement of Burnet's. There is also some evidence (ques- tioned by the other side) of a memorandum found by an auctioneer in 1686, in a copy which had belonged to the then late Earl of Anglesea, to the effect that his lordship had been told the same by both the Duke of York and Charles II.

On the other side there is a quantity of evidence such as the following. In Dr. Perencheieff's Life of Charles I. it is said that the MS. was taken with the king's papers at Naseby, and restored by Fairfax at the intercession of Archbishop Usher and one of the King's chaplains; also that Major Robert Huntington, who was charged with their re-delivery, said that he read the papers, and that they were,—Ebata BaaAnti. Again, that Dr. Dillingham, of Emmanuel College, saw after the King's capture a chapter of Ebam BatrAtzi) lying "fresh writ in his bed-chamber." That the Earl of Manchester saw it, written in the King's own hand, with which he was well acquainted ; that one Levett (one of the King's pages) said he often saw the King at Carisbrooke " writing his Royal resentments," and read the MS. when left lying in the window. And much more to the same effect.

Bishop Kennet steers a middle course. He conjectures that the King wrote most of the book himself, and gave it to Symonds to get printed ; that Symonds handed it over to Gauden, who added and interpolated matter of his own, got a chapter from Duppa, and sent the altered MS. back to the King by the Earl of Southampton. He queries whether the King ever had time to revise this correction of his "Royal resentments." The original Gauden solution re- quires us to regard Gauden as a man not overburdened with either scruples or modesty, but upon Kennet's hypothesis his assur- ance must have been simply monstrous. Modern opinion has been rather in favour of the bishop. It is impossible, however, within so short a space to convey even an approximation to a fairly- balanced epitome, and if a deeper search is made into what Mr. Carlyle would call the whole heap of shotten-rubbish, the chaos becomes very perplexing.

Arguments either way have been drawn from the style and the phraseology of the work, but they have thrown scarcely any light on the matter. Southey, indeed, has said that it is next to impossible to identify any English author by his style. However that may be, the phraseology and style of EWA, BaslXixi) are not very strongly marked ; and though Gauden was a prolific author, the King left scarcely anything on which to found a comparison. Hallam, indeed, considered that he identified many expressions employed elsewhere by Gauden, but as most of the these appear to be Scriptural imagery, they afford no inference.

As to the merits of the piece, opinions have differed as widely upon that as upon the other question, from enthusiasts, who irre- verently compared it to the Scriptures, to Hallam, who stigmatized it as "hypocritical cant." It is a long excuse, rather than a defence,

and though weak, regarded as an argument, is couched in dignified language.

Oxford was ever Royalist. The house of Parker has always been very Oxford. We do not know whether the new edition of Eizen IirstriXixi is to be ascribed to a reverence for traditions, or to a recognition of the success with which a good many works relating to the Stuart period have lately been published. For our own part, we can discern no useful end as likely to be attained by thus publishing a mere reprint, for it is nothing more. It would have been something if the reader had been assisted by short historical notes explanatory of the text, and a sketch might have been given of the arguments pro and con upon the authorship question. On the contrary, nothing whatever has been done for the reader's assistance, except the addition of one single leaf, in which "those who are interested in the author- ship of of the book" are referred to Wagstaffe's Vindication, to Walker's True Account (above mentioned), and to the article " Anne,sley " in the Bibliographic Britannica (1747). Such an imperfect list was scarcely worth giving at all, unless, which is probably the case, it was not desired that the reader should go beyond the biassed conclusions arrived at in favour of Charles, in the last-mentioned composition. It is further stated on this flysheet, that the prayers, which were not printed in the earliest editions, but are added here, "are said to be taken from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia." The producers of this reprint seem not even to have been willing to expend the very trifling amount of labour which would have enabled them to verify that assertion.