Thus, as an historian he has been accused of two faults which have been supposed by those who are ill acquainted with the history of letters to be correlative:  a straining for effect and an inaccuracy of detail.  There is not one of his contemporaries who less forced himself in description than Froude.  Often in Green, very often in Freeman and always in Carlyle you feel that your author is deliberately exciting his mind and your own.  Violent colours are chosen and peculiar emphasis—­from this Froude was free.  He was an historian.

To the end Froude remained an historian, and an historian he was born.  If we regret that his history was not general, and that he turned his powers upon such a restricted set of phenomena, still we must rejoice that there was once in modern England a man who could sum up the nature of a great movement.  He lacked the power of integration.

He was not an artist.  But he possessed to an extraordinary degree the power of synthesis.  He was a craftsman, as the modern jargon goes.  There is not in the whole range of English literature as excellent a summary of the way in which the Divinity of our Lord fought its way into the leading brains of Europe, as appears upon page 192 of this book.  It is as good as Boissier; there runs all through it knowledge, proportion, and something which, had he been granted a little more light, or been nurtured in an intellectual climate a little more sunny, would have been vision itself:—­

“The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling difficulty, what could He be but God?  Who but God could have wrested His prize from a power which half the thinking world believed to be His coequal and co-eternal adversary?  He was God.  He was man also, for He was the second Adam—­the second starting-point of human growth.  He was virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He showed in the nature of His person after His resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness.”

There’s a piece of historical prose which summarises, teaches, and stamps itself finally upon the mind!  Froude saw that the Faith was the summit and the completion of Rome.  Had he written us a summary of the fourth and fifth centuries—­and had he written it just after reading some dull fellow on the other side—­what books we should have had to show to the rival schools of the Continent!

Consider the sharp and almost unique judgment passed upon Tacitus at the bottom of page 133 and the top of page 134, or again, the excellent sub-ironic passages in which he expresses the vast advantage of metaphysical debate:  which has all these qualities, that it is true, sober, exact, and yet a piece of laughter and a contradiction of itself.  It is prose in three dimensions.