something of ecclesiastical history, and he understood that the character of Henry, which certainly left much to be desired, might have been blackened of set purpose by ecclesiastical historians.  Froude’s reputation was made.  The reviewers, most of whom knew nothing about the subject, could not hurt him.  He had followed his bent, and chosen his vocation well.  The gift of narrative was his, and he had had thoughts of turning novelist.  But to write a novel, or at least a successful novel, was a thing he could never do.  He had not the spirit of romance.  If there was anything romantic in him, it was love of England, and of the sea.  From the ocean rovers of Elizabeth to the colonial path-finders of his own day, he delighted in men who carried the name and fame of England to distant places of the earth.  He was an advocate rather than a judge.  He held so strongly the correctness of his own views, and the importance of having a right judgment in all things, that he sometimes gave undue prominence to the facts which supported his theory.  It was only fair and reasonable that critics should draw attention to this characteristic of Froude as an historian.  That he deliberately falsified history is a baseless delusion.  A sterner moralist, a more strenuous worker, it would have been difficult to find.  An artist he could not help being, for it was in the blood.  Once his fingers grasped the pen, they began instinctively to draw a picture.  He was not, like Macaulay, a rhetorician.  He had inherited from his father a contempt for oratory, and he did not speak well in public.  But when he had studied a period he saw it in a series of moving scenes as the figures passed along the stage.  That he was not always accurate in detail is notorious.  Accuracy is a question of degree.  There are mistakes in Macaulay.  There are mistakes in Gibbon.  Humanum est effete.  An historian must be judged not by the number of slips he has made in names or dates, but by the general conformity of his representation with the object.  Canaletto painted pictures of Venice in which there was not a palace out of drawing, nor a brick out of place.  Yet not all Canaletto’s Venetian pictures would give a stranger much idea of the atmosphere of Venice.  Glance at one Turner, in which a Venetian could hardly identify a building or a canal, and there lies before you the Queen of the Sea.  Serious blunders have been discovered by microscopic criticism in Carlyle’s French Revolution; it remains the most vivid and impressive version of a tremendous drama that has ever been given to the world.  Froude and Carlyle had the same scorn of the multitude, the same belief in destiny, the same love of truth.  Froude was more sceptical, less inclined to hero-worship, far more academic in thought and style.  They agreed in setting the moral lessons of history above any theory of scientific development, and in cultivating the human interest of the narrative as that which alone abides.

—­ * Dr. Lightfoot. —­