with advantage.  But it is curious that Froude was attacked for the precisely opposite fault of treating his authorities with too much freedom.  Carlyle, who knew what historical labour was, saw at once that Froude dealt with his material as a born student and an ardent lover of truth.  His suggestions were always excellent, as sound and just as they were careful and kind.  One criticism, which Froude disregarded, shows not only Carlyle’s wide knowledge (that appears throughout), but also that his long residence south of the Tweed never made him really English.  It refers to Froude’s description of the English volunteers at Calais who “were for years the terror of Normandy,” and of Englishmen generally as “the finest people in all Europe,” nurtured in profuse abundance on “great shins of beef.”

“This,” says Carlyle, “seems to me exaggerated; what we call John-Bullish.  The English are not, in fact, stronger, braver, truer, or better than the other Teutonic races:  they never fought better than the Dutch, Prussians, Swedes, etc., have done.  For the rest, modify a little:  Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops (bread boiled in beer), Robert Burns on oatmeal porridge; and Mahomet and the Caliphs conquered the world on barley meal.”

David Hume would have thoroughly approved of this note.  Froude’s patriotism was incorrigible, and he left the passage as it stood.  A little farther on Carlyle’s hatred of political economy, in which Froude fully shared, breaks out with amusing vigour.  “If,” wrote the younger historian, “the tendency of trade to assume a form of mere self-interest be irresistible,” etc.  “And is it?” comments the elder.  “Let us all get prussic acid, then.”  A recent speculator preferred cyanide of potassium.  But if “mere self-interest” comprises fraudulent balance-sheets, it cannot claim any support from political economy.  When Carlyle drew up a petition to the House of Commons for amending the law of copyright, he was guided by self-interest, but it was not a counsel of despair.  The City Companies, says Froude, “are all which now remain of a vast organisation which once penetrated the entire trading life of England—­an organisation set on foot to realise that impossible condition of commercial excellence under which man should deal faithfully with his brother, and all wares offered for sale, of whatever kind, should honestly be what they pretend to be.”

For “impossible” Carlyle proposed “highly necessary, if highly difficult,” and a similar change was made.  But why people who do not understand political economy should be more honest than those who do neither master nor disciple condescended to explain.  It is much easier to preach than to argue.  More valuable than these gibes is Carlyle’s reminder that guilds were not peculiar to England.

“In Lubeck, Augsburg, Nurnberg, Dantzig, not to speak of Venice, Genoa, Pisa,—­George Hudson and the Gospel of Cheap and Nasty were totally unknown entities.  The German Gilds even made poetry together; Herr Sachs of Nurnberg was one of the finest pious genial master shoemakers that ever lived anywhere—­his shoes and rhymes alike genuine (I can speak for the rhymes) and worthy.”