at
he did his best for years, no doubt from the highest motives, to
damage Froude's reputation, and to injure his good name, is certain.
With the general reader he failed. The public had too much sense to
believe Froude was merely, or chiefly, or at all, an ecclesiastical
pamphleteer. But by dint of noisy assertion, and perpetual
repetition, Freeman did at last infect academic coteries with the
idea that Froude was a superficial sciolist. The same thing had been
said of Macaulay, and believed by the same sort of people. Froude's
books were certainly much easier to read than Freeman's. Must they
therefore have been much easier to write? Two-thirds of Froude's
mistakes would have been avoided, and Freeman would never have had
his chance, if the former had had a keener eye for slips in his
proof-sheets, or had engaged competent assistance. When he allowed
Wilhelmus to be printed instead of Willelmus, Freeman shouted with
exultant glee that a man so hopelessly ignorant of mediaeval
nomenclature had no right to express an opinion upon the dispute
between Becket and the King. Nothing could exceed his transports of
joy when he found out that Froude did not know the ancient name of
Lisieux. Freeman thought, like the older Pharisees, that he should be
heard for his much speaking, and for a time he was. People did not
realise that so many confident allegations could be made in which
there was no substance at all. They thought themselves safe in making
allowance for Freeman's exaggeration, and Freeman simply bored many
persons into accepting his estimate of Froude. Perhaps he went a
little too far when he claimed to have found inaccuracies in Froude's
transcripts from the Simancas manuscripts without knowing a word of
Spanish. But he was seldom so frank as that. It was not often that he
forgot his two objects of holding up Froude as the fluent, facile
ignoramus, and himself as the profound, erudite student.

Just after reading Freeman's furious articles on Becket, I turned to
Froude's "Index of Papers collected by me October, November, and
December, 1856." It covers twenty-one pages, very closely written,
and I will give a few extracts to show what sort of preparation this
sciolist thought necessary for his ecclesiastical pamphlet. The first
entry, representing four pages of text, is "Hanson's Description of
England. Diet, habits, prices of provisions from Parliamentary
History." Another is "Dress and loose habits of the London c