would have been appalled at the idea of such research as Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London.  But the scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed themselves in his mind before he began.  He was to vindicate the Protestant cause in Ireland, and to his own satisfaction he vindicated it.  If I may apply a phrase coined many years afterwards, Froude assumed that Irish Catholics had taken a double dose of original sin.  He always found in them enough vice to account for any persecution of which they might be the victims.  Just as he could not write of Kerry without imputing failure and instability to O’Connell, so he could not write about Ireland without traducing the leaders of Irish opinion.  They might be Protestants themselves; but they had Catholics for their followers, and that was enough.  It was enough for Carlyle also, and to attack Froude’s historical reputation is to attack Carlyle’s.  “I have read,” Carlyle wrote on the 20th of June, 1874, “all your book carefully over again, and continue to think of it not less but rather more favourably than ever:  a few little phrases and touches you might perhaps alter with advantage; and the want of a copious, carefully weighed concluding chapter is more sensible to me than ever; but the substance of the book is genuine truth, and the utterance of it is clear, sharp, smiting, and decisive, like a shining Damascus sabre; I never doubted or doubt but its effect will be great and lasting.  No criticism have I seen since you went away that was worth notice.  Poor Lecky is weak as water—­bilge-water with a drop of formic acid in it:  unfortunate Lecky, he is wedded to his Irish idols; let him alone.”  The reference to Lecky, as unfair as it is amusing, was provoked by a review of Froude in Macmillan’s Magazine.  There are worse idols than Burke, or even Grattan, and Lecky was an Irishman after all.

A very different critic from Carlyle expressed an equally favourable opinion.

“I have an interesting letter,” Froude wrote to his friend Lady Derby, formerly Lady Salisbury, “from Bancroft the historian (American minister at Berlin) on the Irish book.  He, I am happy to say, accepts the view which I wished to impress on the Americans, and he has sent me some curious correspondence from the French Foreign Office illustrating and confirming one of my points.  One evening last summer I met Lady Salisbury,* and told her my opinion of Lord Clare.  She dissented with characteristic emphasis—­and she is not a lady who can easily be moved from her judgments.  Still, if she finds time to read the book I should like to hear that she can recognise the merits as well as the demerits of a statesman who, in the former at least, so nearly resembled her husband.”

—­ * The wife of the late Prime Minister. —­

In another letter he says: 

“The meaning of the book as a whole is to show to what comes of forcing uncongenial institutions on a country to which they are unsuited.  If we had governed Ireland as we govern India, there would have been no confiscation, no persecution of religion, and consequently none of the reasons for disloyalty.  Having chosen to set Parliament and an Established Church, and to the lands of the old owners, we left nothing undone to spoil the chances of success with the experiment.”