He works badly, he has the genius of inaccuracy." Their
catalogues, their editions, their _regesta_, their monographs swarm with
imperfections, and never inspire confidence; try as they may, they
never attain, I do not say absolute accuracy, but any decent degree of
accuracy. They are subject to "chronic inaccuracy," a disease of which
the English historian Froude is a typical and celebrated case. Froude
was a gifted writer, but destined never to advance any statement that
was not disfigured by error; it has been said of him that he was
constitutionally inaccurate. For example, he had visited the city of
Adelaide in Australia: "We saw," says he, "below us, in a basin with a
river winding through it, a city of 150,000 inhabitants, none of whom
has ever known or will ever know one moment's anxiety as to the
recurring regularity of his three meals a day." Thus Froude, now for the
facts: Adelaide is built on an eminence; no river runs through it; when
Froude visited it the population did not exceed 75,000, and it was
suffering from a famine at the time. And more of the same kind.[115]
Froude was perfectly aware of the utility of criticism, and he was even
one of the first in England to base the study of history on that of
original documents, as well unpublished as published; but his mental
conformation rendered him altogether unfit for the emendation of texts;
indeed, he murdered them, unintentionally, whenever he touched them.
Just as Daltonism (an affection of the organs of sight which prevents a
man from distinguishing correctly between red and green signals)
incapacitates for employment on a railway, so chronic inaccuracy, or
"Froude's Disease" (a malady not very difficult to diagnose) ought to be
regarded as incompatible with the professional practice of critical
scholarship.

Froude's Disease does not appear to have ever been studied by the
psychologists, nor, indeed, is it to be considered as a separate
pathological entity. Every one makes mistakes "out of carelessness,"
"through inadvertence," and in many other ways. What is abnormal is to
make many mistakes, to be always making them, in spite of the most
persevering efforts to be exact. Probably this phenomenon is connected
with weakness of the attention and excessive activity of the involuntary
(or subconscious) imagination which the will of the patient, lacking
strength and stability, is unable sufficiently to control. The
involuntary imagination intrudes upon in