almost involuntarily, the Protestant side.  In the England of the sixteenth century the Protestant side was the side of England.  In Ireland the case was reversed, and the spirit of Catholicism was identical with the spirit of nationality.  Irish Catholics to this day associate Protestantism with the sack of Drogheda and Wexford, with the detested memory of Oliver Cromwell.  To Froude, as to Carlyle, Cromwell was the minister of divine vengeance upon murderous and idolatrous Papists.  His liking for the Irish, though perfectly genuine, was accompanied with an underlying contempt which is more offensive to the objects of it than the hatred of an open foe.  He regarded them as a race unfit for self-government, who had proved their unworthiness of freedom by not winning it with the sword.  If they had not quarrelled among themselves, and betrayed one another, they would have established their right to independence; or, if there had been still an Act of Union, they could have come in, as the Scots came, on their own terms.  For an Englishman to write the history of Ireland without prejudice he must be either a cosmopolitan philosopher, or a passionless recluse.  Froude was an ardent patriot, and his early studies in hagiology had led him to the conclusion, not now accepted, that St. Patrick never existed at all.  His scepticism about St. Patrick might have been forgiven to a man who had probably not much belief in St. George.  But Froude could not help running amok at all the popular heroes of Ireland.  In the first of his two papers describing a fortnight in Kerry he went out of his way to depreciate the fame of Daniel O’Connell.  “Ireland,” he wrote, “has ceased to care for him.  His fame blazed like a straw bonfire, and has left behind it scarce a shovelful of ashes.  Never any public man had it in his power to do so much good for his country, nor was there ever one who accomplished so little."*

—­ * Short Studies, vol. ii. p. 241. —­

That O’Connell wasted much time in clamouring for Repeal is perfectly true.  But he was as much the author of Catholic Emancipation as Cobden was the author of Free Trade, and that fact alone should have debarred Froude from the use of this extravagant language.  For though an article in Fraser’s Magazine is a very different thing from a serious history, print imposes some obligations, and even two or three casual sentences may show the bent of a man’s mind.  Whatever Froude wrote on Ireland, or on anything else, was sure to be widely read, and to affect, for good or for evil, the opinion of the British public.  It was therefore peculiarly incumbent on him not to flatter English pride by wounding Irish self-respect.