Many years afterwards Froude said to Tennyson that the most essential quality in an historian was imagination.

This true and profound remark is peculiarly liable to be misunderstood.

People who do not know what imagination means are apt to confound it with invention, although the latter quality is really the last resort of those who are destitute of the former.
Froude was an ardent lover of the truth, and desired nothing so much as to tell it.

But it must be the truth as perceived by him, not as it might appear to others.* His readers are expected, if not to see with his eyes, at least to look from his point of view.

Honestly believing that the Reformation was a great and beneficent fact in the progress of mankind, he was incapable of treating it as a sinful rebellion against the authority of the Church.