In the case of Froude, we must remember that, whatever he wrote, he had to meet not a single critic only, but a whole army. As far as one could see, a kind of association had been formed for the suppression of his “History.” Those who were behind the scenes know how certain of his rivals and enemies actually banded themselves together, as if against a common enemy. Now, I remember seeing in _Fraser’s Magazine_, then edited by Froude, a review of Green’s “History of the English People,” with pages and pages of mistakes in names, in dates, in facts. Yet, the same writers who delighted in picking holes in Froude’s “History” from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, kept up a constant chorus of applause for Green’s “History of the English People”—no doubt rightly so; but why not mete the same measure to others also? One of his reviewers openly confessed that if he took the trouble of reading a book carefully, he could not afford to review it in one paper only, he had to write at least five or six articles to make it pay. This Φρουδοφονία, as it was called, went on year after year, but, strange to say, Froude’s work was not killed by it; on the contrary, it became more and more popular. In fact, together with his other works, it enabled him to live independently and even comfortably by his pen. Things have come to such a pass that, if we may trust the experience of publishers, nothing sells so well as a well-abused book, while laudatory notices seem to produce little or no effect. The public, it seems, has grown too wise. Even such powerful adjectives as epoch-making (_Epoche-machend_), monumental and even _pyramidal_, fall flat. _Epoche-machend_ has too often been found out to mean no more than _Poche-machend_ (_Poche_ in German means _claque_), and _monumental_ has once or twice proved a misprint for _momental_ or momentary. Few scholars would agree with M. Le Bon that “works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination, as fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts.” This is a French exaggeration. But neither are books of history meant to be mere chronicles. History is surely meant to teach not only facts, but lessons also; and, though historians may say that facts ought to speak for themselves, they will not speak without a _vates sacer_. I am the last man to stand up for an unscholarlike treatment of history, or of anything else. But as I do not call a man a scholar who simply copies and collates MSS., makes indices or collects errata, I doubt whether mere _Quellenstudium_ will make a historian. _Quellenstudium_ is a _sine quâ non_, but it is not everything; and whereas the number of those who can ransack archives and libraries is large, the world has not been rich in real historians whom it is a delight to listen to, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and, may we not add, Macaulay and Froude? None of these historians, not even Gibbon, has escaped criticism, but