which followed it, had been for the first time thoroughly told.  Many years afterwards Froude said to Tennyson that the most essential quality in an historian was imagination.  This true and profound remark is peculiarly liable to be misunderstood.  People who do not know what imagination means are apt to confound it with invention, although the latter quality is really the last resort of those who are destitute of the former.  Froude was an ardent lover of the truth, and desired nothing so much as to tell it.  But it must be the truth as perceived by him, not as it might appear to others.* His readers are expected, if not to see with his eyes, at least to look from his point of view.  Honestly believing that the Reformation was a great and beneficent fact in the progress of mankind, he was incapable of treating it as a sinful rebellion against the authority of the Church.  Holding Henry viii., with all his faults, to have been the champion of the laity against the clergy, of spiritual and intellectual freedom against the Roman yoke, he could not represent him as a monster of wickedness, trampling on morality for his own selfish ends.  Doing full justice to the conscientiousness of Mary Tudor, excusing her more than some think she ought to be excused, he depicted the heroes of her bloody reign not only in Latimer and Ridley, but in the scores and hundreds of lowlier persons who died for the faith of Christ.

—­ * “Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth or error, but that anything is true to a man which he troweth? and not rather, as the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, and attainable it is, but that its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our moral as well as our intellectual being?”—­Newman’s Grammar of Assent, p. 311. —­

Protestant as he was, however, Froude was an Englishman first and a Protestant afterwards.  One might say of his history, as was said of the drama which Tennyson founded upon the fifth and sixth volumes, that the true heroine is the English people.  Much of his popularity was due to his patriotism and his Protestantism.  On the other hand he gave deep and lasting offence to High Churchmen, which they neither forgot nor forgave.  They could not bear the spectacle of a Church established by statute, of the king in place of the Pope, of Cromwell and Cranmer justified, of More and Fisher condemned.  While not unwilling to profit by Erastianism, they liked its origin kept out of sight.  Bishops appointed by the Crown and sitting in the House of Lords, though awkward facts, were too familiar to be upsetting.  The secular and Parliamentary origin of praemunire and conge d’ elire were less notorious and more disagreeable subjects.  They were indeed to be found in Hallam.  But Hallam had not the popularity or the influence of Froude.  Constitutional histories are for the learned classes.  Froude wrote for men of the world.  The consummate dexterity of his style was only observed by trained critics; its