Both Froude and Kinglake, when one met them
at dinner, were very agreeable, very intelligent; and perhaps the
English method was right, and art fragmentary by essence.
History, like everything else, might be a field of scraps, like
the refuse about a Staffordshire iron-furnace. One felt a little
natural reluctance to decline and fall like Silas Wegg on the
golden dust-heap of British refuse; but if one must, one could at
least expect a degree from Oxford and the respect of the
Athenaeum Club.
While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends
came abroad for a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy
with his "History of New England." Of all the relics of
childhood, Dr. Palfrey was the most sympathetic, and perhaps the
more so because he, too, had wandered into the pleasant meadows
of antiquarianism, and had forgotten the world in his pursuit of
the New England Puritan. Although America seemed becoming more
and more indifferent to the Puritan except as a slightly rococo
ornament, he was only the more amusing as a study for the
Monkbarns of Boston Bay, and Dr. Palfrey took him seriously, as
his clerical education required. His work was rather an Apologia
in the Greek sense; a justification of the ways of God to Man,
or, what was much the same thing, of Puritans to other men; and
the task of justification was onerous enough to require the
occasional relief of a contrast or scapegoat.
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