name, cannot be written—­is not in Mr. Froude’s nature, and it would probably be impossible to make him understand what it is ....  How far the success of the book is due to its inherent vices, how far to its occasional virtues, is a point too knotty for us to solve.  The general reader and his tastes—­why this thing pleases him and the other thing displeases him—­have ever been to us the proroundest of mysteries.  It is enough that on Mr. Froude’s book, as a whole, the verdict of all competent historical scholars has long ago been given.  Occasional beauties of style and narrative cannot be allowed to redeem carelessness of truth, ignorance of law, contempt for the first principles of morals, ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind.  There are parts of Mr. Froude’s volumes which we have read with real pleasure, with real admiration.  But the book, as a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution.  No merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the whole.  Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, ’un livre de bonne foy.’"*

—­ * The Duke was not, as Freeman implies that he was, referring to Froude. —­

By a curious irony of fate or circumstance Freeman has unconsciously depicted the frame of mind in which Froude approached historic problems.  “That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil in the pursuit of truth—­the spirit without which history, to be worthy of the name, cannot be written,” was the dominant principle of Froude’s life and work.  He had hitherto taken no notice of the attacks in The Saturday Review.  The errors pointed out in them were of the most trivial kind, and mere abuse is not worth a reply.  But even Gibbon was moved from his philosophic calm when Mr. Somebody of Something “presumed to attack not the faith but the fidelity of the historian.”  Froude passed over in contemptuous silence impertinent reflections upon his religious belief.  His honesty was now in set terms impugned, and on the 15th of February, 1870, he addressed, through the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Frederick Greenwood, a direct challenge to Mr. Philip Harwood, who had become editor of The Saturday Review.  After a few caustic remarks upon the absurdity of the defects imputed to him, such as ignorance that Parliament could pass Bills of Attainder, because he had said that the House of Lords would not pass one in a particular case, he came to close quarters with the imputation of bad faith.  “I am,” he said, “peculiarly situated”—­as Freeman of course knew—­“towards a charge of this kind, for nine-tenths of my documents are in manuscript, and a large proportion of those manuscripts are in Spain.  To deal as fairly as I can with the public, I have all along deposited my