Freeman could not even be consistent in abuse for half a page.  Immediately after charging Froude with “fanatical hatred towards the English Church, reformed or unreformed”—­though he was the great champion of the Reformation—­“a degree of hatred which must be peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it"- like Freeman’s bosom friend Green—­he says that Froude “never reaches so high a point as in several passages where he describes various scenes and features of monastic life.”  But this could not absolve him from having made a “raid” upon another man’s period, from being a “marauder,” from writing about a personage whom Stubbs might have written about, though he had not.  Froude had “an inborn and incurable twist, which made it impossible for him to make an accurate statement about any matter.”  “By some destiny which it would seem that he cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds—­at least which all other readers find—­in his book he invariably substitutes another narrative out of his own head.”  “Very few of us can test manuscripts at Simancas; it is not every one who can at a moment’s notice test references to manuscripts much nearer home.”  This is a strange insinuation from a man who never tested a manuscript, seldom, if ever, consulted a manuscript, and had declined Froude’s challenge to let his copies be compared with his abridgment.  One grows tired of transcribing a mere succession of innuendoes.  Yet it is essential to clear this matter up once and for all, that the public may judge between Froude and his life-long enemy.

The standard by which Freeman affected to judge Froude’s articles in The Nineteenth Century was fantastic.  “Emperors and Popes, Sicilian Kings and Lombard Commonwealths, should be as familiar to him who would write The Life and Times of Thomas Becket as the text of the Constitutions of Clarendon or the relations between the Sees of Canterbury and York.”  If Froude had written an elaborate History of Henry ii., as he wrote a History of Henry viii., he would have qualified himself in the manner somewhat bombastically described.  But even Lord Acton, who seemed to think that he could not write about anything until he knew everything, would scarcely have prepared himself for an article in The Nineteenth Century by mastering the history of the world.  And if Froude had done so, it would have profited him little.  He would have forgotten it, “with that calm oblivion of facts which distinguishes him from all other men who have taken on themselves to read past events.”  He would still have written “whatever first came into his head, without stopping to see whether a single fact bore his statements out or not.”  “Accurate statement of what really happened, even though such accurate statement might serve Mr. Froude’s purpose, is clearly forbidden by the destiny which guides Mr. Froude’s literary career.”  These extracts from The Contemporary Review are samples, and only samples,