of boasting about their sensual appetites; in a word, to show all
those symptoms which, when fully developed, leave a generation
without fixed principles, without strong faith, without self-
restraint, without moral cohesion, the sensual and divided prey of
any race, however inferior in scientific knowledge, which has a clear
and fixed notion of its work and destiny. That many of these signs
are themselves more and more ominously showing in our young men, from
the fine gentleman who rides in Rotten Row to the boy-mechanic who
listens enraptured to Mr. Holyoake's exposures of the absurdity of
all human things save Mr. Holyoake's self, is a fact which presses
itself most on those who have watched this age most carefully, and
who (rightly or wrongly) attribute much of this miserable temper to
the way in which history has been written among us for the last
hundred years.

Whether or not Mr. Froude would agree with these notions, he is more
or less responsible for them; for they have been suggested by his
'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of
Elizabeth.' It was impossible to read the book without feeling the
contrast between its tone and that of every other account of the
times which one had ever seen. Mr. Froude seems to have set to work
upon the principle, too much ignored in judging of the past, that the
historian's success must depend on his dramatic faculty; and not
merely on that constructive element of the faculty in which Mr.
Macaulay shows such astonishing power, but on that higher and deeper
critical element which ought to precede the constructive process, and
without which the constructive element will merely enable a writer,
as was once bitterly but truly said, 'to produce the greatest
possible misrepresentation with the least possible distortion of
fact.' That deeper dramatic faculty, the critical, is not logical