At that time the editor secured the services of Edward Augustus Freeman, who had been for several years a contributor on miscellaneous topics.

Freeman is well known as the historian of the Norman Conquest, as an active politician, controversialist, and pamphleteer.

Froude toiled for months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost illegible, carefully noting the caligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition assigning his proper share to each.

Freeman wrote his History of the Norman Conquest, upon which he was at this time engaged, entirely from books, without consulting a manuscript or an original document of any kind.

Every historian must take his own line, and the public are concerned not with processes, but with results.
I wish merely to point out the fact that, as between Froude and Freeman, the assailed and the assailant, Froude was incomparably the more laborious student of the two.