“I felt in the autumn (and you were angry at me for saying so) that the very worst thing which could happen for Europe would be the success of the policy with which France and England were managing things.  Happily the gods were against it too, as now, after having between us wasted sixty millions of money and fifty thousand human lives, we are beginning to discover.  But I have no hope that things will go right, or that men will think reasonably, until they have first exhausted every mode of human folly.  I still think Louis Napoleon the d—­d’est rascal in Europe (for which again you will be angry with me), and that his reception the other day in London will hereafter appear in history as simply the most shameful episode in the English annals.  Thinking this, you will not consider my opinion good for anything, and therefore I need not inflict it upon you.  Humbugs, however, will explode in the present state of the atmosphere, and the Austrian humbug, for instance, is at last, God be praised for it, exploding.  John Bull, I suppose, will work himself into a fine fever about that; but he will think none the worse of the old ladies in Downing Street who are made fools of:  and will be none the better disposed to listen to people who told him all along how it would be.  However, in the penal fatuity which has taken possession of our big bow-wow people, and in even the general folly, I see great ground for comfort to quiet people like myself; and if I live fifteen years, I still hope I shall see a Republic among us.”

—­ * April 30th, 1855. —­

Froude’s Republicanism did not last.  His opinion of Louis Napoleon never altered.

CHAPTER IV

THE HISTORY

“It has not yet become superfluous to insist,” said the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge on the 26th of January, 1903, “that history is a science, no less and no more.”  If this view is correct and exhaustive, Froude was no historian.  He must remain outside the pale in the company of Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Mommsen.  Among literary historians, the special detestation of the pseudo-scientific school, Froude was pre-eminent.  Few things excite more suspicion than a good style, and no theory is more plausible than that which associates clearness of expression with shallowness of thought.  Froude, however, was no fine writer, no coiner of phrases for phrases’ sake.  A mere chronicler of events he would hardly have cared to be.  He had a doctrine to propound, a gospel to preach.  “The Reformation,” he said, “was the hinge on which all modern history turned,"* and he regarded the Reformation as a revolt of the laity against the clergy, rather than a contest between two sets of rival dogmas for supremacy over the human mind.  That is the key of the historical position which he took up from the first, and always defended.  He held the Church of Rome to have been the enemy of human freedom, and