must rise above sectarian prejudices, and admit a more intricate mixture of good and evil. The merit of Carlyle's prose-epic of the French Revolution is that he sees it as a gigantic convulsion, with tremendous issues imperfectly visible to the actors, where, therefore, we can admire great passions without accepting the party watchwords, and pity the victims, though admitting the necessity of their fate. Even when Carlyle apologises for Cromwell and Frederick, his heroes are, at least as he conceives them, embodiments of profound insight into the cosmic forces which are crushing or remoulding the old order. Froude is applying the method of hero worship in an inappropriate sphere, and without the glooms and splendours of Carlyle's imagination. He takes a side when he ought to see that the evolution of the great drama can only be rightly judged from a position of detachment.
One feels, in fact, that Froude' s zeal has a touch of the factitious. His position is shown by his view of the two great types represented by Erasmus and Luther. The scholar and thinker desires that superstition may be dispersed, and abuses refined from above. But to appeal to the stupid masses is to let loose all the
