and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediaeval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world." Froude was once asked what was the greatest and most essential quality of an historian. He replied that it was imagination. It was a true and a just saying, and Froude himself possessed the faculty in abundance. It was not only with the old order that Froude showed his sympathy. He is seldom ungenerous in his references to individual Catholics, however mistaken in his sight their opinions may have been. With Wolsey and Warham, Fisher and More, even with Gardiner and Bonner he deals fairly and with some amount of real sympathy. The heroic death of Campian moves him to pity just as much as the death of Latimer; the strenuous labours of Father Parsons to overthrow Elizabeth and Protestantism failed to remove him beyond the pale of Froude's charitable judgment. One English Catholic alone was reserved for the historian's harsh and sometimes petulant criticism. For Cardinal Pole Froude felt the angriest contempt. He was descended from the blood royal, both of England and of Wales. On his father's side he was descended in direct line from the ancient princes of Powis; on his mother's from the Plantagenets and the Nevilles. He was the most learned and illustrious Englishman of his age. He had stood high in King Henry's favour; he was destined for the greatest offices in the state. He was not without natural ambition. Yet he forfeited all that he had--the favour of his prince, the society of his mother whom he loved, and the kindred who were proud of him, the hope of promotion and of power, his friends, his home, and his country, for conscience' sake. He remained true to the ancient faith in which he was reared. With unerring instinct he foresaw that, once England was severed from the Papacy, it would be impossible for king or parliament to stem the flood of the Reformation. For twenty years he remained an exile on the continent. He returned an old and broken man, to witness the overthrow of his cherished plans. He was repudiated by the Pope whose authority he had sacrificed everything to maintain, and in his old age he suffered the humiliation of being accused of heresy in the court of Rome. He died the same day as Mary died, with the knowledge that all his life's labours and sacrifices were come to naught, and that the dominion of the Roman Church in England was gone for ever. Froude saw none of the pathos or tragedy of Pole's life. To him the cardinal was a renegade, a traitor to his country, a mercenary of the Pope, a foreign potentate, a "hysterical dreamer," who vainly imagined that he was "the champion of heaven, and the destroyer of heresy."