anything romantic in him, it was love of
England, and of the sea. From the ocean rovers of Elizabeth to the
colonial path-finders of his own day, he delighted in men who
carried the name and fame of England to distant places of the earth.
He was an advocate rather than a judge. He held so strongly the
correctness of his own views, and the importance of having a right
judgment in all things, that he sometimes gave undue prominence to
the facts which supported his theory. It was only fair and
reasonable that critics should draw attention to this characteristic
of Froude as an historian. That he deliberately falsified history is
a baseless delusion. A sterner moralist, a more strenuous worker, it
would have been difficult to find. An artist he could not help
being, for it was in the blood. Once his fingers grasped the pen,
they began instinctively to draw a picture. He was not, like Macaulay,
a rhetorician. He had inherited from his father a contempt for
oratory, and he did not speak well in public. But when he had studied
a period he saw it in a series of moving scenes as the figures passed
along the stage. That he was not always accurate in detail is
notorious. Accuracy is a question of degree. There are mistakes in
Macaulay. There are mistakes in Gibbon. Humanum est effete. An
historian must be judged not by the number of slips he has made in
names or dates, but by the general conformity of his representation
with the object. Canaletto painted pictures of Venice in which there
was not a palace out of drawing, nor a brick out of place. Yet not all
Canaletto's Venetian pictures would give a stranger much idea of the
atmosphere of Venice. Glance at one Turner, in which a Venetian could
hardly identify a building or a canal, and there lies before you the
Queen of the Sea. Serious blunders have been discovered by microscopic
criticism in Carlyle's French Revolution; it remains the most vivid
and impressive version of a tremendous drama that has ever been given
to the world. Froude and Carlyle had the same scorn of the multitude,
the same belief in destiny, the same love of truth. Froude was more
sceptical, less inclined to hero-worship, far more academic in thought
and style. They agreed in setting the moral lessons of history above
any theory of scientific development, and in cultivating the human
interest of the narrative as that which alone abides.

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* Dr. Lightfoot.
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That Froude set out with a polemical purpose