better disposed to listen to people who told him
all along how it would be. However, in the penal fatuity which has
taken possession of our big bow-wow people, and in even the general
folly, I see great ground for comfort to quiet people like myself;
and if I live fifteen years, I still hope I shall see a Republic
among us."

--
* April 30th, 1855.
--

Froude's Republicanism did not last. His opinion of Louis Napoleon
never altered.

CHAPTER IV

THE HISTORY

"It has not yet become superfluous to insist," said the Regius
Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge on the
26th of January, 1903, "that history is a science, no less and no
more." If this view is correct and exhaustive, Froude was no
historian. He must remain outside the pale in the company of
Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Mommsen. Among literary
historians, the special detestation of the pseudo-scientific school,
Froude was pre-eminent. Few things excite more suspicion than a good
style, and no theory is more plausible than that which associates
clearness of expression with shallowness of thought. Froude,
however, was no fine writer, no coiner of phrases for phrases' sake.
A mere chronicler of events he would hardly have cared to be. He had
a doctrine to propound, a gospel to preach. "The Reformation," he
said, "was the hinge on which all modern history turned,"* and he
regarded the Reformation as a revolt of the laity against the
clergy, rather than a contest between two sets of rival dogmas for
supremacy over the human mind. That is the key of the historical
position which he took up from the first, and always defended. He
held the Church of Rome to have been the enemy of human freedom, and
of British independence. He was devoid of theological prejudice, and
never reviled Catholicism as Newman reviled it before his
conversion. But he held that the reformers, alike in England, in
France, and in Germany, were fighting for truth, honesty, and
private judgment against priestcraft and ecclesiastical tyranny. The
scepticism and cynicism of which he was often accused were on the
surface. They were provoked by what he felt to be hypocrisy and
sham. They were not his true self. He believed firmly unflinchingly,
and always in "the grand, simple landmarks of morality," which
existed before all Churches, and would exist if all Churches
disappeared.

Ou gar tanun ge kachthes, all' aei pote
Ze tauta, koudeis oiden ex hotou pha