Yet this was the language in which the editor of the first literary journal in England permitted Freeman to write of the greatest historical work completed since Macaulay died: "He has won his place among the popular writers of the day; his name has come to be used as a figure of speech, sometimes in strange company with his betters ....

But an historian he is not; four volumes of ingenious paradox, eight volumes of ecclesiastical pamphlet, do not become a history, either because of the mere number of volumes, or because they contain a narrative which gradually shrinks into little more than a narrative of diplomatic intrigues.
The main objections to Mr.Froude's book, the blemishes which cut it off from any title to the name of history, are utter carelessness as to facts and utter incapacity to distinguish right from wrong ....
That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil in the pursuit of truth--the spirit without which history, to be worthy of the name, cannot be written--is not in Mr.Froude's nature, and it would probably be impossible to make him understand what it is ....
How far the success of the book is due to its inherent vices, how far to its occasional virtues, is a point too knotty for us to solve.

The general reader and his tastes--why this thing pleases him and the other thing displeases him--have ever been to us the proroundest of mysteries.

It is enough that on Mr.Froude's book, as a whole, the verdict of all competent historical scholars has long ago been given.

Occasional beauties of style and narrative cannot be allowed to redeem carelessness of truth, ignorance of law, contempt for the first principles of morals, ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind.