be narrating facts.”  Froude not only “professed” to be narrating facts:  he was narrating them.  The only question is whether they happened in England, in Toulouse, or in Aquitaine.  Freeman exposed his own ignorance by alleging that Grim meant the suppression of the free lances, which happened before Becket became Chancellor.  He did not in fact know the subject half so well as Froude, though Froude might have more carefully qualified his general words.  Froude’s account of Becket’s appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, his scruples, and how he overcame them, is described by Freeman as “pure fiction.”  It was taken from William of Canterbury, and, though open to doubt upon some points, is quite as likely to be true as the narrative preferred by Freeman.  The most serious error, indeed the only serious error, attributed by Freeman to Froude is the statement that Becket’s murderers were shielded from punishment by the King.  Freeman alleges with his usual confidence that they could not be tried in a secular court because their victim was a bishop.  It is doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the Constitutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of Becket’s assassination, abolished clerical privileges altogether.  Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly wrong.

But Freeman was not content with making mountains of mole-hills, with speaking of a great historian as if he were a pretentious dunce.  He stooped to write the words, “Natural kindliness, if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work of a long-forgotten brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother’s almost forgotten fame.”  The meaning of this sentence, so far as it has a meaning, was that Hurrell Froude composed a fragment on the Life of Becket which the mistaken kindness of friends published after his own premature death.  If Froude had written anonymously against this work, the phrase “stabs in the dark” would have been intelligible.  As he had written in his own name, and had not mentioned his brother’s work at all, part at least of the accusation was transparently and obviously false.

At last, however, Freeman had gone too far.  Froude had borne a great deal, he could bear no more; and he took up a weapon which Freeman never forgot.  I can well recall, as can hundreds of others, the appearance in The Nineteenth Century for April, 1879, of “A Few Words on Mr. Freeman.”  They were read with a sense of general pleasure and satisfaction, a boyish delight in seeing a big bully well thrashed before the whole school.  Froude was so calm, so dignified, so self-restrained, so consciously superior to his rough antagonist in temper and behaviour.  Only once did he show any emotion.  It was when he spoke of the dastardly attempt to strike him through the memory of his brother.  “I look back upon my brother,” he said, “as on the whole the most remarkable man I have ever met