Note 24 — Chapter II · THE FOUNDER OF THE COTTONIAN LIBRARY. (continued 2)

I have dwelt, somewhat protractedly, on this one interesting point in Cotton’s history,—pressing as are the limits prescribed to this volume,—under the belief that many readers will bear in mind that Sir Robert’s misfortune beneath the recent disinterment of ambassadorial despatches, written to foreign courts, is not an exceptional misfortune. Sir Walter Ralegh has fared still worse, in Mr. Gardiner’s able hands, by being held up to public scorn as a knavish liar, upon the uncorroborated testimony of certain avowed and bitter enemies of England. See Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage (1869), vol. i, Chaps. 1 and 2, passim. Readers of the admirable History of England by Mr. Froude—and who has not read that history?—will easily call to mind several not dissimilar instances. Nor is it at all surprising that it should be so. The most warily judicial of intellects can never be quite independent of that factitious charm which there will always be—over and above the legitimate charm—in telling an old story from an entirely new point of view. If, besides the attraction of mere novelty, there should chance to have been a keen burst of search over a difficult country, before the eager searcher could succeed in running down his quarry, he would be more than human if, in the moment of victory, he could weigh and balance with exact precision the real value of the hard-won spoil. At present, historians are too keenly chasing after new evidence to be able to estimate quite fairly its relative importance or net result. The most part both of writers and of readers are far too busy over newly-discovered materials to adjust with any approach to impartial fairness the vital question of comparative credibility. But the time for doing that must needs come, by and bye. Meanwhile, the fame of not a few of our old and true worthies will—in all probability—suffer some degree of momentary eclipse; just as that of Ralegh and Cotton has suffered.