volumes. Excellent linguist as he was, Froude could hardly avoid
falling into some errors. With his general accuracy as an historian
I shall have to deal in a later part of this book. Here I am only
concerned to prove that he took unlimited pains. He kept no
secretary, he was his own copyist, and he was not a good proof-
reader. Those natural blots, quas aut incuria fudit, aut humaria
parum cavit natura, are to be found, no doubt, in his pages. From a
conscientious obedience to truth as he understood it, and a resolute
determination to present it as he saw it, he never swerved. He was
not a chronicler, but an artist, a moralist, and a man of genius.
Unless an historian can put himself into the place of the men about
whom he is writing, think their thoughts, share their hopes, their
aspirations, and their fears, he had better be taking a healthy walk
than poring over dusty documents. A paste-pot, a pair of scissors,
the mechanical precision of a copying clerk, are all useful in their
way; but they no more make an historian than a cowl makes a monk.

Polloi men narthekophoroi Bakchoi de te pauroi
["There are many officials, but few inspired." Zenobius, 5.77]

There are many writers of history, but very few historians. Froude
wrote with a definite purpose, which he never concealed from
himself, or from others. He believed, and he thought he could prove,
that the Reformation freed England from a cruel and degrading yoke,
that the things which were Caesar's should be rendered to Caesar,
and that the Church should be restricted within its own proper
sphere. Those, if such there be, who think that an historian should
have no opinions are entitled to condemn him. Those who simply
disagree with him are not. No man is hindered by any other cause
than laziness, incompetence, or more immediately profitable
occupations, from writing a history of the same period in exactly
the opposite sense.

Froude's earliest chapters were set in type, and distributed among a
few friends whose judgment he trusted. The most sympathetic was
Carlyle, who pronounced the introductory survey of England's social
condition at the opening of the sixteenth century to be just what it
ought to have been. Carlyle's marginal notes upon the first two
chapters are extremely interesting, and doubly characteristic,
because they illustrate at the same time his practical shrewdness
and his intense prejudice. For these reasons, and also because in
many instances