The high quality of Freeman's work was acknowledged by all competent judges. He was made D.C.L. of Oxford and LL.D. of Cambridge _honoris causa_, and when he visited the United States on a lecturing tour was warmly received at various places of learning. He served on the royal commission on ecclesiastical courts appointed in 1881. In 1884 he was appointed regius professor of modern history at Oxford. His lectures were thinly attended, for he did not care to adapt them to the requirements of the university examinations, and he was not perhaps well fitted to teach young men. But he exercised a wholesome influence over the more earnest students of history among the resident graduates. From 1886 he was forced by ill-health to spend much of his time abroad, and he died of smallpox at Alicante on the 16th of March 1892, while on a tour in Spain. Freeman had a strongly marked personality. Though impatient in temper and occasionally rude, he was tender-hearted and generous. His rudeness to strangers was partly caused by shyness and partly by a childlike inability to conceal his feelings. Eminently truthful, he could not understand that some verbal insincerities are necessary to social life. He had a peculiar faculty for friendship, and his friends always found him sympathetic and affectionate. In their society he would talk well and showed a keen sense of humour. He considered it his duty to expose careless and ignorant writers, and certainly enjoyed doing so. He worked hard and methodically, often had several pieces of work in hand, and kept a daily record of the time which he devoted to each of them. His tastes were curiously limited. No art interested him except architecture, which he studied throughout his life; and he cared little for literature which was not either historical or political. In later life he ceased to hold the theological opinions of his youth, but remained a devout churchman. See W. R. W. Stephens, _Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman_ (London, 1895); Frederic Harrison, _Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and other Literary Estimates_ (London, 1899); James Bryce, "E. A. Freeman," _Eng. Hist. Rev._, July 1892. (W. Hu.)