In such a time Froude maintained an opposing force, which was not reforming nor constructive in any way, but which will obtain the attention of the future historian, simply because it was an opposition.

It was an opposition of manner rather than of matter.  The matter of it was common enough even in Froude’s chief decade of power.  The cause to which he gave allegiance was already winning when he proceeded to champion it, and many a better man, one or two greater men, were saying the same things as he; but they said such things in a fashion that suggested no violent effort nor any demand for resistance:  it was the peculiar virtue of Froude that he touched nothing without the virile note of a challenge sounding throughout his prose.  On this account, though he will convince our posterity even less than he does ourselves, the words of persuasion, the writings themselves will remain:  for he chose the hardest wood in which to chisel, knowing the strength of his hand.

What was it in him which gave him that strength, and which permitted him, in an age that would tolerate no formative grasp upon itself, to achieve a permanent fame?  I will not reply to this question by pointing to the popularity of his History of England; the essays that follow will afford sufficient material to answer it.  He produced the effect he did and remained in the eminence to which he had climbed, first because his manner of thought was rigid and of a hard edge; secondly, because he could use that steel tool of a brain in a fashion that was general; he could use it upon subjects and with a handling that was comprehensible to great masses of his fellow-countrymen.

It is not certain that such a man with such interests would have made his voice heard in any other society.  It is doubtful whether he will be translated with profit.  His field was very small, the points of his attack might all be found contained in one suburban villa.  But in our society his grip and his intensity did fall, and fall of choice, upon such matters as his contemporaries either debated or were ready to debate.  He therefore did the considerable thing we know him to have done.

I say that his mind was rigid and of a close fibre:  it was a mind (to repeat the metaphor) out of which a strong graying-tool could be forged.  Its blade would not be blunted:  it could deal with its material.  Of this character, which I take to be the first essential in his achievement, the few essays before us preserve an ample evidence.

Thus you will find throughout their pages the presence of that dogmatic assertion which invariably proceeds from such a mind, and coupled with such assertion is a continual consciousness that his dogmas are dogmas:  that he is asserting unprovable things and laying down his axioms before he begins his process of reasoning.