the assailed and the assailant, Froude was incomparably
the more laborious student of the two. It would be hard to say that
one historian should not review the work of another; but we may at
least expect that he should do so with sympathetic consideration for
the difficulties which all historians encounter, and should not pass
sentence until he has all the evidence before him. What were
Freeman's qualifications for delivering an authoritative judgment on
the work of Froude? Though not by any means so learned a man as his
tone of conscious superiority induced people to suppose, he knew his
own period very well indeed, and his acquaintance with that period,
perhaps also his veneration for Stubbs, had given him a natural
prejudice in favour of the Church. For the Church of the middle ages,
the undivided Church of Christ, was even in its purely mundane aspect
the salvation of society, the safeguard of law and order, the last
restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the wretched.

Historically, if not doctrinally, Freeman was a High Churchman, and
his ecclesiastical leanings were a great advantage to him in dealing
with the eleventh century. It was far otherwise when he came to write
of the sixteenth. If the Church of the sixteenth century had been
like the Church of the eleventh century, or the twelfth, or the
thirteenth, there would have been no Reformation, and no Froude.
Freeman lived, and loved, the controversial life. Sharing Gladstone's
politics both in Church and State, he was in all secular matters a
strong Liberal, and his hatred of Disraeli struck even Liberals as
bordering on fanaticism. Yet his hatred of Disraeli was as nothing to
his hatred of Froude. By nature "so over-violent or over-civil that
every man with him was God or devil," he had erected Froude into his
demon incarnate. Other men might be, Froude must be, wrong. He
detested Froude's opinions. He could not away with his style.
Freeman's own style was forcible, vigorous, rhetorical, hard; the
sort of style which Macaulay might have written if he had been a
pedant and a professor instead of a politician and a man of the
world. It was not ill suited for the blood-and-thunder sort of
reviewing to which his nature disposed him, and for the vengeance of
the High Churchmen he seemed an excellent tool.

Freeman's biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken
silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude. I think the Dean's
conduct was