from a mass of rhetoric not unworthy of the grammarian who prayed for the damnation of an opponent because he did not agree with him in his theory of irregular verbs.  Freeman, whose self-assertion was perpetual, represented himself throughout his libel as fighting for the cause of truth.  His own reverence for truth he illustrated quaintly enough at the close of his last article.  “I leave others to protest,” said this veracious critic, “against Mr. Froude’s treatment of the sixteenth century.  I do not profess to have mastered those times in detail from original sources.”  I leave others to protest!  From 1864 to 1870 Freeman had continuously attacked successive volumes of Froude’s History in The Saturday Review.  Yet he here makes in his own name a statement quite irreconcilable with his ever having done anything of the kind, and accompanies it with an admission which, if it had been made in The Saturday Review, would have robbed his invective of more than half its sting.

And now let us see what was the real foundation for this imposing fabric.  Freeman’s boisterous truculence made such a deafening noise, and raised such a blinding dust, that it takes some little time and trouble to discover the hollowness of the charges.  With four-fifths of Froude’s narrative he does not deal at all, except to borrow from it for his own purposes, as he used to borrow from the History in The Saturday Review.  In the other fifth, the preliminary pages, he discovered two misprints of names, one mistake of fact, and three or four exaggerations.  Not one of these errors is so grave as his own statement, picked up from some bad lawyer, that “the preamble of an Act of Parliament need not be received as of any binding effect.”  The preamble is part of the Act, and gives the reasons why the Act was passed.  Of course the rules of grammar show that being explanatory it is not an operative part; but it can be quoted in any court of justice to explain the meaning of the clauses.

In his Annals of an English Abbey Froude allowed “Robert Fitzwilliam” to pass for Robert Fitzwalter in his proofs, and upon this conclusive evidence that Froude was unfit to write history Freeman pounced with triumphant exultation.  He had some skill in the correction of misprints, and would have been better employed in revising proof-sheets for Froude than in “belabouring” him.  Froude said that Becket’s name “denoted Saxon extraction.”  An anonymous biographer, not always accurate, says that both his parents came from Normandy.  It is probable, though by no means certain, that in this case the biographer was right, and Froude corrected the mistake when, in consequence of Freeman’s criticisms, he republished the articles.  Froude, on the authority of Edward Grim, who knew Becket, and wrote his Life, referred to the cruelty and ferocity of Becket’s administration as Chancellor.  Freeman declared that “anything more monstrous never appeared from the pen of one who professed to