t of the remedy to be applied to these evils."
When his handling of documentary evidence was criticised, Froude
repeated his challenge to the editor of The Saturday Review, which
had never been taken up, and on that point the American sense of
fair play gave judgment in his favour. But how was public opinion to
pronounce upon such a subject as the alleged Bull of Adrian II.,
granting Ireland to Henry II of England? The Bull was not in
existence, and Burke boldly denied that it had ever existed at all.
Froude maintained that its existence and its nature were proved by
later Bulls of succeeding Popes. The matter had no interest for
Protestants, and the American press regarded it as a bore. Burke had
more success with the rebellion of 1641, and the Cromwellian massacres
of Such 1649. Such topics cannot be exhaustively treated in part of a
single lecture, and Burke could not be expected to put the slaughter
of true believers on a level with irregular justice roughly wreaked
upon heretics. The combat was not so much unequal as impossible. There
was no common groud. Froude could be fair to an eminent especially if
he were a Protestant. His panegyric on Grattan deserves to be quoted
alike for its eloquence and its justice. "In those singular labyrinths
of intrigue and treachery," meaning the secret correspondence at the
Castle, "I have found Irishmen whose names stand fair enough in
patriotic history concerned in transactions that show them knaves and
scoundrels; but I never found stain nor shadow of stain on the
reputation of Henry Grattan. I say nothing of the temptations to which
he was exposed. There were no honours with which England would not
have decorated him; there was no price so high that England would not
have paid to have silenced or subsidised him. He was one of those
perfectly disinterested men who do not feel temptations of this kind.
They passed by him and over him without giving him even the pains to
turn his back on them. In every step of his life he was governed
simply and fairly by what he conceived to be the interest of his
country." Grattan's Parliament, as we all know, nearly perished in a
dispute about the Regency, and finally disappeared after the rebellion
of 1798. It gave the Catholics votes in 1793, though no Catholic ever
sat within its walls. Grattan, according to Froude, was led astray by
the "delirium of nationality," and the true Irish statesman of his
time was Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Lord Clar