Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/383

 purpose is directly, endangered, and sparing neither friend nor foe where he is not strong enough to rely on himself alone. It may have been a nature too cold to care for popular love; or too self-contained to condescend to court it; there is no evidence that Henry VII ever dreamed of winning it. In his domestic life there is little that calls for remark. He cannot have cared much about his wife or any of her relations: he honoured and trusted his mother, and may have been in some matters guided by the advice which natural acuteness and varied experience helped her to give him. But this is a minor matter, and would count for little in the picture of a man of whose real character we knew enough to enable us to judge of him. I said in the former lecture there is nothing attractive about him, with all his virtues and all the great consequences of his work. There is surely always something attractive about either greatness or goodness, unless they fall in an age so lost to itself as to be unable to appreciate either. And the opening century, whilst to some extent it shared the king's character, was scarcely so lost as that.

I conclude: like many other things on which it has been my lot all these years to give public statutory lectures, this reign and this king, the more we study them, give the more ground for questioning our own judgments, and the extent and character of our knowledge: the Cheshire cat in Alice's adventure faded away into a grin; we grow more and more impatient of generalisations and idealisations, and more and more intolerant of dogmatic assumptions, the longer we study them. Perhaps this may be the whole lesson, and if it is, it is a lesson that can never be too thoroughly learned or too often repeated.