inguishing between the true and false; also that he was so
arbitrary and arrogant and ready to trample on those who doubted his
infallibility.

All this, I confess, would not be much to say against him, seeing that
it is nothing but the ordinary professorial or academic mind, and I
suppose that the only difference between Freeman and the ruck of the
professors was that he was more impulsive or articulate and had a
greater facility in expressing his scorn.

Here I may mention in passing that when this lecture appeared in print
in his _Historical Essays_ he had evidently been put out a little, and
also put on his mettle by that letter from an undergraduate, and had
gone more deeply into the documents relating to the incident, seeing
that he now relied mainly on the discrepancies in half a dozen
chronicles he was able to point out to prove its falsity. His former
main argument now appeared as a "small matter of detail"--a "confusion
of geography" in the different versions of the old historians. But one
tells us, Freeman writes, that Athelwold was killed in the Forest of
Wherwell on his way to York, and then he says: "Now as Wherwell is in
Hampshire, it could not be on the road to York;" and further on he says:
"Now Harewood Forest in Yorkshire is certainly not the same as Wherwell
in Hampshire," and so on, and on, and on, but always careful not to say
that Wherwell Forest and Harewood Forest are two names for one and the
same place, although now the name of Wherwell is confined to the village
on the Test, where it is supposed Athelwold had his castle and lived
with his wife before he was killed, and where Elfrida in her declining
years, when trying to make her peace with God, came and built a Priory
and took the habit herself and there finished her darkened life.

This then was how he juggled with words and documents and chronicles
(his thimble-rigging), making a truth a lie or a lie a truth according
as it suited a froward and prejudicate mind, to quote the expression of
an older and simpler-minded historian--Sir Walter Raleigh.

Finally, to wind up the whole controversy, he says you are to take it as
a positive truth that Edgar married Elfrida, and a positive falsehood
that Edgar killed Athelwold. Why--seeing there is as good authority and
reason for believing the one statement as the other? A foolish question!
Why?--Because I, Professor or Pope Freeman, say so!

The main thing here is the effect the Freeman anecdote