often remarked that the
growth of journalism, forcing men to write hastily and profusely,
tends to injure literature both in matter and in manner. In point of
matter, Freeman, though for the best part of his life a very prolific
journalist, did not seem to suffer. He was as exact, clear, and
thorough at the end as he had been at the beginning. On his style,
however, the results were unfortunate. It retained its force and its
point, but it became diffuse, not that each particular sentence was
weak, or vague, or wordy, but that what was substantially the same
idea was apt to be reiterated, with slight differences of phrase, in
several successive sentences or paragraphs. He was fond of the
Psalter, great part of which he knew by heart, and we told him that he
had caught too much of the manner of Psalm cxix. This tendency to
repetition caused some of his books, and particularly the _Norman
Conquest_ and _William Rufus_, to swell to a portentous bulk. Those
treatises, which constitute a history of England from A.D. 1042 to
1100, would be more widely read if they had been, as they ought to
have been, reduced to three or four volumes; and as he came to
perceive this, he resolved in the last year of his life to republish
the _Norman Conquest_ in a condensed form. To be obliged to compress
was a wholesome, though unwelcome, discipline, and the result is seen
in some of his smaller books, such as the historical essays, and the
sketches of English towns, often wonderfully fresh and vigorous bits
of work. Anxiety to be scrupulously accurate runs into prolixity, and
Freeman so loved his subjects that it pained him to omit any
characteristic detail a chronicler had preserved; as he once observed
to a distinguished writer who was dealing with a much later period,
"You know so much about your people that you have to leave out a great
deal, I know so little that I must tell all I know." The tendency to
repeat the same word too frequently sprang from his preference for
words of Teutonic origin and his pride in what he deemed the purity of
his English. His pages would have been livelier had he felt free to
indulge in the humour with which his private letters sparkled; for he
was full of fun, though it often turned on points too recondite for
the public. But it was only in the notes to his histories, and seldom
even there, that he gave play to one of the merits that most commended
him to his friends.

So far of his books. He was, however,