“I have found Mr. Froude often in error; often, as I think, misunderstanding, misquoting, omitting and even adding, but I have never once seen reason to suspect him of conscious misrepresentation, of knowingly giving a false impression. ...  It is easy to show that Mr. Froude erred contrary to his bias on occasion, and it must never be forgotten that he did what no consciously dishonest historian could possibly do.  He deposited at the British Museum copies, in the original Spanish, of the documents, very difficult of access, which he used in his History.  By aid of these transcripts, we can find him slipping into errors, and his action in presenting the country with the means of correcting his mistakes proves beyond doubt that he did not consciously make mistakes.  There is no way in which this conclusion can be evaded.  No historian was more honest than Mr. Froude, though few or none of his merit have been so fallible.”

How many historians of his merit have there been?  He had no contemporary rival in England, for Carlyle and Macaulay belonged to a previous generation.  There was certainly no one living when Froude died who could have written the famous passage in the first chapter of his History about the decay of mediaevalism: 

“For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still are hidden from us, a change from era to era.  The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream.  Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return.  A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea.  The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe.  In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer.  And now it is all gone—­like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English themselves a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge.  They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them.  Only among the aisles of the cathedrals, only before the silent figures sleeping on the tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive, and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of the middle age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world.”