“The present Oliver Cromwell, whose book serves me for a heading in the Quarterly Review, has led me into an interesting course of reading, and I am surrounded with memoirs of that age. Among other books, I have been reading the Εικον Βασιλικη, which never fell in my way before. The evidence concerning its authenticity is more curiously balanced than in any other case, except perhaps that of the two Alexander Cunninghams; but the internal evidence is strongly in its favour, and I very much doubt whether any man could have written it in a fictitious character,—the character is so perfectly observed. If it be genuine (which I believe it to be as much as a man can believe the authenticity of any thing which has been boldly impugned) it is one of the most interesting books connected with English history. I have been reading also Hobbes’s Behemoth; it is worth reading, but has less of his characteristic strength and felicity of thought and expression than the Leviathan. There is one great point on which he dwells with unanswerable wisdom—the necessity that public opinion should be directed by Government, by means of education and public instruction.
“The course of the revolution in Portugal and Brazil
will be to separate the two countries, and then I fear, to break up Brazil into
as many separate
| 82 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 47. |
“God bless you!
