Spanish transcripts, as soon as I have done with them, in the British Museum.  The reading of manuscripts, however, is at best laborious.  The public may be inclined to accept as proved an uncontradicted charge, the value of which they cannot readily test.  I venture therefore to make the following proposal.  I do not make it to my reviewer.  He will be reluctant to exchange communications with me, and the disinclination will not be on his side only.  I address myself to his editor.  If the editor will select any part of my volumes, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred pages, wherever he pleases, I am willing to subject them to a formal examination by two experts, to be chosen—­if Sir Thomas Hardy will kindly undertake it—­by the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records.  They shall go through my references, line for line.  They shall examine every document to which I have alluded, and shall judge whether I have dealt with it fairly.  I lay no claim to be free from mistakes.  I have worked in all through nine hundred volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and official, in five languages and in difficult handwritings.  I am not rash enough to say that I have never misread a word, or overlooked a passage of importance.  I profess only to have dealt with my materials honestly to the best of my ability.  I submit myself to a formal trial, of which I am willing to bear the entire expense, on one condition-that the report, whatever it be, shall be published word for word in The Saturday Review.”

The proposal was certainly a novel one, and could not in ordinary circumstances have been accepted.  But it is also novel to charge an historian of the highest character and repute with inability to speak the truth, or to distinguish between truth and falsehood.  Freeman, signing himself “Mr. Froude’s Saturday Reviewer,” replied in The Pall Mall Gazette.  The challenge he left to the editor of The Saturday, who contemptuously refused it, and he admitted that after all Froude probably did know what a Bill of Attainder was.  The rest of his letter is a shuffle.  “I have made no charge of bad faith against Mr. Froude”—­whom he had accused of not knowing what truth meant—­“with regard to any Spanish manuscripts, or any other manuscripts.  All that I say is, that as I find gross inaccuracies in Mr. Froude’s book, which he does not whenever I have the means of testing him which was certainly not often—­“I think there is a presumption against his accuracy in those parts where I have not the means of testing him.  But this is only a presumption, and not proof.  Mr. Froude may have been more careful, or more lucky”—­meaning less fraudulent, or more skilful—­“with the hidden wealth of Simancas than he has been with regard to materials which are more generally accessible.  I trust it may prove so.”  If Freeman thought that he meant that, he must have had singular powers of self-deception.  “I have been twitted by men of thought and learning”—­whom he does not name—­“for letting Mr.