Such was the temper in which Froude set about his task, and which made it a labour of love.  Besides the great public events in Luther’s career which are familiar to all, he gave a charming picture of the affectionate father, the genial host, the eloquent, humourous talker whose fragments of conversation, his Tischreden, are in Germany almost as popular as his hymns.  Luther’s dominant quality was force, and that was a quality which Froude, like Carlyle, honoured above all others.  Luther was not in all respects like a modern Protestant.  He had a great respect for authority, when it was genuine, and he believed in transubstantiation, which Leo X. regarded as a juggle to deceive the vulgar.  If Luther’s appearance before the Diet of Worms was, as Froude says, “the finest scene in human history,” it is so because this solitary monk stood not for one form of religion against another, but for truth against falsehood, for earnest belief in divine things against a Church governed by unbelievers.  The Renaissance in its most Pagan form had invaded the Vatican, and the Vicar of Christ appeared to Luther as Anti-Christ himself.  If Charles V. had been Pope, and Leo X. had been emperor, we might never have heard of Luther.  Froude sincerely respected Charles V., and held that Protestant historians had done him less than justice.  Although Charles opposed the Reformation, he opposed it honestly, and his faith in his own religion was absolute.  He was a Christian gentleman.  As he entered Wittenberg after the battle of Mahlberg, some bishop asked him to dig up Luther’s body and burn it.  “I war not with the dead,” he perhaps remembering the grand old Roman line: 

Nullum cum victis certamen, et aethere cassis.

One valuable truth Froude had learned not from Carlyle, but from study of the past, and from his own observation at the Cape.  “If,” he wrote in Caesar, “there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this, that free nations” cannot govern subject provinces.  If they are unable or unwilling to admit their dependencies to share their constitution, the constitution itself will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties.”  A critic in The Quarterly Review expressed a hope that this would not prove to be true of India.  But Froude was not thinking of India.  He had in his mind the self-governing Colonies, whose fortunes and future were to him a source of perpetual interest.  He loved travel, and as soon as he had shaken off the burden of Carlyle he took a voyage round the world, described, not always with topical accuracy, in Oceana.  The name of this delightful volume is of course taken from Harrington, More’s successor in the days of the Commonwealth.  The contents were a characteristic mixture of history, speculation, and personal experience.  Froude had a fixed idea that English politicians, especially Liberal politicians, wanted to get rid of the Colonies.  Else why had they withdrawn British troops from Canada and New Zealand?  He could