a period he saw it in a series of moving scenes as the figures passed
along the stage. That he was not always accurate in detail is
notorious. Accuracy is a question of degree. There are mistakes in
Macaulay. There are mistakes in Gibbon. Humanum est effete. An
historian must be judged not by the number of slips he has made in
names or dates, but by the general conformity of his representation
with the object. Canaletto painted pictures of Venice in which there
was not a palace out of drawing, nor a brick out of place. Yet not all
Canaletto's Venetian pictures would give a stranger much idea of the
atmosphere of Venice. Glance at one Turner, in which a Venetian could
hardly identify a building or a canal, and there lies before you the
Queen of the Sea. Serious blunders have been discovered by microscopic
criticism in Carlyle's French Revolution; it remains the most vivid
and impressive version of a tremendous drama that has ever been given
to the world. Froude and Carlyle had the same scorn of the multitude,
the same belief in destiny, the same love of truth. Froude was more
sceptical, less inclined to hero-worship, far more academic in thought
and style. They agreed in setting the moral lessons of history above
any theory of scientific development, and in cultivating the human
interest of the narrative as that which alone abides.

--
* Dr. Lightfoot.
--

That Froude set out with a polemical purpose is not to be denied. He
had seen enough of the Romanist or Anglican revival to dislike it
heartily, and he held that Protestant countries were the most
prosperous because they were morally the best. Although he did not
accept the Evangelical theology, he thought Calvinism the most