his first treatise, the "Nemesis of
Faith," which appeared in 1849, and created a sensation. Its
tendency to skepticism cost him his fellowship, but its
profound pathos, its accent of tenderness, and its fervour
excited wide admiration. Permanent fame was secured by the
appearance, in 1856, of the first two instalments of his
magnificent work, "The History of England, from the Fall of
Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada," the last volume appearing
in 1870. This treatise on the middle Tudor period is one of
the most fascinating historical treatises in the whole range
of literature. It is written in a vivid and graphic prose, and
with rare command of the art of picturesque description.
Froude never accepted the doctrine that history should be
treated as a science; rather he claimed that the historian
should concern himself with the dramatic aspect of the period
about which he writes. The student may disagree with many of
Froude's points of view and portraitures, yet his men and
women breathe with the life he endows them, and their motives
are actuated by the forces he sets in motion. Of his
voluminous works perhaps the most notable, with the exception
of the "History," are his "History of Ireland in the
Eighteenth Century," 1871-74, and his "Short Studies on Great
Subjects," the latter aptly exhibiting Froude's gifts of
masterful prose and glittering paradox.

_I.--The Condition of England_

In periods like the present, when knowledge is every day extending, and
the habits and thoughts of mankind are perpetually changing under the
influence of new discoveries, it is no easy matter to throw ourselves
back into a time in which for centuries the European world grew upon a
single type, in which the forms of the father's thoughts were the forms
of the son's, and the late descendant was occupied in treading into
paths the footprints of his ancestors.

So absolutely has change become the law of our present condition, that
to cease to change is to lose place in the great race. Looking back over
history, we see times of change and progress alternating with other
times when life and thought have settled into permanent forms. Such was
the condition of the Greeks through many ages before the Persian wars,
and such, again, became the condition of Europe when the Northern
nations grafted religion and the laws of the