ining
for effect and an inaccuracy of detail. There is not one of
his contemporaries who less forced himself in description
than Froude. Often in Green, very often in Freeman and
always in Carlyle you feel that your author is deliberately
exciting his mind and your own. Violent colours are chosen
and peculiar emphasis--from this Froude was free. He was
an historian.

To the end Froude remained an historian, and an historian
he was born. If we regret that his history was not general,
and that he turned his powers upon such a restricted set of
phenomena, still we must rejoice that there was once in
modern England a man who could sum up the nature of
a great movement. He lacked the power of integration.

He was not an artist. But he possessed to an extraordinary
degree the power of synthesis. He was a craftsman, as the
modern jargon goes. There is not in the whole range of
English literature as excellent a summary of the way in
which the Divinity of our Lord fought its way into the
leading brains of Europe, as appears upon page 192 of this
book. It is as good as Boissier; there runs all through it
knowledge, proportion, and something which, had he been
granted a little more light, or been nurtured in an intellectual
climate a little more sunny, would have been vision itself:--

"The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work
compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling
difficulty, what could He be but God? Who but God could
have wrested His prize from a power which half the thinking
world believed to be His coequal and co-eternal adversary?
He was God. He was man also, for He was the second
Adam--the second starting-point of human growth. He was
virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the
substance which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He
showed in the nature of His person after His resurrection,
what the material body would have been in all of us except
for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its
purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its
likeness."

There's a piece of historical prose which summarises,
teaches, and stamps itself finally upon the mind! Froude
saw that the Faith was the summit and the completion of
Rome. Had he written us a summary of the fourth and
fifth centuries--and had he written it just after reading some
dull fellow on the other side--what books we should have
had to show to the rival schools of the Continent!

Cons