a
spirit which is not of any school, which breathes from the wide
ocean and the liquid air. He wrote, for all his scholarly grace,
like a man of flesh and blood, not a pedant nor a doctrinaire.
Impartial he never was, nor pretended to be. Dramatic he could not
help being, and yet his own opinions were seldom concealed. Three or
four main propositions were at the root of his mind. He held the
Reformation to be the greatest and most beneficent change in modern
history. He believed the English race to be the finest in the world.
He disbelieved in equality, and in Parliamentary government.
Essentially an aristocrat in the proper sense of the term, he
cherished the doctrine of submission to a few fit persons, qualified
for authority by training and experience. These ideas run through
all Froude's historical writing, which takes from them its trend and
colour. Whatever else the male Tudors may have been, they were
emphatically men; and even Elizabeth, whom Froude did not love, had
a commanding spirit. Except poor priest-ridden Mary, who had a
Spanish mother and a Spanish husband, they did not brook control,
and no one was ever more conscious of being a king than Henry VIII.
To him, as to Elizabeth, the Reformation was not dogmatic but
practical, the subjection of the Church to the State. The struggle
between Pope and sovereign had to be fought out before the struggle
between sovereign and Parliament could begin.

Liberals thought that Froude would not have been on the side of the
Parliament, and they joined High Churchmen in attacking him.
Spiritual and democratic power were to him equally obnoxious. He
delighted in Plato's simile of the ship, where the majority are
nothing, and the captain rules. His opinions were not popular,
except his dislike for the Church of Rome. He is read partly for his
exquisite diction, and partly for the patriotic fervour with which
he rejoices in the achievements of England, especially on sea.

Rossetti's fine burden:

Lands are swayed by a king on a throne,
The sea hath no king but God alone:

might be a motto for the title-page of Froude. The fallacy that
brilliant writers are superficial accounts for much of the prejudice
in academic circles against which Froude had to contend. To him of
all men it was inapplicable, for no historian studied original
documents with greater zest. That he did not know his period nobody
could pretend. He knew it so much better than his critics that few
of