the Peace, admonition for neglect of duty.
Highly in character." "King's Highness having discovered all the
enormities of the clergy, pardons all that is past, and exhorts them
to a Christian life in all time to come."

During the three months to which alone this list refers Froude must
have read and studied more than four hundred pages of important
documents. If any one wishes to form a correct judgment of Froude as
an historian, he can scarcely begin better than by reversing every
statement that Freeman felt it his duty to make. Froude came to write
about the sixteenth century after careful study of previous times. He
prepared himself for his task by patient research among letters and
manuscripts such as Freeman never thought of attempting. He neglected
no source of information open to him, and he obtained special
privileges for searching Spanish archives which entailed upon him the
severest labour. He studied not only at Simancas, where none had been
before him, but also in Paris, in Brussels, in Vienna. The documents
he read were in half a dozen languages, sometimes in the vilest
scrawls. Long afterwards he described his own experience in his own
graphic way. "Often at the end of a page," he said, "I have felt as
after descending a precipice, and have wondered how I got down. I had
to cut my way through a jungle, for no one had opened the road for
me. I have been turned into rooms piled to the window-sill with
bundles of dust-covered despatches, and told to make the best of it.
Often I have found the sand glistening on the ink where it had been
sprinkled when a page was turned. There the letter had lain, never
looked at again since it was read and put away." Out of such
materials Froude wrote a History which any educated person can read
with undisturbed enjoyment. He was too good an artist to let his own
difficulties be seen, and they were assumed not to exist. Froude did
not write, like Stubbs, for professional students alone; he wrote for
the general public, for those whom Freeman affected to despise. So
did Macaulay, whom Freeman idolised. So did Gibbon, the greatest
historian of all time. Froude's History covered the most
controversial period in the growth of the English Church. Lynx-eyed
critics, with their powers sharpened by partisanship, searched it
through and through for errors the most minute. Some of course they
found. But they did not find one which interfered with the main
argument, and such evidence