No artifices imposed upon him, and he acknowledged no master but Christ.

He translated the arch-sceptic Lucian, about whom Froude has himself written a delightful essay.

"I wish," said Froude, "I wish more of us read Lucian now.

He was the greatest man by far outside the Christian Church in the second century." Lucian lived in an age when miracles the most grotesque were supported by witnesses the most serious, and when, as he said, the one safeguard was an obstinate incredulity, the ineradicable certainty that miracles did not happen.

Erasmus enjoyed Lucian as a corrective of monkish superstition, though he himself was essentially Christian.