either neutrality or difference of opinion.  To him, and to those who thought like him, Froude’s History was anathema.  Their detested Reformation was set upon its legs again; Bishop Fisher was removed from his pedestal; the Church of England, which since Keble’s assize sermon had been the Church of the Fathers, was shown to be Protestant in its character and Parliamentary in its constitution.  The Oxford Movement seemed to be discredited, and that by a man who had once been enlisted in its service.  It was necessary that the presumptuous iconoclast should be put down, and taught not to meddle with things which were sacred.

—­ * Alexander James Beresford Hope, some time member for the University of Cambridge. —­

From the first The Saturday Review was hostile, but it was not till 1864 that the campaign became systematic.  At that time the editor secured the services of Edward Augustus Freeman, who had been for several years a contributor on miscellaneous topics.  Freeman is well known as the historian of the Norman Conquest, as an active politician, controversialist, and pamphleteer.  Froude toiled for months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost illegible, carefully noting the caligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition assigning his proper share to each.  Freeman wrote his History of the Norman Conquest, upon which he was at this time engaged, entirely from books, without consulting a manuscript or an original document of any kind.  Every historian must take his own line, and the public are concerned not with processes, but with results.  I wish merely to point out the fact that, as between Froude and Freeman, the assailed and the assailant, Froude was incomparably the more laborious student of the two.  It would be hard to say that one historian should not review the work of another; but we may at least expect that he should do so with sympathetic consideration for the difficulties which all historians encounter, and should not pass sentence until he has all the evidence before him.  What were Freeman’s qualifications for delivering an authoritative judgment on the work of Froude?  Though not by any means so learned a man as his tone of conscious superiority induced people to suppose, he knew his own period very well indeed, and his acquaintance with that period, perhaps also his veneration for Stubbs, had given him a natural prejudice in favour of the Church.  For the Church of the middle ages, the undivided Church of Christ, was even in its purely mundane aspect the salvation of society, the safeguard of law and order, the last restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the wretched.