nd
journals, matter never intended for the public, and of a nature not
only to wound living persons but to create an erroneous impression of
the writer. The habit of expressing himself in pithy and pungent
personalities seems to have been with Carlyle a sort of intellectual
exercise, and should not necessarily be taken as an index of morose
ill-temper. A very delicate literary tact was necessary to his
literary executor, in selecting from the matter put in his hands that
which would combine to make a true picture of a crude and powerful
genius without making him appear to the ordinary reader a selfish,
willful man. Froude's idea of the duty of an editor of contemporary
biography seems to have been that it was limited to careful
publication of all the available material as _memoires pour servir_.
Such miscellaneous printing may in the end serve truth, but at the
time it arouses resentment. It resulted, however, in the production of
a book far preferable to the non-committal, evasive, destructively
laudatory biography of a public man, of which every year brings a new
specimen. It is at least honest, if not tactful.

Froude's early connection with the Oxford movement and his work on the
Lives of the Saints first called his attention to the study of
historical documents, and to the large amount of fiction with which
truth is diluted in them. His further researches among the authorities
recently made accessible, for the history of the destruction of the
monasteries, impressed on him the fact that an assumption of spiritual
authority is as dangerous to those who assume it as to those over whom
it is assumed, exactly as physical slavery is in the end as harmful to
the masters as it is to the slaves. He saw that ecclesiasticism had
been profoundly hostile to morals, and he judged the present by the
past till he really believed that the precious fruits of the
Reformation would be lost if the ritualists obtained control of the
Church. He persuaded himself that under such influence--

"Civilization would ebb, the great moral lights be extinguished,
Over the world would creep an unintelligent darkness
Under which men would be portioned anew 'twixt the priest and the
soldier."

It is perhaps too much to expect of a man of the imaginative
temperament of Froude, to whom the abominations of the Church from the
twelfth to the sixteenth century were as real as if he had witnessed
them, to retain judicial calmness unde