their powers sharpened by partisanship, searched it through and through for errors the most minute.  Some of course they found.  But they did not find one which interfered with the main argument, and such evidence as has since been discovered confirms Froude’s proposition that the cause of Henry was the cause of England.  Freeman’s Norman Conquest has secured for him an honourable fame; his attacks upon Froude, until they have been forgotten, will always be a reproach to his memory.

It was with just pride, and natural satisfaction, that Froude wrote to Lady Derby in May, 1890:  “I am revising my English History for a final edition.  Since I wrote it the libraries and archives of all Europe have been searched and sifted.  I am fairly astonished to find how little I shall have to alter.  The book is of course young, but I do not know that it is the worse on that account.  That fault at any rate I shall not try to cure.”

The Divorce of Katharine of Aragon, though not published till 1891, is a sequel to the History.  The twenty years which had intervened did not lead Froude to modify any of his main conclusions, and he was able to furnish new evidence in support of them.  The correspondence of Chapuys, Imperial Ambassador at the court of Henry viii., puts Fisher’s treason beyond doubt, and proves that the bishop was endeavouring to procure an invasion by Spanish troops when the king, in Freeman’s language, “slaughtered” him.  The next year Froude brought out, in a volume with other essays, his Spanish Story of the Armada, written in his raciest manner, and proving from Spanish sources the grotesque incompetence of Medina Sidonia.  There are few better narratives in the language, and the enthusiastic admiration of a great American humourist was as well deserved as it is charmingly expressed.

“The other night,” wrote Bret Harte, “I took up Longman’s Magazine* and began to lazily read something about the Spanish Armada.  My knowledge of that historic event, I ought to say, is rather hazy; I remember a vague something about Drake playing bowls while the Spanish fleet was off the coast, and of Elizabeth going to Tilbury en grande tenue, but there was always a good deal of ‘Jingo’ shouting and Crystal Palace fireworks about it, and it never seemed real.  In the article I was reading the style caught me first; I became tremendously interested; it was a new phase of the old story, and yet there was something pleasantly familiar.  I turned to the last page quickly, and saw your blessed name.  I had heard nothing about it before.  Then I went through it breathlessly to the last word, which came all too soon.  And now I am as eager for the next instalment as I was when a boy for the next chapter of my Dickens or Thackeray.  Don’t laugh, dear old fellow, over my enthusiasm or my illustration, but remember that I represent a considerable amount of average human nature, and that’s what we all write for, and ought to write for, and be dashed