"Mr.Froude by his own statement has not made history the study of his life," which was exactly what he had done, and stated that he had done.

"The man who insisted on the Statute-book being the text of English history showed that he had never heard of peine forte et dure, and had no clear notion of a Bill of Attainder." Freeman could not even be consistent in abuse for half a page.
Immediately after charging Froude with "fanatical hatred towards the English Church, reformed or unreformed"-- though he was the great champion of the Reformation--"a degree of hatred which must be peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it"- like Freeman's bosom friend Green--he says that Froude "never reaches so high a point as in several passages where he describes various scenes and features of monastic life." But this could not absolve him from having made a "raid" upon another man's period, from being a "marauder," from writing about a personage whom Stubbs might have written about, though he had not.

Froude had "an inborn and incurable twist, which made it impossible for him to make an accurate statement about any matter." "By some destiny which it would seem that he cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds--at least which all other readers find--in his book he invariably substitutes another narrative out of his own head." "Very few of us can test manuscripts at Simancas; it is not every one who can at a moment's notice test references to manuscripts much nearer home." This is a strange insinuation from a man who never tested a manuscript, seldom, if ever, consulted a manuscript, and had declined Froude's challenge to let his copies be compared with his abridgment.

One grows tired of transcribing a mere succession of innuendoes.

Yet it is essential to clear this matter up once and for all, that the public may judge between Froude and his life-long enemy.
The standard by which Freeman affected to judge Froude's articles in The Nineteenth Century was fantastic.