ng
self-begotten, original or mystical; if they were not heroes they were
at least demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude set himself to the
praise of the Tudors, a much lower class of people; ill-conditioned
prosperous people who merely waxed fat and kicked. Such strength as
Henry VIII had was the strength of a badly trained horse that bolts, not
of any clear or courageous rider who controls him. There is a sort of
strong man mentioned in Scripture who, because he masters himself, is
more than he that takes a city. There is another kind of strong man
(known to the medical profession) who cannot master himself; and whom it
may take half a city to take alive. But for all that he is a low
lunatic, and not a hero; and of that sort were too many of the heroes
whom Froude attempted to praise. A kind of instinct kept Carlyle from
over-praising Henry VIII; or that highly cultivated and complicated
liar, Queen Elizabeth. Here, the only importance of this is that one of
Carlyle's followers carried further that "strength" which was the real
weakness of Carlyle. I have heard that Froude's life of Carlyle was
unsympathetic; but if it was so it was a sort of parricide. For the
rest, like Macaulay, he was a picturesque and partisan historian: but,
like Macaulay (and unlike the craven scientific historians of to-day) he
was not ashamed of being partisan or of being picturesque. Such studies
as he wrote on the Elizabethan seamen and adventurers, represent very
triumphantly the sort of romance of England that all this school was
attempting to establish; and link him up with Kingsley and the rest.

Ruskin may be very roughly regarded as the young lieutenant of Carlyle
in his war on Utilitarian Radicalism: but as an individual he presents
many and curious divergences. In the matter of style, he enriched
English without disordering it. And in the matter of religion (which
was the key of this age as of every other) he did not, like Carlyle, set
up the romance of the great Puritans as a rival to the romance of the
Catholic Church. Rather he set up and worshipped all the arts and
trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the Church itself. None
need dispute that he held a perfectly tenable position if he chose to
associate early Florentine art with a Christianity still comparatively
pure, and such sensualities as the Renaissance bred with the corruption
of a Papacy. But this does not alter, as a merely artistic fact, the
strange air of il