Froude must have been reminded by the obligatory reference to Freeman that a man of seventy-four was succeeding a man of sixty-nine.  The Roman Cardinals were, he said, in the habit of electing an aged Pontiff with the hope, not always fulfilled, that he would die soon.  He had no belief that such an expectation would be falsified in his own case, and he undertook, with obvious sincerity, not to hold the post for a single day after he had ceased to be capable of efficiently discharging his functions.  To history his own life had been devoted, and it would indeed have been strange if he could not give young men some help in reading it.  His own great book might not be officially recommended for the schools.  It was unofficially recommended by all lovers of good literature and sound learning.  Like most people who know the meaning of science and of history, he denied that history was a science.  There were no fixed and ascertained principles by which the actions of men were determined.  There was no possibility of trying experiments.  The late Mr. Buckle had not displaced the methods of the older historians, nor founded a system of his own.  “I have no philosophy of history,” added Froude, who disbelieved in the universal applicability of general truths.  Here, perhaps, he is hardly just to himself.  The introductory chapter to his History of the Reformation, especially the impressive contrast between modern and mediaeval England, is essentially philosophical, so much so that one sees in it the student of Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon.  History to Froude, like the world to Jaques, was a stage, and all the men and women merely players.  But a lover of Goethe knows well enough that the drama can be philosophical, and Shakespeare, the master of human nature, has drawn nothing more impressive than the close of Wolsey’s career.  “The history of mankind is the history of great men,” was Carlyle’s motto, and Froude’s.  It is a noble one, and to discredit great men with low motives is the vice of ignoble minds.  The reign of Henry viii., after Wolsey’s fall, was rich in horrors and in tragical catastrophes.  But it was not a mere carnival of lust and blood.  High principles were at stake, and profound issues divided parties, beside which the levity of Anne Boleyn and the eyes of Jane Seymour were not worth a moment’s thought.  Hobbes wondered that a Parliament man worth thousands of pounds, like Hampden, to pay twenty shillings for ship-money, as if the amount had anything to do with the principle that taxes could only be levied by the House of Commons.  Henry’s vices are dust in the balance against the fact that he stood for England against Rome.  It is one of Froude’s chief merits that he never fails to see the wood for the trees, never forgets general propositions to lose himself in details.  A novice whose own mind is a blank may read whole chapters of Gardiner without discovering that any events of much significance happened in the seventeenth century.  He will not read many pages of Froude before he perceives that the sixteenth century established our national independence.