But he did perceive by sympathetic intuition a great deal that an ordinary writer would have missed altogether.

For instance, the full humour of that singular occasion when Benjamin Disraeli appeared on the platform of a Diocesan Conference at Oxford, with Samuel Wilberforce in the chair, could have been given by no one else exactly as Froude gave it.

Nothing like it had ever happened before.

It is scarcely possible that anything of the kind can ever happen again.

Froude found the origin of the Established Church in the statutes of Henry VIII.