incapable of self-government, or that Englishmen must know better what was good for them than they knew themselves.  For Cromwell he could make allowance.  The Protector had to deal with a Catholicism which would have made an end of him and restored Charles ii.  But times had changed.  Catholics had abandoned persecution, and ought not to be punished the sins of their fathers.  The Irish did not claim, as the Southern States had claimed, the right to secede, but to exercise the powers inherent in every State of the American Union.

Carlyle warmly approved of Froude’s undertaking, and persisted in believing that it had done good by forcing the American public to see that there were two sides to the historic question, an English side as well as an Irish one.  He was so far right, and with that qualified success Froude had to be content.  His champion, whose opinion was more to him than any other, than any number of others, wrote to Mrs. Froude on the 5th of December, 1872:  “The rest of the affair, all that loud whirlwind of Bully Burke, Saturday Review and Co., both at home and abroad, I take to be, in essence, absolutely nothing; and to deserve from him no more regard than the barking of dogs, or the braying of asses.  He may depend on it, what he is saying about Ireland is the genuine truth, or the nearest to it that has ever been said by any person whatever; and I hope he knows long ere this (if he likes to consider it) that the truth alone is anything, and all the circumambient balderdash and whirlwinds of nonsense tumbling round it are, and eternally remain, nothing.  Tell him I have read his book, and know others that have read it with attention; and that their and my clear opinion is as above.  To myself there is a ring in it as of clear steel; and my prophecy is that all the roaring blockheads of the world cannot prevent its natural effect on human souls.  Sooner or later all persons will have to believe it.”  Carlyle seldom qualified his approval, and his earnest advocacy was to Froude a recompense beyond all price.

The first volume of Froude’s English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, to which Carlyle refers, had been published at home while the author was lecturing on the Irish question to the people of the United States.  Like the lectures, on a more thorough and comprehensive scale, it is a bold indictment of the Irish nation.  Froude could not write without a purpose, nor forget that he was an Englishman and a Protestant.  Before he had finished a single chapter of his new book he had stated in uncompromising language his opinion of the Irish race.  “Passionate in everything—­passionate in their patriotism, passionate in their religion, passionately courageous, passionately loyal and affectionate—­they are without the manliness which would give strength and solidity to the sentimental part of their dispositions; while the surface and show is so seductive and winning that only experience of its instability can resist