which it was erased: so well does the progress of time cover the scars of illiberality and increase the reasonableness of

men.

Froude's family were proud of their orthodoxy and felt that the "Nemesis" disgraced them. His father withdrew the author's allowance, throwing him on his own resources, in itself not a bad thing. One of the friends he had made was Charles Kingsley, who took him to his house till something satisfactory could be found for the outcast. There the author met Miss Greenfell, sister of Mrs. Kingsley, and an attachment sprang up which in a few months resulted in marriage. The lady had many estimable qualities, and she served as a balance to some of his erratic tendencies. She had, also, enough fortune to enable her husband to turn his entire attention to literature, which he loved and for which he was best fitted. The couple settled down in a charming spot in Wales, where the beautiful hills and the sea vied with one another to make the locality the pleasantest in the United Kingdom. Here Froude found peace for a harassed mind; religious difficulties were laid aside, if not forgot; and when, a few years later, he came under the influence of Carlyle, he recovered most of the spirit, if not the form, of orthodox Christianity.

In his retirement he turned to history, and the field which attracted him was the Reformation. It was one of the greatest crises of English History, and he had ever a partiality for striking phases of history; its basis was religion, and this suited a mind which up to that time was absorbed in religious discussion; and finally he got access to a quantity of public records which offered the possibility of rich revelations in the way of evidence. He declared that he took up the work without any preconceived notions of the merits of its participants; but he certainly did not come out of it in so impartial a manner. He was, in fact, not a man of balanced judgment. He took sides warmly, and his great History of England is a brilliant piece of special pleading. It is a defense of the Reformation against a school of historians which had given the facts with as much distortion as he himself gave them; and between the two the discriminating reader is left to find a medial ground, which is not encumbered by the extreme statement of either pleader.

Froude took up the task of writing his great History in 1850, the first installment was published in 1856, the last appeared in 1870. In all there were twelve volumes, and it covered the period from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Those who read them will be apt to be so well pleased by the vivacious and clear manner in which they are written that they will not realize how carefully and laboriously they were prepared. Industry was one of his most notable qualities; and in the large mass of documents in both the English and the foreign public record offices there was abundant need to test this trait to the fullest. The correspondence of foreign ministers, the entries in council journals, the records of trials, and many more such documents were patiently examined, and abstracts of most of them were made in his own hand from original manuscripts. It was such a task as many another careful student has performed; but there has, perhaps, not been another who has wrought out of the mass of his notes so clear and perfectly constructed a piece of literature.

The History was received with a storm of denunciation; for it was in vital antagonism to the long accepted views of the Established Church. Modern Americans can have little idea how vital a thing is such a church. It dominates the political, religious, social, and literary parts of the community; it makes standards of intellectual comfort, and it has the power to punish severely those who incur its displeasure. It had its own notions about the Reformation, and Froude paid little respect to them. It was accustomed to say that the Reformation in England was but an incident in the history of the church, that it produced little new, and that its leaders were for the most part actuated by unworthy motives. Froude, who began the investigation without prejudice on either side, came to an opposite conclusion, and made a strong defense of the whole movement. He gave strong arguments and facts to show that it was, in effect, a deep revolution in the church, that it gave that body an entirely new basis of power, that it was supported by the mass of the people, and that Henry VIII and those who assisted him in bringing it about were actuated by a wise sense of the best good of the

country. In a word, Froude voiced in English historical literature a first protest for a rational man's view of the Reformation in his native country.

His critics pounced on whatever error they could find, and there were many minor mistakes in the work. It seems to be a law of nature, observable with rare exceptions, that a mind which reproduces details with accuracy has little of the faculty of literary expression, and that the converse is also true. Now Froude had literary expression in a remarkable degree, and he was lacking in the power of detail. He made many small errors which he ought not to have made. Some of them were slips in copying, some were falsities of expression, some came from hurried examinations, and it was charged that some were deliberate changes in order to warp the sense into such a form that it would support his view. Whether Froude can be convicted of making intentional changes of meaning, it is impossible to say. Every principal step of his literary career was attended by controversy, and in every case it was possible to show that he made the same kinds of mistakes. Yet it is not in keeping with his character in other respects deliberately to corrupt the reading of his authorities. It is probably better to say that his hasty examinations, his strong conviction of what the evidence was going to show, and his proneness to overlook the significance of detail led him to form immature judgments. They must ever remain as blots on his reputation as a competent historian.

But Froude as a historian is not to be disposed of by saying that he made errors. In spite of them he did some very important things for the cause of historical truth. In his History, for example, he gave a new interpretation to the English story at one of its most critical stages; for he broke down for intelligent readers the claim of the high church party in regard to the continuity of the church, he rescued Henry VIII from the charge of being a mere "Blue Beard," and he showed the element of nationality in the new movement. If, in doing so, he painted More and Fisher too black and Henry too white, and if he made a hundred other such individual errors, they were such as the world has readily detected, and the good he did lives after him.

How deeply he caught the spirit of the time is seen in the wonderful popularity of his book. Decried as it was, it sold astonishingly. The more it was denounced, the more the people bought it; and this seems to show how little hold the church party had on their consciousness. They did not have ecclesiastical bias, they had reasons to distrust the contentions of those who did have such a bias, and they were filled with the layman's desire for liberty. The spirit of the new time was in them, and in Froude they recognized its prophet.

While he was writing the earliest volumes of the History, he met Carlyle, that earnest Scotch rebel against all conventionality, who blustered about in the moral realm, pulling down much that was bad, building up little that was good, and yet ever insisting on the highest and bravest concepts of personal excellence. Between the characters of the two men there was much in common. For Froude, Carlyle became staff and guide, a moral friend and companion, and a valued literary critic. Froude was brought to London by the necessity of consulting materials for the History, and he was able to give a great deal of time to his companion. Carlyle, who was getting old, came to rely much on his friend, and out of this confidence and dependence came for Froude the momentous request that he should act as literary executor to both Mrs. Carlyle and her husband. He accepted the obligation with some reluctance, and out of the fulfilment of it grew the most notable controversy of his life. The facts which led up to it are briefly as follows:

Carlyle was married to a brilliant and sensitive woman whose maiden name was Jane Welsh. From looking intently up into the heavens he did not see the excellence at his side, and it came about that Mrs. Carlyle led a very lonely life. She even had good cause to feel deeply offended when she found some letters in which her husband expressed a very exalted, but platonic, affection for another woman. She made no protest, save to have unpleasant scenes in the family, but she wrote down in her diary a faithful picture of her misery; she also inscribed there some of the best things to be found in any memoirs, and in 1866 she died. Carlyle was stupefied with grief, so we are told; and in going through her posses

sions came upon the diary, of whose existence he did not previously know. He was amazed and deeply penitent when he saw what grief he had inflicted on an innocent and noble person. Conscience stricken, he sought to make reparation, and like many another prophet, he would impale himself in expiation of his sin. Thus it was that he turned over to Froude the dead wife's diary and a mass of notes relating to her life, giving him full permission to publish as much as he saw fit. He wrote, also, a memoir of his wife, and this was entrusted to the same friend. Froude quickly convinced himself that Mrs. Carlyle was far too brilliant a woman to be forgotten, and he agreed with her husband that her memoirs ought to be published. But what should he do about exposing her sufferings at the hands of one of the most prophetic characters then before the world? There before him was the heroic Carlyle, who said in effect: "I have washed my hands of responsibility, publish if you choose."

What ought Froude to have done in the situation? Should he gloze over the conduct which seemed so reprehensible to Carlyle and give the world an ideal man, or should he paint the Scotch philosopher as he was? He might take one alternative or the other without the least blame, and he chose the latter. Another man in his place might have ignored as a quixotic freak, Carlyle's desire to immolate himself, but Froude took it seriously. Carlyle wanted his character turned wrong side outward and turned it should be.

The great Scotchman himself died in February, 1881, leaving Froude and Justice Fitzjames Stephen his literary executors, with the understanding that the former should write his life. Under the title "Reminiscences of Carlyle" Froude brought out at once some miscellaneous papers of the deceased man, among them the memoir of Mrs. Carlyle by her husband. It was full of the misery which filled the last days of the poor man's life, and it revealed to the world the tragedy of the Carlyle home. In 1882 he brought out the first two volumes of the "Life of Carlyle," in 1883 the "Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle," and in 1884 he completed the biography of his friend with "Carlyle's Life in London."

The publication of this series of books made a deep impression on the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic. Be