Carlyle's direct historical worship of strength and the rest of it was
fortunately not very fruitful; and perhaps lingered only in Froude the
historian. Even he is more an interruption than a continuity. Froude
develops rather the harsher and more impatient moral counsels of his
master than like Ruskin the more romantic and sympathetic. He carries on
the tradition of Hero Worship: but carries far beyond Carlyle the
practice of worshipping people who cannot rationally be called heroes.
In this matter that eccentric eye of the seer certainly helped Carlyle:
in Cromwell and Frederick the Great there was at least something
self-begotten, original or mystical; if they were not heroes they were
at least demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude set himself to the
praise of the Tudors, a much lower class of people; ill-conditioned
prosperous people who merely waxed fat and kicked. Such strength as
Henry VIII had was the strength of a badly trained horse that bolts, not
of any clear or courageous rider who controls him. There is a sort of
strong man mentioned in Scripture who, because he masters himself, is
more than he that takes a city.
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