the charm, which to him was so obvious, of the despotic side of Carlyle's character. That was the real difficulty. Froude was, I believe, as loyal to his master's memory as he had been affectionate to him in life. The loyalty did not prevent him from forcing the shades as well as the lights, and he was quite right in his desire to delineate both in his portrait. What he did not see was that the merit which, for him, altogether overbalanced the faults, was not a merit at all for the outside world. He could excuse the harshness of a despot, whose rule he loved, but to people who objected to the despotic rule altogether, the excuse was an aggravation.
Froude's history was necessarily unsatisfactory on what may be called the scientific side. The hero-worshipper cannot stoop to such prosaic matters as economical or constitutional conditions. J. R. Green says that Froude's great fault was that in a history of England he had omitted the English people. The centre of interest, at any rate, is in the leading personages of the drama, and too much is attributed to their individual characteristics. Accepting Froude's conception, however, it would be difficult to praise the execution too highly. No man of his generation, I
