The time with which Froude chose to deal was full of blazing fire,
which the ashes of three hundred years imperfectly covered. He did
not realise the ordeal to which he was exposing himself, the malice
he was stirring up. His whole life had been a preparation for the
task. When he had the free run of his father's library after leaving
Westminster, it was to the historical shelves that he went first;
and while his brother talked eloquently about the evils of the
Reformation, he himself was studying its causes. His own
entanglement in the Anglican revival was personal, accidental, and
brief. It was due entirely to his affectionate admiration for
Newman, aided perhaps, if by anything, by curiosity to know
something about the lives of the saints. For a real saint, such as
Hugh of Lincoln, he had a sincere reverence, and loved to show it.
The miraculous element disgusted him, and the more he read of
ecclesiastical performances the more anti-ecclesiastical he became.

The article in The Edinburgh Review for July, 1858, upon Froude's
first four volumes is an elaborate, an able, and a bitter attack.
Henry Reeve, the editor of The Edinburgh at that time, and for many
years afterwards, was not himself a scholar, like his illustrious
predecessor, Cornewall Lewis. He was a Whig of the most conventional
type, regarding Macaulay and Hallam as the ideal historians,
suspicious of novelty, and dismayed by paradox. Froude's critic
belonged to a more advanced school of Liberalism, and shuddered at
the glorification of a "tyrant" like Henry VIII. That he had also
some reason for personally detesting Froude is plain from his
malicious references to the Lives of the Saints, and to The Nemesis
of Faith, which Froude himself had, so far as he could, suppressed.
When Froude's name was restored to the books of Exeter College in
1858, he wrote to Dr. Lightfoot, the Rector, that he regretted the