which he had taken. Of Freeman's charge Froude has long been honourably
acquitted. The Simancas MSS. have since been published in the Rolls Series,
and Mr. Martin Hume, in his Introduction, has paid his tribute to the care,
accuracy, and good faith of their first transcriber. Long before this
testimony could be given, Scottish historians who disagreed with Froude's
conclusions on many points,--men such as Skelton and Burton--had been
profoundly impressed with the care, skill, and conscientiousness with which
Froude handled the mass of tangled materials relating to the history of
Scotland.

This does not mean that Froude is free from minor inaccuracies, or that he
is innocent of graver faults which flowed from his abundant quality of
imagination. He constantly quotes a sentence inaccurately in his text,
while it is accurately transcribed in a footnote. He is careless in matters
which are important to students of Debrett, as for instance, he
indiscriminately describes Lord Howard as Lord William Howard and Lord
Howard. But Froude was sometimes guilty of something worse than these
trivial "howlers." Lecky exposed, with calm ruthlessness, some of Froude's
exaggerations--to call them by no worse name--in his _Story of the English
in Ireland_. When his _Erasmus_ was translated into Dutch, the countrymen
of Erasmus accused him of constant, if not deliberate, inaccuracy. Lord
Carnarvon once sent Froude to South Africa as an informal special
commissioner. When he returned to this country he wrote an article on the
South African problem in the _Quarterly Review_. Sir Bartle Frere, who knew
South Africa as few men did, said of it that it was an "essay in which for
whole pages a truth expressed in brilliant epigrams alternates with
mistakes or misstatements which would scarcely be pardoned in a special war
correspondent hurriedly writing against time." So dangerous is the quality
of imagination in a writer!