was smiter of one Antonius. I venture
to think that I have whopped the whole _Gens Antonia_--first
Anthony pure and simple, which is Trollope; secondly, James
Anthony, whom I believe myself to have smitten, as Cnut did
Eadric swiethe rihtlice, in the matter of St. Hugh; thirdly,
George Anthony, with whom I fought again last Tuesday, carrying
at our Education Board a resolution in favour of Forster's
bill." Trollope and he became warm friends. Froude he heartily
disliked, not, I think, on any personal grounds, but because he
thought Froude indifferent to truth, and was incensed by the
defence of Henry VIII.'s crimes.

It may be added that Freeman, much as he detested Henry VIII.,
used to observe that Henry had a sort of legal conscience,
because he always wished his murders to be done by Act of
Parliament, and that the earlier and better part of Henry's
reign ought not to be forgotten. He was fond of quoting the
euphemism with which an old Oxford professor of ecclesiastical
history concluded his account of the sovereign whom, in respect
of his relation to the Church of England, it seemed proper to
handle gently: "The later years of this great monarch were
clouded by domestic troubles."

[40] "The heart makes the theologian."

ROBERT LOWE VISCOUNT SHERBROOKE[41]

Had Robert Lowe died in 1868, when he became a Cabinet Minister, his
death would have been a political event of the first magnitude; but
when he died in 1892 (in his eighty-second year) hardly anybody under
forty years of age knew who Lord Sherbrooke was, and the new
generation wondered why their seniors should feel any interest in the
disappearance of a superannuated peer whose name had long since ceased
to be heard in either the literary or the political world. It requires
an effort to believe that he was at one time held the equal in oratory
and the superior in intellect of Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone. There
are few instances in our annals of men who have been equally famous
and whose fame has been bounded by so short a span out of a long
life.

No one who knew Lowe ever doubted his abilities. He made a brilliant
reputation, first at Winchester (where, as his autobiography tells
us, he was miserable) and then at Oxford, where he was the
contemporary and fully the peer of Roundell Palmer (afterwards Lord
C