e appearance of his book, of treachery towards Scott.

But it must be confessed that if Mr. Froude's critics were unfair (and
they certainly were) he himself gave only too abundant opening to fair
criticism. That his first great book (not perhaps any of his others) was
planned on an unduly large scale, and indulged in far too extensive
dissertation, divagation, and so forth, was rather the fault of his time
than of himself. Grote and Macaulay had obtained, the first
considerable, the latter immense popularity by similar prolixity; and
Carlyle was about, in the _Frederick_, to follow the fashion. But
whereas all these three, according to the information open to them, were
and are among the most painfully laborious researchers and, with a fair
allowance, the most faithful recorders among historians, Mr. Froude
displayed an attention to accuracy which his warmest admirers must allow
to be sadly, and which enemies asserted to be scandalously insufficient.
He has been called by well-affected critics "congenitally inaccurate,"
and there is warrant for it. Nor did any one of his three great models
come short of him in partiality, in advocacy, in the determination to
make the reader accept his own view first of all.

He was, in the earlier part of his career at any rate, a very poor man,
whereas Macaulay was in easy, and Grote in affluent circumstances, and
he had not Carlyle's Scotch thrift. But the carelessness of his dealing
with documents had more in it than lack of pence to purchase assistance,
or even than lack of dogged resolve to do the drudgery himself. His
enemies of course asserted, or hinted, that the added cause was
dishonesty at the worst, indifference to truth at the best. As far as
dishonesty goes they may be summarily non-suited. The present writer
once detected, in a preface of Mr. Froude's to a book with which the
introducer was thoroughly in sympathy, repeated errors of quotation or
allusion which actually weakened Mr. Froude's own argument--cases where
he made his own case worse by miscitation. To the very last, in his
_Erasmus_ itself, which he had prepared at some pains for the press, his
work would always abound in the most astonishing slips of memory,
oversights of fact, hastinesses of statement. There is probably no
historian of anything like his calibre in the whole history of
literature who is so dangerous to trust for mere matters of fact, who
gives such bad books of reference, who is so little to b