e read with
implicit confidence in detail. Had his critics confined themselves to
pointing this out, and done him justice in his other and real merits,
little fault could have been found with them. But it is impossible not
to see that these merits were, at least in some cases, part of his
crime, in the eyes of those who did not like him; in others were of a
kind which their natural abilities did not qualify them to detect.

The first of these merits--the least it may be in some eyes, not so in
others--was a steadfast, intense, fiery patriotism, which may remind us
of that which Macaulay in a famous passage has ascribed to Chatham in
modern times and to Demosthenes of old. This quality differed as much
from the flowery and conventional rhetoric not uncommon in writers of
some foreign nations, as from the smug self-satisfaction which was so
frequent in English speakers and authors of his own earlier time. No one
probably of Mr. Froude's day was less blind to English faults than he
was; no one more thoroughly grasped and more ardently admired the
greatness of England, or more steadfastly did his utmost in his own
vocation to keep her great.

His second excellence--an excellence still contested and in a way
contestable, but less subject than the first to personal and particular
opinion--was his command of the historic grasp, his share of the
historic sense. I have seen these terms referred to as if they were
chatter or claptrap; while the qualities which they denote are very
often confounded with qualities which, sometimes found in connection
with them, may exist without either. The historic sense may be roughly
described as the power of seizing, and so of portraying, a historic
character, incident, or period as if it were alive not dead; in such a
manner that the fit reader, whether he is convinced or not that the
things ever did happen, sees that they might and probably must have
happened. Some of the most estimable and excellent of historians have
not had even a glimmering of this sense: they have at best laboriously
assembled the materials out of which, sooner or later, some one with the
sense will make a live history. But Thucydides and Herodotus had it;
Tacitus had it, and even Sallust; it betrays itself in the most artless
fashion in Villehardouin and Joinville, less artlessly in Comines;
Clarendon had it; Gibbon had it; Carlyle had it as none has had it
before or since. And Mr. Froude had it; not much less though m