‘… With regard to Mr. Froude’s treatment of his brother’s writings, I see that what I have said has pained Mr. Froude. I am so far sorry for it; but I do not admit that I said anything beyond fair criticism. I know that the friends of Mr. R. H. Froude were deeply pained by what Mr. J. A. Froude wrote in his Life and Times of Thomas Becket. I cannot say that I was pained, because I never knew Mr. R. H. Froude. He was, to me, neither a friend nor a kinsman, nor a man in whom I had any personal or party interest. But as a student of twelfth-century history, I do owe him a certain measure of thanks as a pioneer in one of my subjects of study. Therefore, if not pained, like his personal friends, I was indignant: because I thought that he was unworthily treated, and that the treatment was the more unworthy because it came from the hands of his own brother. When I spoke of “stabs in the dark,” I meant that the victim (I must use the word) was in the dark. Very few of Mr. Froude’s readers would know that it was his own brother of whom Mr. Froude was speaking, in a way which, brother or no brother, I hold to be wholly undeserved.

‘But if any impartial judge thinks that I ought not to have mentioned the fact of the kindred between the two writers, I regret having done so.’