Now I say that just as the excellences of Froude’s prose proceeded from this universality of his so did the errors into which that prose fell, and it is remarkable that these errors are slips of detail.  They proceed undoubtedly from rapid writing and from coupling his scholarship with a very general and ephemeral reading.

A few examples drawn from these essays will prove what I mean.  On the very first page, in the first line of the second paragraph we have the word “often” coming after the word “experience,” instead of before it.  He had written “experience,” he desired to qualify it, and he did not go back to do what should always be done in plain English, and what indeed distinguishes plain English from almost every other language—­to put the qualification before the thing qualified; a peculiarly English mark in this, that it presupposes one’s having thought the whole thing out before writing it down.

On page 3 we have exactly the same thing; “A legend not known unfortunately to general English readers.”  He means of course, “unfortunately not known,” but as the sentence stands it reads as though he had meant to say, somewhat clumsily, that the method in which English readers knew the legend was not unfortunate.

He is again careless in the matter of repetitions, both of the same word, and (what is a better test of ear) of rhymes within the sentence:  we have in one place “which seemed to give a soul to those splendid donations to learning,” and further on in the same page “a priority in mortality.”

On pages 34 and 35 you have “an intensely real conviction.”  You are then told that “the most lawless men did then really believe.”  Then that the American tribes were in the eyes of the colonists “real worshippers” of the Devil, and a few lines later we hear of “the real awfulness of the world.”

The position of the relative is often as slipshod as the position of the qualicative; thus you will find upon page 37 that the pioneers “grayed out the channels, and at last paved them with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise of England has flowed out of all the world.”  This sentence is quite deplorable; it has a singular verb after two nominatives, and is so framed that one might imagine the commerce and enterprise of our beloved country to have flown through those hollow interior channels, with which, I believe, our larger bones are provided, and in which is to be discovered that very excellent substance, marrow.

It is singular that, while these obvious errors have excited so little comment, Froude should have been blamed so often and by such different authorities for weaknesses of the pen from which he did not suffer, or which, if he did suffer from them, at least he had in common with every other writer of our time and perhaps less than most.