In the absence of other testimony one might almost stamp a writer as Royalist or Parliamentarian according as his verdict inclined to Charles I.or Bishop Gauden.

In fact, it is no easy matter to balance the respective claims of two entirely different kinds of testimony.

The external evidence of Charles's authorship is worth nothing.

It is almost confined to the assertions, forty years after the publication, of a few aged Cavaliers, who were all morally certain that Charles wrote the book, and to whom a fiction supplying the accidental lack of external testimony would have seemed laudable and pious.

The only wonder is that such legends are not far more numerous.