us error, indeed the
only serious error, attributed by Freeman to Froude is the statement
that Becket's murderers were shielded from punishment by the King.
Freeman alleges with his usual confidence that they could not be
tried in a secular court because their victim was a bishop. It is
doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the
Constitutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of
Becket's assassination, abolished clerical privileges altogether.
Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly
wrong.

But Freeman was not content with making mountains of mole-hills, with
speaking of a great historian as if he were a pretentious dunce. He
stooped to write the words, "Natural kindliness, if no other feeling,
might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work
of a long-forgotten brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a
brother's almost forgotten fame." The meaning of this sentence, so
far as it has a meaning, was that Hurrell Froude composed a fragment
on the Life of Becket which the mistaken kindness of friends
published after his own premature death. If Froude had written
anonymously against this work, the phrase "stabs in the dark" would
have been intelligible. As he had written in his own name, and had
not mentioned his brother's work at all, part at least of the
accusation was transparently and obviously false.

At last, however, Freeman had gone too far. Froude had borne a great
deal, he could bear no more; and he took up a weapon which Freeman
never forgot. I can well recall, as can hundreds of others, the
appearance in The Nineteenth Century for April, 1879, of "A Few Words
on Mr. Freeman." They were read with a sense of general pleasure and
satisfaction, a boyish delight in seeing a big bully well thrashed
before the whole school. Froude was so calm, so dignified, so self-
restrained, so consciously superior to his rough antagonist in temper
and behaviour. Only once did he show any emotion. It was when he
spoke of the dastardly attempt to strike him through the memory of
his brother. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole
the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen
any person--not one--in whom, as I now think of him, the excellences
of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure. Of my
personal feeling towards him I cannot speak. I am ashamed to have
been compelled, by what I c