me extracts from his marginal notes. "A lie, teste Stubbs," as
if Stubbs were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any
more than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or original
documents. Another entry is "Beast," and yet another is "Bah!" "May I
live to embowel James Anthony Froude" is the pious aspiration with
which he has adorned another page. "Can Froude understand honesty?"
asks this anxious inquirer; and again, "Supposing Master Froude were
set to break stones, feed pigs, or do anything else but write
paradoxes, would he not curse his day?" Along with such graceful
compliments as "You've found that out since you wrote a book against
your own father," "Give him as slave to Thirlwall," there may be seen
the culminating assertion, "Froude is certainly the vilest brute that
ever wrote a book." Yet there was "no kind of temper in the case,"
and "only a strong sense of amusement." I suppose it must have amused
Freeman to call another historian a vile brute. But it is fortunate
that there was no temper in the case. For if there had, it would have
been a very bad temper indeed.

In this judicial frame of mind did Freeman set himself to review
successive volumes of Froude's Elizabeth. Froude did not always
correct his proofs with mechanical accuracy, and this gave Freeman an
advantage of which he was not slow to avail himself. "Mr. Froude," he
says in The Saturday Review for the 30th of January, 1864, "talks of
a French attack on Guienne, evidently meaning Guisnes. It is hardly
possible that this can be a misprint." It was of course a misprint,
and could hardly have been anything else. Guisnes was a town, and
could be attacked. Guienne was a province, and would have been
invaded. Guienne had been a French province since the Hundred Years'
War, and therefore the French would neither have attacked nor invaded
it. As if all this were not enough to show the nature and source of
the error, the word was correctly printed in the marginal heading. In
the same article, after quoting Froude's denial that a sentence
described by the Spanish Ambassador de Silva as having been passed
upon a pirate could have been pronounced in an English court of
justice, Freeman asked, "Is it possible that Mr. Froude has never
heard of the peine forte et dure?" Freeman of course knew it to be
impossible. He knew also that the peine forte et dure was inflicted
for refusing to plead, and that this pirate, by de Silva's own
accoun