When in the year 1509 a handsome youth of eighteen came to the throne, the hopes of England ran high. His intelligence, his frank, genial manners, his sympathy with the "new learning," won all classes. Erasmus in his hopes of purifying the Church, and Sir Thomas More in his "Utopian" dreams for politics and society, felt that a friend had come to the throne in the young Henry VIII. -from Chapter VI American writer MARY PLATT PARMELE (1843-1911) believed that in the typically dry presentation of her day, the reading of history was a "dreary task," and so she set out to remedy that with a series of sprightly chronicles of the past and accounts of the present that encompassed the essential facts necessary for appreciating the state of the world as she saw it. With this William B. Harison; New York book, she lays bare the "multitudinous characters and details" of the "imposing strand of English Civilization" at the very height of its power at the end of the 19th century. From Caesar"s...