rs were over his head Freeman had occasion
to remember the Hornfinn tag:

Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Froude himself took the matter very lightly. He had boldly offered
the fullest inquiry, and Freeman had not been clever enough to
shelter himself behind the plea that copies were not originals; he
did not know enough about manuscripts to think of it. The blunders he
had detected were trifling, and Froude summed up the labours of his
antagonists fairly enough in a letter to Skelton from his beloved
Derreen.* "I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the whole book-
twelve volumes--about twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not
dotted and t's not crossed; and that is all that the utmost malignity
has discovered. Every one of the rascals has made a dozen blunders of
his own, too, while detecting one of mine." Skelton's own testimony
is worth citing, for, though a personal friend, he was a true
scholar. "We must remember that he was to some extent a pioneer, and
that he was the first (for instance) to utilise the treasures of
Simancas. He transcribed, from the Spanish, masses of papers which
even a Spaniard could have read with difficulty, and I am assured
that his translations (with rare exceptions) render the original with
singular exactness."+ And in the preface to his Maitland of
Lethington the same distinguished author says, "Only the man or woman
who has had to work upon the mass of Scottish material in the Record
Office can properly appreciate Mr. Froude's inexhaustible industry
and substantial accuracy. His point of view is very different from
mine; but I am bound to say that his acquaintance with the
intricacies of Scottish politics during the reign of Mary appears to
me to be almost, if not quite, unrivalled." John Hill Burton, to
whose learning and judgment Freeman's were as moonlight unto
sunlight, and as water unto wine, concurred in Skelton's view, and
no one has ever known Scottish history better than Burton.

--
* June 21st, 1870.
+ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 143.
--

Freeman's reckless and unscholarly attacks upon Froude produced no
effect upon his own master Stubbs, whom he was always covering with
adulation. From the Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1876 Stubbs
pronounced Froude's "great book," as he called it, to be "a work of
great industry, power, and importance." Stubbs was as far as possible
from agreeing with Froude in opinion. An orthodox Churchman and a