on Catiline, or Burke on Hastings.
"On purely moral points there is no need now for me to enlarge; every
man who knows right from wrong ought to be able to see through the
web of ingenious sophistry which tries to justify the slaughter of
More and Fisher"; although the guilt of More and Fisher is a question
not of morality, but of evidence. "Mr. Froude by his own statement
has not made history the study of his life," which was exactly what
he had done, and stated that he had done. "The man who insisted on
the Statute-book being the text of English history showed that he had
never heard of peine forte et dure, and had no clear notion of a Bill
of Attainder."

Freeman could not even be consistent in abuse for half a page.
Immediately after charging Froude with "fanatical hatred towards the
English Church, reformed or unreformed"--though he was the great
champion of the Reformation--"a degree of hatred which must be
peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it"-
like Freeman's bosom friend Green--he says that Froude "never reaches
so high a point as in several passages where he describes various
scenes and features of monastic life." But this could not absolve him
from having made a "raid" upon another man's period, from being a
"marauder," from writing about a personage whom Stubbs might have
written about, though he had not. Froude had "an inborn and incurable
twist, which made it impossible for him to make an accurate statement
about any matter." "By some destiny which it would seem that he
cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds--at least
which all other readers find--in his book he invariably substitutes
another narrative out of his own head." "Very few of us can test
manuscripts at Simancas; it is not every one who can at a moment's
notice test references to manuscripts much nearer home." This is a
strange insinuation from a man who never tested a manuscript, seldom,
if ever, consulted a manuscript, and had declined Froude's challenge
to let his copies be compared with his abridgment. One grows tired of
transcribing a mere succession of innuendoes. Yet it is essential to
clear this matter up once and for all, that the public may judge
between Froude and his life-long enemy.

The standard by which Freeman affected to judge Froude's articles in
The Nineteenth Century was fantastic. "Emperors and Popes, Sicilian
Kings and Lombard Commonwealths, should be as familiar to him who
would