Froude off too easily, and I am inclined to plead guilty to the charge.  I do not suppose that Mr. Froude wilfully misrepresents anything; the fault seems to be inherent and incurable; he does not know what historical truth is, or how a man should set about looking for it.  As therefore his book is not written with that regard for truth with which a book ought to be written, I hold that I am justified in saying that it is not ‘un livre de bonne roy.’”

It is difficult to read this disingenuous farrago of insinuation even now without a strong sense of moral contempt.  But vengeance was coming, and before many years were over his head Freeman had occasion to remember the Hornfinn tag: 

Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Froude himself took the matter very lightly.  He had boldly offered the fullest inquiry, and Freeman had not been clever enough to shelter himself behind the plea that copies were not originals; he did not know enough about manuscripts to think of it.  The blunders he had detected were trifling, and Froude summed up the labours of his antagonists fairly enough in a letter to Skelton from his beloved Derreen.* “I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the whole book-twelve volumes—­about twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i’s not dotted and t’s not crossed; and that is all that the utmost malignity has discovered.  Every one of the rascals has made a dozen blunders of his own, too, while detecting one of mine.”  Skelton’s own testimony is worth citing, for, though a personal friend, he was a true scholar.  “We must remember that he was to some extent a pioneer, and that he was the first (for instance) to utilise the treasures of Simancas.  He transcribed, from the Spanish, masses of papers which even a Spaniard could have read with difficulty, and I am assured that his translations (with rare exceptions) render the original with singular exactness."+ And in the preface to his Maitland of Lethington the same distinguished author says, “Only the man or woman who has had to work upon the mass of Scottish material in the Record Office can properly appreciate Mr. Froude’s inexhaustible industry and substantial accuracy.  His point of view is very different from mine; but I am bound to say that his acquaintance with the intricacies of Scottish politics during the reign of Mary appears to me to be almost, if not quite, unrivalled.”  John Hill Burton, to whose learning and judgment Freeman’s were as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine, concurred in Skelton’s view, and no one has ever known Scottish history better than Burton.

—­ * June 21st, 1870. + Table Talk of Shirley, p. 143. —­