‘… Mr. Froude, in his present attempt to paint the picture of the great men of the twelfth century, puts on the outward garb of one who has read and tested his materials, and has come to a critical judgement on what he has read and tested. But he happily leaves a little cranny open which enables us to look within. The very first words of Mr. Froude’s _Life and Times of Thomas Becket_ are enough to show us that the seeming historical inquiry is really designed as a manifesto against a theological party which once numbered its author among its members. To those who know the whole literature of the subject, it has a look more unpleasant still. Those whose study of twelfth-century history goes back to times when those who are now in their second half-century were young, will not fail to remember a time when the name of Froude reminded them of another, an earlier, and (I have no hesitation in saying) a worthier treatment of the same subject. And some of those who go back so far may be tempted to think that natural kindliness, if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the honest work of a long-deceased brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother’s almost forgotten fame…. [Mr. Froude] is controversial, something more than controversial, from the beginning. He undertakes the study, not to throw fresh light on the history of the twelfth century, but to deal a blow at a party in the nineteenth. His first words are: “Among the earliest efforts of the modern sacerdotal party in the Church of England was an attempt to re-establish the memory of the Martyr of Canterbury.” It is not everybody who reads this who will fully take in what is here meant. The first attempt made, within the memory of our own generation, to examine and compare the materials for the great controversy between King and Primate, was made by Richard Hurrell Froude of Oriel College: the Froude of the once famous _Remains_, the elder brother of the man who makes this somewhat unbrotherly reference. The elder Froude doubtless belonged to what the younger calls “the sacerdotal party.” His wish undoubtedly was “to re-establish the memory of the Martyr of Canterbury.” To those with whom historic truth comes foremost, and who have no special fanaticism, sacerdotal or anti-sacerdotal, the effort of a “sacerdotal party” to re-establish the memory of Thomas of Canterbury may seem at least as worthy an object as to re-establish the memory of Flogging Fitzgerald, or of King Harry himself. To re-establish the memory of Thomas is, at the worst, a question of words and names, and of a certain law: it does not, like the other two re-establishments, imply the defence of any matter of wrong, or wicked lewdness. And the elder Froude’s history of controversy, if undertaken with a purpose of theological partisanship, was still a piece of creditable historical work. Done forty years or so ago, it was, of course, not up to the