of genius and research.

The principles on which he worked are explained in a contribution to
the volume of Oxford Essays for the year 1855. The subject of this
brilliant though forgotten paper is the best means of teaching
English history, and the author's judgments upon modern historians
are peculiar. Hume and Hallam, the latter of whom was still living,
are indiscriminately condemned. Macaulay, whose first two volumes
were already famous, is ignored. The Oxford examiners are severely
censured for prescribing Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors as
authoritative, and Carlyle's Cromwell, a collection of materials
rather than a book, is pronounced to be the one good modern history,
though Froude denounces, with friendly candour, Carlyle's
"distempered antagonism to the prevailing fashions of the age." The
most characteristic part of this essay, however, is that which
recommends the Statutes, with their preambles, as the best text-
book, and the following passage would be confidently assigned by
most critics to the History itself:

"Who now questions, to mention an extreme instance, that Anne
Boleyn's death was the result of the licentious caprice of Henry?
and yet her own father, the Earl of Wiltshire, her uncle, the Duke
of Norfolk, the hero of Flodden Field, the Privy Council, the House
of Lords, the Archbishop and Bishopsm, the House of Commons, the
Grand Jury of Middlesex, and three other juries, assented without,
as far as we know, an opposing voice, to the proofs of her guilt,
and approved of the execution of the sentence against her."

Froude was not, however, so much absorbed in the work of his life
that he could not form and express strong opinions upon the great