fortunately not very fruitful; and perhaps lingered only in Froude the
historian. Even he is more an interruption than a continuity. Froude
develops rather the harsher and more impatient moral counsels of his
master than like Ruskin the more romantic and sympathetic. He carries on
the tradition of Hero Worship: but carries far beyond Carlyle the
practice of worshipping people who cannot rationally be called heroes.
In this matter that eccentric eye of the seer certainly helped Carlyle:
in Cromwell and Frederick the Great there was at least something
self-begotten, original or mystical; if they were not heroes they were
at least demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude set himself to the
praise of the Tudors, a much lower class of people; ill-conditioned
prosperous people who merely waxed fat and kicked. Such strength as
Henry VIII had was the strength of a badly trained horse that bolts, not
of any clear or courageous rider who controls him. There is a sort of
strong man mentioned in Scripture who, because he masters himself, is
more than he that takes a city. There is another kind of strong man
(known to the medical profession) who cannot master himself; and whom it
may take half a city to take alive. But for all that he is a low
lunatic, and not a hero; and of that sort were too many of the heroes
whom Froude attempted to praise. A kind of instinct kept Carlyle from
over-praising Henry VIII; or that highly cultivated and complicated
liar, Queen Elizabeth. Here, the only importance of this is that one of
Carlyle's followers carried further that "strength" which was the real
weakness of Carlyle. I have heard that Froude's life of Carlyle was
unsympathetic; but if it was so it was a sort of parricide. For the
rest, like Macaulay, he was a picturesque and partisan historian: but,
like Macaulay (and unlike the craven scientific historians of to-day) he
was not ashamed of being partisan or of being picturesque. Such studies
as he wrote on the Elizabethan seamen and adventurers, represent very
triumphantly the sort of romance of England that all this school was