"The Saturday Review temperament," he wrote, "is ten thousand
thousand times more damnable than the worst of Swinburne's skits.
Modern respectability is so utterly without God, faith, heart; it
shows so singular an ingenuity in and injuring everything that is
noble and good, and so systematic a preference for what is mean and
paltry, that I am not surprised at a young fellow dashing his heels
into the face of it .... When there is any kind of true genius, we
have no right to drive it mad. We must deal with it wisely, justly,
fairly."*

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* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 137.
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Froude was an excellent editor; appreciative, discriminating, and
alert. He prided himself on Carlyle's approval, though perhaps
Carlyle was not the best judge of such things. His energy was
multifarious. Besides his History and his magazine, he found time
for a stray lecture at odd times, and he could always reckon upon a
good audience. His discourse at the Royal Institution in February,
1864, on "The Science of History," for which he was "called an
atheist," is in the main a criticism of Buckle, the one really
scientific historian. According to Buckle, the history of mankind
was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the
past that made the impossibility of predicting the future. Great men
were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle
more erratic in their behaviour. Political economy was history in
little, illustrating the regularity of human, like all other
natural, forces. But can we predict historical events, as we can