He had lectured on Erasmus and Luther at Newcastle five-and-twenty years before.

The contrast between the two reformers is perennially interesting.

Goethe, a supreme critic, thought that reform of the Church should have been left to Erasmus, and that Luther was a misfortune.
But then Goethe, though he understood religious enthusiasm, did not see the need for it, and would have tolerated such a Pope as Leo X., who had excellent taste in literature, rather than see issues submitted to the people which should be left for the learned to decide.
The weak point of Froude's Erasmus is the inaccuracy of its verbal scholarship.

"Sir," said Dr.Johnson of a loose scholar, "he makes out the Latin from the meaning, not the meaning from the Latin." This biting sarcasm would be inapplicable to Froude, who knew the dead languages, as they are called, well enough to read them with ease and enjoyment.

But he took in the general sense of a passage so quickly that he did not always, even in translating, stop to consider the precise significance of every word.