was an obstinate incredulity, the ineradicable certainty that miracles did not happen.  Erasmus enjoyed Lucian as a corrective of monkish superstition, though he himself was essentially Christian.  A Protestant he never became.  He lived and died in communion with Rome, denounced by monks as a heretic, and by Lutherans as a time-server.  Paul iii.  Would have made him a Cardinal if his means had sufficed for a Prince of the Church.  Standing between the two extremes, he saw better than any of his contemporaries the real proportions of things, and Froude’s last words on the subject were that students would be most likely to understand the Reformation if they looked at it with the eyes of Erasmus.  Small faults notwithstanding, there is no one who has drawn a more vivid, or a more faithful, portrait of Erasmus than Anthony Froude.

Of Froude in his Oxford Chair it may fairly be said that in a short time he fulfilled a long time, and made more impression upon the under-graduates in a few months than Stubbs had made in as many years.  It was not so much the love of learning that he inspired, though the range of his studies was wide, as enthusiasm for history because it was the history of England.  His subjects were really English.  Erasmus knew England thoroughly, and would have been an Englishman if he could.  The Council of Trent failed to check the Reformation, and England without the Reformation would have been a different country, if not a province of Spain.  Froude’s lectures were events, landmarks in the intellectual life of Oxford, and the young men who came to him for advice went away not merely with dry facts, but with fructifying ideas.  Distasteful as modern Parliamentary politics were to him, the position of the British Empire in the world was the dominant fact in his mind, and he regarded Oxford as a training-ground of imperial statesmanship.

He was not made to run in harness, or to act as a coach for the schools.  “The teaching business at Oxford,” he wrote to Skelton, after his last term, “goes at high pressure—­in itself utterly absurd, and unsuited altogether to an old stager like myself.  The undergraduates come about me in large numbers, and I have asserted in some sense my own freedom; but one cannot escape the tyranny of the system."* This is severe, though not perhaps severer than the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Firth.  To a critic from the outside it seems that Boards of Studies should have power to relax their own rules, and that the utmost possible relaxation should have been granted in the case of Froude.  A famous historian of seventy-four, if qualified to be a Professor at all, must be capable of managing his own work so that it may be most useful and efficient.  The restrictions of which Froude, not alone, complained are really incompatible with Regius Professorships, or at least with the patronage of the Crown.  They imply that the teaching branch of the University is to be entirely controlled by expert specialists