Hume and Hallam, the latter of whom was still living, are indiscriminately condemned.

Macaulay, whose first two volumes were already famous, is ignored.

The Oxford examiners are severely censured for prescribing Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors as authoritative, and Carlyle's Cromwell, a collection of materials rather than a book, is pronounced to be the one good modern history, though Froude denounces, with friendly candour, Carlyle's "distempered antagonism to the prevailing fashions of the age." The most characteristic part of this essay, however, is that which recommends the Statutes, with their preambles, as the best text- book, and the following passage would be confidently assigned by most critics to the History itself: "Who now questions, to mention an extreme instance, that Anne Boleyn's death was the result of the licentious caprice of Henry?
and yet her own father, the Earl of Wiltshire, her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, the hero of Flodden Field, the Privy Council, the House of Lords, the Archbishop and Bishopsm, the House of Commons, the Grand Jury of Middlesex, and three other juries, assented without, as far as we know, an opposing voice, to the proofs of her guilt, and approved of the execution of the sentence against her." Froude was not, however, so much absorbed in the work of his life that he could not form and express strong opinions upon the great events passing around him.

His view of the Russian war and of the French alliance was set forth with much plainness of speech in a letter to Max Muller:* "I felt in the autumn (and you were angry at me for saying so) that the very worst thing which could happen for Europe would be the success of the policy with which France and England were managing things.

Happily the gods were against it too, as now, after having between us wasted sixty millions of money and fifty thousand human lives, we are beginning to discover.