must have occupied him at least a month.  Now let us see what use Freeman made of the information thus given him by Froude.  “Meanwhile,” he says in The Saturday Review for the 22nd of January, 1870, “Mr. Froude is conveniently silent as to the infamous tricks played by Elizabeth and her courtiers in order to make estates for court favourites out of Episcopal lands.  A line or two of text is indeed given to the swindling transaction by which Bishop Coxe of Ely was driven to surrender his London house to Sir Christopher Hatton.  But why?  Because the story gives Mr. Froude an opportunity of quoting at full length a letter from Lord North to the Bishop in which all the Bishop’s real or pretended enormities are strongly set forth.”  Here follows a short extract from the letter, in which North accused Coxe of grasping covetousness.  Now it is perfectly obvious to any one having the whole letter before him, as Freeman had, that Froude quoted it with the precisely opposite aim of denouncing the conduct of Elizabeth to the Bishop, whom he compares with Naboth.  Freeman must have heard of Naboth.  He must have known what Froude meant.  Yet the whole effect of his comments must have been to make the readers of The Saturday Review think that Froude was attacking the Church, when he was attacking the Crown for its conduct to the Church.

—­ + History of England, vol. xi. p. 321. —­

Freeman seemed to glory in his own deficiencies, and was almost as proud of what he did not know as of what he did.  Thus, for instance, Froude, a born man of letters, was skilful and accomplished in the employment of metaphors.  Freeman could no more handle a metaphor than he could fish with a dry fly.  He therefore, without the smallest consciousness of being absurd, condemned Froude for doing what he was unable to do himself, and even wrote, in the name of The Saturday Review, “We are no judges of metaphors,” though there must surely have been some one on the staff who knew something about them.

Froude had a mode of treating documents which is open to animadversion.  He did not, as Mr. Pollard happily puts it in the Dictionary of National Biography, “respect the sanctity of inverted commas.”  They ought to imply textual quotation, Froude used them for his abridgments, openly proclaiming the fact that he had abridged, and therefore deceiving no one.  Freeman’s comment upon this irregularity is extremely characteristic.  “Now we will not call this dishonest; we do not believe that Mr. Froude is intentionally dishonest in this or any other matter; but then it is because he does not know what literary honesty and dishonesty are.”  There is no such thing as literary honesty, or scientific honesty, or political honesty.  There is only one kind of honesty, and an honest man does not misrepresent an opponent, as Freeman misrepresented Froude.  To call a man a liar is an insult.  To say that is not a liar because he does not know the difference between truth and falsehood is a cowardly insult.