as sometimes guilty of something worse than these
trivial "howlers." Lecky exposed, with calm ruthlessness, some of Froude's
exaggerations--to call them by no worse name--in his _Story of the English
in Ireland_. When his _Erasmus_ was translated into Dutch, the countrymen
of Erasmus accused him of constant, if not deliberate, inaccuracy. Lord
Carnarvon once sent Froude to South Africa as an informal special
commissioner. When he returned to this country he wrote an article on the
South African problem in the _Quarterly Review_. Sir Bartle Frere, who knew
South Africa as few men did, said of it that it was an "essay in which for
whole pages a truth expressed in brilliant epigrams alternates with
mistakes or misstatements which would scarcely be pardoned in a special war
correspondent hurriedly writing against time." So dangerous is the quality
of imagination in a writer!

Truth to tell, Froude was a literary man with a fondness for historical
investigation, and an artist's passion for the dramatic in life and story.
He wrote with a purpose--that purpose being to defend the English
Reformation against the attacks of the neo-Catholic-Anglicans, under whose
influence he had himself been for a time in his youth. To him, therefore,
Henry VIII. was "the majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome." This is
not the occasion, nor is the present writer the man, to analyse that
complex and masterful personality. Froude started to defend the English
Reformation against the vile charge that it was the outcome of kingly lust.
That charge he has finally dispelled. Henry VIII. was not the monster that
Lingard painted. He beheaded two queens, but few will be found to assert
to-day that either Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard were innocent martyrs.
People must agree to differ to the crack of doom as to the justice of
Catherine's divorce. It is one of those questions which different men will
continue to answer in different ways. But one thing is abundantly clear. If
Henry was actuated merely by passion for Anne Boleyn, he would scarcely
have waited for years before putting Queen Catherine away. Henry divorced
Anne of Cleves, but Anne, who survived the dissolution of her marriage and
remained in England for twenty years, made no complaint of her treatment,
and she has had no champions either among Catholic or Protestant writers.
Her divorce is only remembered as the occasion of the downfall of the
greatest statesman of his age, Thomas Cromwell