to have his own way.  Froude saw the absurdity of the Blue-beard delusion, and did immense service in exposing it.  He would have given no handle to his Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic enemies if he had acknowledged that there was an explanation of the error.  He was sometimes carried away by his own eloquence, and his convictions grew stronger as he expressed them, until the facts on the other side looked so small that they were ignored.

History deals, and can only deal, with consequences and results.  Motives and Intentions, however interesting, belong to another sphere.  Henry and Cromwell, Mary and Pole, Elizabeth and Cecil, are tried in Froude’s pages by the simple test of what they did, or failed to do, for England.  Froude detested and despised the cosmopolitan philosophy which regards patriotic sentiment as a relic of barbarism.  He was not merely an historian of England, but also an English historian; and holding Fisher to be a traitor, he did not hesitate to justify the execution of a pious, even saintly man.  Fisher would no doubt have said that it was far more important to preserve the Catholic faith in England than to keep England independent of Spain.  Froude would have replied that unless the nation punished those who sought for the aid of Spanish troops against their own countrymen, she would soon cease to be a nation at all.  His critics evaded the point, and took refuge in talk about bloody tyrants wreaking vengeance upon harmless old men.

If patriotism be not a disqualification for an historian, Froude had none.  Like every other writer, he made mistakes.  But he was laborious in research, a master of narrative, with a genius for seizing dramatic points.  Above all, he had imagination, without which the vastest knowledge is as a ship without sails, or a bird without wings.  His objects, even his prejudices, were frankly avowed, and his prejudices gave way to fresh facts or reasons.  The records at Simancas, for instance, completely changed, and changed for the worse, his estimate of Queen Elizabeth’s character, and he admitted it at once with his transparent candour.  To defend Froude against mendacity seems like an insult to his memory, for if he loved anything it was truth, though he sometimes spoke in a cynical way about the difficulty of attaining it.  But such monstrous charges were made against him when he could no longer reply for himself that I may be forgiven for quoting an authority which will command general respect.  Mr. Andrew Lang is as scrupulously accurate in statement as he is brilliantly felicitous in style.  He has studied the history of the sixteenth century, especially in Scotland, and he disagrees with Froude on many, if not on most, of the points in dispute.  Yet this is Mr. Lang’s deliberate judgment: