It is strange that Carlyle should have taken the trouble to correct a misquotation from Juvenal, and still stranger that Froude should have left the words uncorrected.  Misquotation was a too frequent habit with him.  In his second chapter he applies to Henry the famous passage in Tacitus’s character of Galba, and changes capax imperii to dignus imperil, though dignus would have required imperio, and would then have made inferior sense.  Some of Carlyle’s queries were productive of really substantial results; for instance, the simple words “such as” brought out the fact that the spoils of the monasteries were in part devoted to national defence.  “Inveterate frenzy” is Froude’s description of the years covered by the reign of Edward IV.  “Fine healthy years in the main, for all their fighting,” notes Carlyle.  “See the Paston Letters, for one proof.”  Some of his recommendations are racily colloquial.  “Give us time of day” is his mode of asking for more dates.  Henry’s instructions to his Secretary or Ambassador at Rome he pronounces “very rough matter to set upon the table uncooked,” and recommends an Appendix, unluckily without avail.  “Abridge, redact,” he exclaims towards the end, but there was no abridgment and no redaction.  On the other hand, “prestige,” stigmatised by Carlyle as “a bad newspaper word,” was rejected for “influence,” and his insistence that English only should be used in the text, foreign languages being confined to notes, was accepted by Froude.  That “new doctrines ever gain readiest hearing among the common people” he left to stand as a general proposition, although, as Carlyle reminded him, “in Germany it was by no means the common people who believed Luther first, but the Elector of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, etc., etc.—­Scotland too.”

The conclusion at which Carlyle arrived after reading the second chapter is less favourable than his verdict upon the first.  Inasmuch, however, as some of the modifications suggested were made, though by no means all of them, and as Carlyle’s notions of history are worth knowing on their own account, I will transcribe his words, which are dated the 27th of September, 1855: 

“This chapter contains a great deal of well meditated knowledge, just insight, and sound thinking; seems calculated to explain the Phaenomenon of the Reformation to an unusual degree, in fact has great merit of many kinds, historical among the rest.  But it seems to me (1) to be more of a Dissertation than a Narrative; to want dates, specific details, outline of every kind. (2) The management might surely be mended?  It does not “begin at the beginning” (which indeed is the most difficult of all things, but also the most indispensable); the story is not clear; or rather, as hinted above, there is no story, but an explanation of some story supposed to be already known, which is contrary to rule in writing ‘History.’  On the whole, the Author seems to have such a conception of the subject as were well worth a better setting