he is quite right.  It is more than plausible, because it is true.  After vainly trying to explain away some of the errors brought home to him by Froude, and leaving others unnoticed, he complains, with deep and obvious sincerity, that Froude had not read his books, nor even his articles in Encyclopaedias.  He exhibits a striking instance of his own accuracy.  In his defence against the rather absurd charge of not going, as Macaulay had gone, to see the places about which he wrote, Froude pleaded want of means.  Freeman rejoined that Macaulay was at one time of his life “positively poor.”  He was so for a very short time when his Fellowship at Trinity came to an end.  Unluckily for Freeman’s statement the period was before his appointment to be Legal Member of Council in India, and long before he had begun to write his History of England.  The most charitable explanation of an erroneous statement is usually the correct one, and it was probably forgetfulness which made Freeman say that he did not hear of Froude’s having placed copies of the Simancas manuscripts in the British Museum till 1878, whereas he had himself discussed it in The Pall Mall Gazette eight years before.  If Froude had made such an astonishing slip, there would have been more ground for imputing to him an incapacity to distinguish between truth and falsehood.  Freeman’s “Last Words on Mr. Froude” show no sign of penitence or good feeling, and they end with characteristic bluster about the truth, from which he had so grievously departed.  But Froude was never troubled with him again.

Although a refuted detractor is not formidable in the flesh, the evil that he does lives after him.  Freeman’s view of Froude is not now held by any one whose opinion counts; yet still there seems to rise, as from a brazen head of Ananias, dismal and monotonous chaunt, “He was careless of the truth, he did not make history the business of his life.”  He did make history the business of his life, and he cared more for truth than for anything else in the world.  Freeman’s biographer has given no clue to his imperfect sympathy with Froude.  Green, true historian as he was, made more mistakes than Froude, and the mistakes he did make were more serious.  He trespassed on the preserves of Brewer, who criticised him severely without deviating from the standard of a Christian and a gentleman.  Even over the domain of Stubbs, and the consecrated ground of the Norman Conquest itself, Green ranged without being Freemanised as a poacher.  But then Green was Freeman’s personal friend, and in friendship Freeman was staunch.  They belonged to the same set, and no one was more cliquish than Freeman.  Liberal as he was in politics, he always professed the utmost contempt for the general public, and wondered what guided their strange tastes in literature.  Dean Stephens has apparently suppressed most of the references to Froude in Freeman’s private letters, and certainly he drops no hint of the controversy about