well ascertained. Darnley was blown up, whoever supplied the powder, and the Spanish Armada certainly came somehow to grief. Froude's imagination may invest those facts with a poetical haze. In reading him, I do not know certainly where fiction ends and facts begin. The history may be an 'impressionist' picture, coloured and distorted by the mirror in which the facts are reflected. But I can take that into account. I know that I am not to read with unqualified faith. I get such a narrative of the past as I should of the present if I confined myself to party-journalism. I must study writers of opposite prejudices, and superpose the pictures as well as I can. I must take the story, not as definitive truth, but as an aspect of the truth seen from a particular point of view. I get at least one important fact: if not the real persons, the images projected by them upon the imagination of their partisans; and to see for a moment as they saw is a help to understanding the ideals and the prejudices of the time.
Anyhow, Froude was a most skilful historical artist. I remember being startled many years ago by the assertion of a friend that Froude's style was superior to Macaulay's. My notions of style were then too crude to be shocked by
