He could not away with his style.
Freeman's own style was forcible, vigorous, rhetorical, hard; the sort of style which Macaulay might have written if he had been a pedant and a professor instead of a politician and a man of the world.

It was not ill suited for the blood-and-thunder sort of reviewing to which his nature disposed him, and for the vengeance of the High Churchmen he seemed an excellent tool.
Freeman's biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude.

I think the Dean's conduct was judicious.

But there is no reason why a biographer of Froude should follow his example.

On the contrary, it is absolutely essential that he should not; for Freeman's assiduous efforts, first in The Saturday, and afterwards in The Contemporary, Review, did ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless of the truth.