— * Dr. Jackson. + Mr. Monro. ^ Dr. Paget. # Mr. Warren. —

It must not be supposed that Froude felt only the burden. His powers of enjoyment were great, and he thoroughly enjoyed Oxford. He had left it forty years ago under a cloud. He came back in a dignified character with an assured position. He liked the familiar buildings and the society of scholars. The young men interested and amused him. Ironical as he might be at times, and pessimistic, his talk was intellectually stimulating. His strong convictions, even his inveterate prejudices, prevented his irony from degenerating into cynicism. History, said Carlyle, is the quintessence of innumerable biographies, and it was always the human side of history that appealed to Froude. He once playfully compared himself with the Mephistopheles of Faust, sitting in the Professor's chair. But in truth he saw always behind historical events the directing providence of God. Newman held that no belief could stand against the destructive force of the human reason, the intellectus sibi permissus. Froude felt that there were things which reason could not explain, and that no revelation was needed to trace the limits of knowledge. Sceptical as he was in many ways, he had the belief which is fundamental, which no scientific discovery or philosophic speculation can shake or move. Creeds and Churches might come or go. The moral law remained where it was. His own creed is expressed in that which he attributes to Luther. "The faith which Luther himself would have described as the faith that saved is the faith that beyond all things and always truth is the most precious of possessions, and truthfulness the most precious of qualities; that when truth calls, whatever the consequence, a brave man is bound to follow."*

— * Short Studies, iii. 189. —

Although Froude was probably happier at Oxford than he had been at any time since 1874, the regulations of his professorship worried him, as they had worried Stubbs and Freeman. They seemed to have been drawn on the assumption that a Professor would evade his duties, and behave like an idle undergraduate. Froude, on the contrary, interpreted them in the sense most adverse to himself. The authorities of the place, or some of them, would have had him spare his pains, and colourably evade the statute by talking instead of lecturing. But Froude was too conscientious to seek relief in this way. Whatever he had to do he did thoroughly, conscientiously, and as well as he could. There is no trace of senility in his professorial utterances. On the contrary, they are full of life and fire. Yet Froude was by no means entirely engrossed in his work. He had time for hospitality, and for making friends with young men. He loved his familiar surroundings, for nothing can vulgarise Oxford. He found men who still read the classics as literature, not to convict Aeschylus of violating Dawes's Canon, or to get loafers through the schools. He was not in all respects, it must be admitted, abreast of modern thought. His education had been unscientific, and he cared no more for Darwin than Carlyle did. He had learnt from his brother William, who died in 1879,* the scope and tendency of modern experiments, and astronomical illustrations are not uncommon in his writings. But the bent of his mind was in other directions, and he had never been under the influence of Spencer or of Mill. The Oxford which he left in 1849 was dominated by Aristotle and Bishop Butler. He came back to find Butler dethroned, and more modern philosophers established in his place. Aristotle remained where he was, not the type and symbol of universal knowledge, as Dante conceived him, but the groundwork upon which all later systems had been built. Plato, without whom there would have been no Aristotle, was more closely and reverently studied than ever, partly no doubt through Jowett, and yet mainly because no philosopher can ever get far away from him. Jowett himself, the ideal "Head of a House," who had been at Balliol when Froude was at Oriel, died in the second year of Froude's professorship, after seeing many of his pupils famous in the world. He had lived through the great period of transition in which Oxford passed from a monastery to a microcosm. The Act of 1854 had opened the University to Dissenters, reserving fellowships and scholarships, all places of honour and emolument, for members of the Established Church. The Act of 1871 removed the test of churchmanship for all such places, and for the higher degrees, except theological professorships and degrees in divinity. The Act of 1877 opened the Headships of the Colleges, and put an end to prize Fellowships for life. The Provost of Oriel, then Vice- Chancellor, was a layman. Marriage did not terminate a Fellowship, which, unless it were connected with academic work, lasted for seven years, and no longer. The old collegiate existence was at an end. Many of the tutors were married, and lived in their own houses. When Gladstone revisited Oxford in 1890, and occupied rooms in college as an Honorary Fellow of All Souls, nothing pleased him less than the number of women he encountered at every turn. They were not all the wives and daughters of the dons, who in Gladstone's view had no more right to such appendages than priests of the Roman Church; there were also the students at the Ladies' Colleges, who were allowed to compete for honours, though not to receive degrees.

— * "My brother," Froude wrote to Lady Derby, "though his name was little before the public, was well known to the Admiralty and indeed in every dock-yard in Europe. He has contributed more than any man of his time to the scientific understanding of ships and shipbuilding. His inner life was still more remarkable. He resisted the influence of Newman when all the rest of his family gave way, refusing to become a Catholic when they went over, and keeping steadily to his own honest convictions. To me he was ever the most affectionate of friends. The earliest recollections of my life are bound up with him, and his death takes away a large past of the little interest which remained to me in this most uninteresting world. The loss to the Admiralty for the special work in which he was engaged will be almost irreparable." —

Froude, who brought his own daughters with him, entered easily into the changed conditions. He was not given to lamentation over the past, and if he regretted anything it was the want of Puritan earnestness, of serious purpose in life. He had an instinctive sympathy with men of action, whether they were soldiers, sailors, or statesmen. For mere talkers he had no respect at all, and he was under the mistaken impression that they governed the country through the House of Commons. He never realised, any more than Carlyle, the vast amount of practical administrative work which such a man as Gladstone achieved, or on the other hand the immense weight carried in Parliament by practical ability and experience, as distinguished from brilliancy and rhetoric. The history which he liked, and to which he confined himself, was antecedent to the triumph of Parliament over the Crown. Warren Hastings, he used to say, conquered India; Burke would have hanged him for doing it. The House of Lords acquitted Hastings; and so far from criticising the doubtful policy of the war with France in 1793, Burke's only complaint of Pitt was that he did not carry it on with sufficient vigour. The distinction between talkers and doers is really fallacious. Some speeches are actions. Some actions are too trivial to deserve the name. But if Froude was incapable of understanding Parliamentary government, he very seldom attempted to deal with it. The English in Ireland is a rare and not a fortunate, exception. The House of Tudor was far more congenial to him than either the House of Stuart or the House of Brunswick.

Froude delivered his Inaugural Lecture on the 27th of October, 1892. The place was the Museum, which stands in the parks opposite Keble, and the attendance was very large. In the history of Oxford there have been few more remarkable occasions. Although the new Professor had made his name and writings familiar to the whole of the educated world, his immediate predecessor had vehemently denied his right to the name of historian, and had assured the public with all the emphasis which reiteration can give that Froude could not distinguish falsehood from truth. If anything could have brought Freeman out of his grave, it would have been Froude's appointment to succeed him. It is the custom in an Inaugural Lecture to mention in eulogistic language the late occupant of the chair. No man was less inclined to bear malice than Froude. His disposition was placable, and his temperament calm. Freeman had grossly and frequently insulted him without the faintest provocation. But he had long since taken his revenge, such as it was, and he could afford to be generous now. He discovered, with some ingenuity, a point of agreement in that Freeman, like himself, was a champion of classical education. Therefore, "along with his asperities," he had "strong masculine sense," and had voted for compulsory Greek. If the right of suffrage were restricted to men who knew Greek as well as Froude or Freeman, the decisions of Congregation at Oxford, and of the Senate at Cambridge, would command more respect.

Froude must have been reminded by the obligatory reference to Freeman that a man of seventy-four was succeeding a man of sixty- nine. The Roman Cardinals were, he said, in the habit of electing an aged Pontiff with the hope, not always fulfilled, that he would die soon. He had no belief that such an expectation would be falsified in his own case, and he undertook, with obvious sincerity, not to hold the post for a single day after he had ceased to be capable of efficiently discharging his functions. To history his own life had been devoted, and it would indeed have been strange if he could not give young men some help in reading it. His own great book might not be officially recommended for the schools. It was unofficially recommended by all lovers of good literature and sound learning. Like most people who know the meaning of science and of history, he denied that history was a science. There were no fixed and ascertained principles by which the actions of men were determined. There was no possibility of trying experiments. The late Mr. Buckle had not displaced the methods of the older historians, nor founded a system of his own. "I have no philosophy of history," added Froude, who disbelieved in the universal applicability of general truths. Here, perhaps, he is hardly just to himself. The introductory chapter to his History of the Reformation, especially the impressive contrast between modern and mediaeval England, is essentially philosophical, so much so that one sees in it the student of Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon. History to Froude, like the world to Jaques, was a stage, and all the men and women merely players. But a lover of Goethe knows well enough that the drama can be philosophical, and Shakespeare, the master of human nature, has drawn nothing more impressive than the close of Wolsey's career. "The history of mankind is the history of great men," was Carlyle's motto, and Froude's. It is a noble one, and to discredit great men with low motives is the vice of ignoble minds. The reign of Henry VIII., after Wolsey's fall, was rich in horrors and in tragical catastrophes. But it was not a mere carnival of lust and blood. High principles were at stake, and profound issues divided parties, beside which the levity of Anne Boleyn and the eyes of Jane Seymour were not worth a moment's thought. Hobbes wondered that a Parliament man worth thousands of pounds, like Hampden, to pay twenty shillings for ship-money, as if the amount had anything to do with the principle that taxes could only be levied by the House of Commons. Henry's vices are dust in the balance against the fact that he stood for England against Rome. It is one of Froude's chief merits that he never fails to see the wood for the trees, never forgets general propositions to lose himself in details. A novice whose own mind is a blank may read whole chapters of Gardiner without discovering that any events of much significance happened in the seventeenth century. He will not read many pages of Froude before he perceives that the sixteenth century established our national independence.

Two of Froude's pet hobbies may be found in his Inaugural Lecture. There is the theory that judgment falls upon idleness and vice, which he adopted from Carlyle. There is his own doctrine that the Statute Book furnishes the most authentic material of history. It is no answer to say that preambles are inserted by Ministers, who put their own case and not the case of the nation. In the use or reception of all evidence allowance must be made for the source from which it comes. But even Governments do not invent out of their own heads, or put into statutes what is foreign to the public mind. They employ the arguments most likely to prevail, and these must be closely connected with the circumstances of the day. No recital in an Act of parliament can prove incontestably that the monasteries were stews, or worse. That such a thing could be plausibly alleged, and generally believed, is itself important, and history must take account of popular views. Debates were not reported in the sixteenth century, nor was freedom of speech in Parliament recognised by the Crown. There was nothing to ensure a fair trial for the victims of a royal prosecution, and testimony obtained by torture was accepted as authentic. All these are facts, and to neglect them is to go astray. But they do not prove that every public document is untrustworthy; or that the words of a statute have no more to do with reality than the words of a romance. It is a question of degree. Historical narrative could not be written under the conditions most properly imposed upon criminal proceedings in a court of law. If nothing which cannot be proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt is admitted into the pages of history, they will be bare indeed. It is significant that Froude laid down in 1892 the same propositions for which he had contended in the Oxford Essays of 1855. He had suffered many things in the meantime of The Saturday Review, but he held to his old opinions with unshaken tenacity. All Froude's changes were made early in life. When once he had shaken himself free of Tractarianism, The Nemesis of Faith, and Elective Affinities, he remained a Protestant, Puritan, sea-loving, priest-hating Englishman.

The subject with which Froude began his brief career as Professor was the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent has been described by one of the great historians of the world, Fra Paolo Sarpi, whom Macaulay considered second only to Thucydides. Entirely ineffective for the purpose of securing universal concord, it did in reality separate Protestant from Catholic Europe, and establish Papal authority over the Church of Rome. When the Council met, the Papacy was no part of orthodox Catholicism, and Henry VIII. never dreamt that in repudiating the jurisdiction of the Pope he severed himself from the Catholic Church. If Luther had been only a heretic, the Council might have put him down. But he had behind him the bulk of the laity, and Cardinal Contarini told Paul III. that the revolt against ecclesiastical power would continue if every priest submitted. "The Reformation," said Froude at the beginning of his first course, in November, 1892, "is the hinge on which all modern history turns." He traced in it the rise of England's greatness. When he came back in his old age to Oxford, it was to sound the trumpet-note of private judgment and religious liberty, as if the Oxford Movement and the Anglo-Catholic revival had never been. Froude could not be indifferent to the moral side of historical questions, or accept the doctrine that every one is right from his own point of view. The Reformation did in his eyes determine that men were responsible to God alone, and not to priests or Churches, for their opinions and their deeds. It also decided that the Church must be subordinate to the State, not the State to the Church. This is called Erastianism, and is the bugbear of High Churchmen. But there is no escape from the alternative, and the Church of Rome has never abandoned her claim to universal authority. Against it Henry VIII. and Cromwell, Elizabeth and Cecil, set up the supremacy of the law, made and administered by laymen. As Froude said at the close of his first course, in the Hilary Term of 1893, "the principles on which the laity insisted have become the rule of the modern Popes no longer depose Princes, dispense with oaths, or absolve subjects from their allegiance. Appeals are not any more carried to Rome from the national tribunals, nor justice sold there to the highest bidder." Justice was sold at Rome before the existence of the Catholic Church, or even the Christian religion. It has been sold, as Hugh Latimer testified, in England herself. But with the English Court's independence of the Holy See came the principles of civil and religious freedom.

Few things annoyed Froude more than the attacks of Macaulay and other Liberals on Cranmer. This was not merely sentimental attachment on Froude's part to the compiler of the Prayer Book. He looked on the Marian Martyrs as the precursors of the Long Parliament and of the Revolution, the champions of liberty in church and State. He would have felt that he was doing less than his duty if he had taught his pupils mere facts. Those facts had a lesson, for them as well as for him, and his sense of what the lesson was had deepened with years. He had observed in his own day an event which made much the same impression upon him as study of the French Revolution had made upon Carlyle. When the Second Empire perished at Sedan, Froude saw in the catastrophe the judgment of Providence upon a sinister and tortuous career. If the duty of an historian be to exclude moral considerations, Froude did not fulfil it. That there were good men on the wrong side he perceived plainly enough. But that did not make it the right side, nor confuse the difference between the two.

Froude's second set of Oxford lectures, begun in the Easter Term of 1893, was entitled English Seamen of the Sixteenth Century, and the name of the first lecture in it, a thoroughly characteristic name, was The Sea Cradle of the Reformation. He was in his element, and his success was complete. How Protestant England ousted Catholic Spain from the command of the ocean, and made it Britannia's realm, was a story which he loved to tell. "The young King," Henry VIII., "like a wise man, turned his first attention to the broad ditch, as he called the British Channel, which formed the natural defence of the kingdom." It was "the secret determined policy of Spain to destroy the English fleet, pilots, masters, and sailors, by means of the Inquisition." In 1562, according to Cecil, more than twenty British subjects had been burnt at the stake in Spain for heresy, and more than two hundred were starving in Spanish prisons. There was work for Hawkins and Drake. They were both Devonshire men, like Raleigh.

'Twas ever the way with good Queen Bess, Who ruled as well as a mortal can, When she was stogged, and the country in a mess, To send for a Devonshire man.

Spain paid heavily for the persecution of British sailors. In his fifth lecture, Parties in the State, Froude read with dramatic emphasis, and in a singularly impressive manner, the application of a seaman to Elizabeth for leave to attack Philip's men-of-war off the banks of Newfoundland. "Give me five vessels, and I will go out and sink them all, and the galleons shall rot in Cadiz Harbour for want of hands to sail them. But decide, Madam, and decide quickly. Time flies, and will not return. The wings of man's life are plumed with the feathers of death." When he uttered these tragic words, Froude paused, and looked up, and it seemed to those who heard him as if he felt that the time of his own departure was at hand. Elizabeth herself was never moved by sentiment, and final vengeance on Spain had to wait for the Armada, with which these lectures, like the History, conclude. The consequences he left to others who had more years before them than he himself. He loved to dwell on the glories of seamen, especially Devonshire seamen, whose descendants he had known from his boyhood. The open sea and the open air, the stars and the waves, were akin to him. His companions sometimes thought that he cared too little for the perils of the deep. A lady who went boating with him, and hazarded the opinion that they would be drowned, got no warmer comfort than "Very likely," which struck her as grim. Probably he knew that there was no danger. He was accustomed to storms, and rather enjoyed them than otherwise. His lectures on the Elizabethan heroes of the sea had a fascination for young Englishmen which no historical discourses ever surpassed.

These sea-tales were spread over a year, being delivered in the Easter Terms of 1893 and 1894. Before they were finished Froude had begun another course on the life and correspondence of Erasmus. Erasmus is one of the choicest names in the history of letters, the flower of the religious Renaissance. Simply and sincerely pious, he enjoyed without abusing all the pleasures of life, wrote such Latin prose as had not been known since Pliny, and learnt Greek that he might understand the true meaning of the New Testament. Hating the monks of his own time for their ignorance and coarseness, he was as learned as any Benedictine of old, and as a master of irony he is like a gentler Pascal, a more reverent Voltaire. He loved England, the England of Archbishop Warham, Dean Colet, and Sir Thomas More. English ladies too were much to his taste, and in his familiar letters he has described their charms with frank appreciation. Priest as he was, and strictly moral, he cultivated an innocent epicureanism, including the collection of manuscripts and the exposure of pretentious ignorance in high places. He felt imperfect sympathy with Luther, and his literary criticism would have made no reformation. He was indeed precisely what we now call a Broad Churchman, accepting forms as convenient, though not essential, to faith. No one was better qualified to interpret him than Froude, whose translations of his letters, though free and sometimes loose, are vivid, racy, and idiomatic. Froude was by no means a blind admirer of Erasmus. His favourite heroes were men of action, and he regarded Luther as the real champion of spiritual freedom.

Intellect, he used to say, fought no battles, and was no match for superstition. Without Luther there would have been no Reformation. There might well have been a Reformation without Erasmus.

Neither of them was necessary according to Contarini, and in truth the Reformation had many sides. When Selden attended the Westminster Assembly of Divines, he took occasion to remind his colleagues that the Scriptures were not written in English. "Perhaps in your little pocket Bibles with gilt leaves" (which they would often pull out and read) "the translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew signifies thus and thus." So he would speak, says Whitelock, and totally silence them. But neither were the Scriptures written in Latin. It was Erasmus who revived the study of the Greek Testament, the charter of the scholar's reformation. He gave the Renaissance, in its origin purely Pagan, a Christian direction, and prevented the divorce of learning from religion. He also protested against the confusion of Christianity with asceticism, and against belief in the superior sanctity of monks. He turned his satire upon corruption in high places, and did not spare the Holy See. His residence in England, his friendship with More, his admiration for the earlier and better part of Henry VIII.'s career, connected him with events of which Froude had Himself traced the development. Luther moved him sometimes to sarcasm. Toleration and comprehension were the watchwords of Erasmus. "Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed," he said, "to the smallest possible number; you can do it without danger to the realities of Christianity. On other points, either discourage inquiry, or leave every one to believe what he pleases- then we shall have no more quarrels, and religion will again take hold of life." The subject was not a new one to Froude. He had lectured on Erasmus and Luther at Newcastle five-and-twenty years before. The contrast between the two reformers is perennially interesting. Goethe, a supreme critic, thought that reform of the Church should have been left to Erasmus, and that Luther was a misfortune.

But then Goethe, though he understood religious enthusiasm, did not see the need for it, and would have tolerated such a Pope as Leo X., who had excellent taste in literature, rather than see issues submitted to the people which should be left for the learned to decide.

The weak point of Froude's Erasmus is the inaccuracy of its verbal scholarship. "Sir," said Dr. Johnson of a loose scholar, "he makes out the Latin from the meaning, not the meaning from the Latin." This biting sarcasm would be inapplicable to Froude, who knew the dead languages, as they are called, well enough to read them with ease and enjoyment. But he took in the general sense of a passage so quickly that he did not always, even in translating, stop to consider the precise significance of every word. Literal conformity with the original text is of course not possible or desirable in a paraphrase. What Froude did not sufficiently consider was the difference between the translation and the translator himself, who cannot paraphrase properly unless he renders literally in his own mind. Froude gave abundant proof of his good faith by quoting in notes some of the very passages which are incorrectly rendered above. A great deal has been made by a Catholic critic of the fact that the book which checked Ignatius Loyola's "devotional emotions" was not Erasmus's Greek Testament, but his Enchiridion Militis Christiani, Christian Soldier's Manual. This mistake was unduly favourable to the saint. Froude did not mean to imply that it was the actual words of Scripture which had this effect upon Ignatius. He was referring to the great scholar's own notes, which are polemical, and not intended to please monks. The founder of the Jesuits would have doubtless regarded them as most detestable blasphemy. The Enchiridion, on the other hand, is a purely devotional book, though written for a man of the world.

"My object," says Froude in his Preface, "has been rather to lead historical students to a study of Erasmus's own writings than to provide an abbreviated substitute for them." The students who took the advice will have found that Froude was guilty of some strange inadvertences, such as mistaking through a misprint a foster brother for a collection of the classics, but they will not have discovered anything which substantially impairs the value of his work. His paraphrases were submitted to two competent scholars, who drew up a long and rather formidable list of apparently inaccurate renderings. These were in turn submitted to the accomplished Latinist, Mr. Allen of Corpus, who is editing the Letters of Erasmus for the Clarendon Press. Mr. Allen thought that in several cases Froude had given the true meaning better than a more literal translation would give it. There remain a number of rather trivial slips, which do not appreciably diminish the merit of the best attempt ever made to set Erasmus before English readers in his habit as he was. The Latin of Erasmus is not always easy. He wrote it beautifully, but not naturally, as an exercise in imitation of Cicero. Without a thorough knowledge of Cicero and of Terence he is sometimes unintelligible, in a few cases the text of his letters is corrupt, and in others his real meaning is doubtful. One of the most glaring blunders, "idol" for "old," is obviously due to the printer, and a more careful comparison with the Latin would have easily removed them all. But at seventy-six a little laxity may be pardoned, and these were the only Oxford lectures which Froude himself prepared for the press. The publication of English Seamen and the Council of Trent was posthumous.

Between 1867 and 1893 Froude had become more favourable to Erasmus, or more sympathetic with his point of view. It was not that he admired Luther less. On the contrary, his Protestant convictions grew stronger with years, and to the last he raised his voice against the Anglo-Catholic revival. But he seemed to feel with more force the saying of Erasmus that "the sum of religion is peace." He translated and read out to his class the whole of the satiric dialogue held at the gate of Paradise between St. Peter and Julius II., in which the wars of that Pontiff are ruthlessly flagellated, and the wicked old man threatens to take the celestial city by storm. Erasmus, averse as he was from violent measures, had no lack of courage, and in his own name he told the truth about the most dignified ecclesiastics. 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. A Protestant he never became. He lived and died in communion with Rome, denounced by monks as a heretic, and by Lutherans as a time-server. Paul III. Would have made him a Cardinal if his means had sufficed for a Prince of the Church. Standing between the two extremes, he saw better than any of his contemporaries the real proportions of things, and Froude's last words on the subject were that students would be most likely to understand the Reformation if they looked at it with the eyes of Erasmus. Small faults notwithstanding, there is no one who has drawn a more vivid, or a more faithful, portrait of Erasmus than Anthony Froude.

Of Froude in his Oxford Chair it may fairly be said that in a short time he fulfilled a long time, and made more impression upon the under-graduates in a few months than Stubbs had made in as many years. It was not so much the love of learning that he inspired, though the range of his studies was wide, as enthusiasm for history because it was the history of England. His subjects were really English. Erasmus knew England thoroughly, and would have been an Englishman if he could. The Council of Trent failed to check the Reformation, and England without the Reformation would have been a different country, if not a province of Spain. Froude's lectures were events, landmarks in the intellectual life of Oxford, and the young men who came to him for advice went away not merely with dry facts, but with fructifying ideas. Distasteful as modern Parliamentary politics were to him, the position of the British Empire in the world was the dominant fact in his mind, and he regarded Oxford as a training-ground of imperial statesmanship.

He was not made to run in harness, or to act as a coach for the schools. "The teaching business at Oxford," he wrote to Skelton, after his last term, "goes at high pressure—in itself utterly absurd, and unsuited altogether to an old stager like myself. The undergraduates come about me in large numbers, and I have asserted in some sense my own freedom; but one cannot escape the tyranny of the system."* This is severe, though not perhaps severer than the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Firth. To a critic from the outside it seems that Boards of Studies should have power to relax their own rules, and that the utmost possible relaxation should have been granted in the case of Froude. A famous historian of seventy-four, if qualified to be a Professor at all, must be capable of managing his own work so that it may be most useful and efficient. The restrictions of which Froude, not alone, complained are really incompatible with Regius Professorships, or at least with the patronage of the Crown. They imply that the teaching branch of the University is to be entirely controlled by expert specialists on the spot. A Regius Professor is a national institution, a public man, not like a college tutor, who has purely local functions to discharge. That is a point on which Freeman would have agreed with Froude, and Stubbs would have agreed with both of them. Froude's success in spite of limitations does not show that they were wise, but that genius surmounts obstacles and breaks the barriers which seek to impede it. "To my sorrow I am popular," he said, "and my room is crowded. I know not who they are, and have no means of knowing. So it is not satisfactory. I must alter things somehow.

— * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 222. —

I can't yet tell how." The opportunity never came. But he was too old and too wise a man to let such things affect his happiness, and he was happier in Oxford than in London. "Some of the old Dons," he wrote, "have been rather touchingly kind."

There was indeed only one chance of escaping Froude's magnetism, and that was to keep out of his way. The charm of his company was always irresistible. Different as the Oxford of 1893 was from the Oxford of 1843, young men are always the same, and Froude thoroughly understood them. He had enjoyed himself at Oriel not as a reading recluse, but as a boy out of school, and he was as young in heart as ever. Strange is the hold that Oxford lays upon men, and not less strong than strange. Nothing weakens it; neither time, nor distance, nor success, nor failure, nor the revolution of opinion, nor the deaths of friends. Oxford had been unjust to Froude, and had driven out one of her most illustrious sons in something like disgrace. Yet he never wavered in his affection for her, and the many vicissitudes of his life he came back to Oriel with the spirits of a boy. The spells of Oxford, like the spells of Medea, disperse the weight of years.



CHAPTER XI

THE END

He lectures on Erasmus were not public; they were delivered in Froude's private house at Cherwell Edge, and attended only by members of the University reading for the Modern History School. His public lectures on the Council of Trent and on English seamen had been so much crowded by men and women, young and old, that candidates for honours in history were scarcely able to find room. Nothing could be more honourable to Froude, or to Oxford, than his enthusiastic reception by his old University at the close of his brilliant and laborious career. But it was too much for him. Like Voltaire in Paris, he was stifled with flowers. His twentieth discourse on Erasmus begins with the pathetic sentence, "This will be my last lecture, for the life of Erasmus was drawing to an end." So was his own. His final task in this world was the preparation of Erasmus for the press. He had been all his life accustomed to work at his own time, and the strain of living by rule at Oxford had told upon him more than he knew. Before the end of the summer term in 1894 he left Oxford for Devonshire, worn out and broken down. "Education," he wrote in his last letter to Skelton, "like so much else in these days, has gone mad, and has turned into a large examination mill." He was so much exhausted that he could not go again to Norway with Lord Ducie,* though with characteristic pluck he half thought of paying another visit to Sir George Grey in New Zealand. But it was not to be. During the summer his strength failed, and it became known that the disorder was incurable. With philosophic calmness he awaited the inevitable close, feeling, as he had always felt, that he was in the hands of God. His religion, very deep, constant, and genuine, was not a spiritual emotion, nor a dogmatic creed, but a calm and steady confidence that, whatever weak mortals might do, the Judge of all the earth would do right. "It is impossible," said Emerson, whom he loved and admired, "for a man not to be always praying." The relations of such men with the unseen are an inseparable part of their daily lives. Froude had no more sympathy with the self-complacent "agnosticism" of modern thought than he had with Catholic authority or ecstatic revivalism. To fear God and to keep His commandments was with him the whole duty of man. The materialistic hypothesis he rejected as incredible, explaining nothing, meaning nothing, a presumptuous attempt to put ignorance in the place of knowledge.

— * "Ducie wanted me to go to Norway with him, salmon-fishing; but I didn't feel that I could do justice to the opportunity. In the debased state to which I am reduced, if I hooked a thirty-pound salmon, I should only pray him to get off."—Table Talk of Shirley, pp. 222, 223. —

His soul had always dwelt apart. His early training did not encourage spiritual sympathy, and, except in his books, he habitually kept silence on ultimate things. But he had always thought of them; and as he lay dying, in almost the last moments of consciousness, he repeated dearly to himself those great, those superhuman lines which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Macbeth between his wife's death and his own.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle; Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more.

Still later he murmured, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

He died on the 20th of October, 1894, and was buried at Salcombe in his beloved Devonshire not far from his beloved sea. He "made his everlasting mansion upon the beached verge of the salt flood." By his own particular desire he was described on his tombstone as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, so deeply did he feel the complete though tardy recognition of the place he had made for himself among English historians. Otherwise he was the most unassuming of men, simple and natural in manner, never putting himself forward, patient under the most hostile criticism which did not impugn his personal veracity. Although the malice of Freeman did once provoke him to a retort the more deadly because it was restrained, he suffered in silence all the detraction which followed the reminiscences and the biography of Carlyle. His temper was singularly placable, and he bore no malice. His father and his eldest brother had not treated him wisely or kindly. But neither of Hurrell Froude nor of the Archdeacon did he ever speak except with admiration and respect. His early training hardened him, and perhaps accounts for the indifference to cruelty which sometimes disfigures his pages. He did not know what a mother's affection was before he had a wife and children of his own. Before he became an honour to his family he was regarded as a disgrace to it, and not until the first two volumes of the History appeared did his father believe that there was any good in him. Yet the Archdeacon was always his ideal clergyman, and the Church of England as it stood before the Oxford Movement was his model communion. With the Evangelical party, represented to him by his Irish friend, Mr. Cleaver, he had sympathetic relations, and practical, though not doctrinal, agreement. His temporary leaning towards Tractarianism was no more than personal admiration for Newman, and he took orders not because he was a High Churchman, but because he was a Fellow. Yet it was in some respects a fortunate accident, which, by shutting him out from other professions, drove him into literature. Fiction he soon learned to avoid, for his early experiments in it were failures, and in later years his least successful book, with all its eloquence, was The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. As an historical writer he has few superiors, and his essays are among the most delightful in our tongue. To analyse his style is as difficult as not to feel the charm of it. It is as smooth as the motion of a ship sailing on a calm sea, and yet it is never fiat nor tame.

Although Froude, like Newman, belonged to the Oriel school, he has a spirit which is not of any school, which breathes from the wide ocean and the liquid air. He wrote, for all his scholarly grace, like a man of flesh and blood, not a pedant nor a doctrinaire. Impartial he never was, nor pretended to be. Dramatic he could not help being, and yet his own opinions were seldom concealed. Three or four main propositions were at the root of his mind. He held the Reformation to be the greatest and most beneficent change in modern history. He believed the English race to be the finest in the world. He disbelieved in equality, and in Parliamentary government. Essentially an aristocrat in the proper sense of the term, he cherished the doctrine of submission to a few fit persons, qualified for authority by training and experience. These ideas run through all Froude's historical writing, which takes from them its trend and colour. Whatever else the male Tudors may have been, they were emphatically men; and even Elizabeth, whom Froude did not love, had a commanding spirit. Except poor priest-ridden Mary, who had a Spanish mother and a Spanish husband, they did not brook control, and no one was ever more conscious of being a king than Henry VIII. To him, as to Elizabeth, the Reformation was not dogmatic but practical, the subjection of the Church to the State. The struggle between Pope and sovereign had to be fought out before the struggle between sovereign and Parliament could begin.

Liberals thought that Froude would not have been on the side of the Parliament, and they joined High Churchmen in attacking him. Spiritual and democratic power were to him equally obnoxious. He delighted in Plato's simile of the ship, where the majority are nothing, and the captain rules. His opinions were not popular, except his dislike for the Church of Rome. He is read partly for his exquisite diction, and partly for the patriotic fervour with which he rejoices in the achievements of England, especially on sea.

Rossetti's fine burden:

Lands are swayed by a king on a throne, The sea hath no king but God alone:

might be a motto for the title-page of Froude. The fallacy that brilliant writers are superficial accounts for much of the prejudice in academic circles against which Froude had to contend. To him of all men it was inapplicable, for no historian studied original documents with greater zest. That he did not know his period nobody could pretend. He knew it so much better than his critics that few of them could even criticise him intelligently. That he was not thoroughly acquainted with the periods preceding his own may be more plausibly argued. There must of course be some limit. The siege of Troy can be told without mention of Leda's egg. But if Froude had given a little more time to Henry VII., and all that followed the Battle of Bosworth, he would have approached the fall of Wolsey and the rise of Cromwell with a more thorough understanding of cause and effect. His mind moved with great rapidity, and went so directly to the point that the circumstances were not always fully weighed. It is possible to see the truth too clearly, without allowance for drawbacks and qualifications. The important fact about Henry, for instance, is that he was a statesman who had to provide for a peaceful succession. But he was also a wilful, headstrong, arbitrary man, spoiled from his cradle by flatterers, and determined to have his own way. Froude saw the absurdity of the Blue-beard delusion, and did immense service in exposing it. He would have given no handle to his Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic enemies if he had acknowledged that there was an explanation of the error. He was sometimes carried away by his own eloquence, and his convictions grew stronger as he expressed them, until the facts on the other side looked so small that they were ignored.

History deals, and can only deal, with consequences and results. Motives and Intentions, however interesting, belong to another sphere. Henry and Cromwell, Mary and Pole, Elizabeth and Cecil, are tried in Froude's pages by the simple test of what they did, or failed to do, for England. Froude detested and despised the cosmopolitan philosophy which regards patriotic sentiment as a relic of barbarism. He was not merely an historian of England, but also an English historian; and holding Fisher to be a traitor, he did not hesitate to justify the execution of a pious, even saintly man. Fisher would no doubt have said that it was far more important to preserve the Catholic faith in England than to keep England independent of Spain. Froude would have replied that unless the nation punished those who sought for the aid of Spanish troops against their own countrymen, she would soon cease to be a nation at all. His critics evaded the point, and took refuge in talk about bloody tyrants wreaking vengeance upon harmless old men.

If patriotism be not a disqualification for an historian, Froude had none. Like every other writer, he made mistakes. But he was laborious in research, a master of narrative, with a genius for seizing dramatic points. Above all, he had imagination, without which the vastest knowledge is as a ship without sails, or a bird without wings. His objects, even his prejudices, were frankly avowed, and his prejudices gave way to fresh facts or reasons. The records at Simancas, for instance, completely changed, and changed for the worse, his estimate of Queen Elizabeth's character, and he admitted it at once with his transparent candour. To defend Froude against mendacity seems like an insult to his memory, for if he loved anything it was truth, though he sometimes spoke in a cynical way about the difficulty of attaining it. But such monstrous charges were made against him when he could no longer reply for himself that I may be forgiven for quoting an authority which will command general respect. Mr. Andrew Lang is as scrupulously accurate in statement as he is brilliantly felicitous in style. He has studied the history of the sixteenth century, especially in Scotland, and he disagrees with Froude on many, if not on most, of the points in dispute. Yet this is Mr. Lang's deliberate judgment:

"I have found Mr. Froude often in error; often, as I think, misunderstanding, misquoting, omitting and even adding, but I have never once seen reason to suspect him of conscious misrepresentation, of knowingly giving a false impression. ... It is easy to show that Mr. Froude erred contrary to his bias on occasion, and it must never be forgotten that he did what no consciously dishonest historian could possibly do. He deposited at the British Museum copies, in the original Spanish, of the documents, very difficult of access, which he used in his History. By aid of these transcripts, we can find him slipping into errors, and his action in presenting the country with the means of correcting his mistakes proves beyond doubt that he did not consciously make mistakes. There is no way in which this conclusion can be evaded. No historian was more honest than Mr. Froude, though few or none of his merit have been so fallible."

How many historians of his merit have there been? He had no contemporary rival in England, for Carlyle and Macaulay belonged to a previous generation. There was certainly no one living when Froude died who could have written the famous passage in the first chapter of his History about the decay of mediaevalism:

"For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still are hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone—like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English themselves a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedrals, only before the silent figures sleeping on the tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive, and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of the middle age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."

Although Froude cared little for music, the rhythm of his sentences is musical, and the organ-note of the opening words in the quotation carries a reminiscence of Tacitus which will not escape the classical reader. That is literary artifice, though a very high form of it. The real merit of the paragraph is not so much its eloquence as its insight into the depth of things. Many respectable historians see only the outward lineaments. Froude saw the nation's heart and soul. It was the same with the great man whose biographer Froude became. Carlyle's faults would have been impossible in a character mean or small. They were the defects of his qualities, those

Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,

which do not wait to appear till the last scene of life. Now that more than twenty years have passed since the final volumes of the Life were published, it may be said with confidence that Carlyle owes almost as much to Froude as to his own writings for his high and enduring fame. "Though the lives of the Carlyles were not happy," says Froude, "yet, if we look at them from the beginning to the end, they were grandly beautiful. Neither of them probably under other conditions would have risen to as high an excellence as in fact they each actually achieved; and the main question is not how happy men and women have been in this world, but what they have made of themselves."* The loftier a man's own view of mental conceptions and sublunary things, the more will he admire Carlyle as described by Froude. The same Carlyle who made a ridiculous fuss about trifles confronted the real evils and trials of life with a dignity, courage, and composure which inspire humble reverence rather than vulgar admiration. Froude rightly felt that Carlyle's petty grumbles, often most amusing, throw into bright and strong relief his splendid generosity to his kinsfolk, his manly pride in writing what was good instead of what was lucrative, his anxiety that Mill should not perceive what he lost in the first volume of The French Revolution. Whenever a crisis came, Carlyle stood the test. The greater the occasion, the better he behaved. One thing Froude did not give, and perhaps no biographer could. Carlyle was essentially a humourist. He laughed heartily at other people, and not less heartily at himself. When he was letting himself go, and indulging freely in the most lurid denunciations of all and sundry, he would give a peculiar and most significant chuckle which cannot be put into print. It was a warning not to take him literally, which has too often passed unheeded. He has been compared with Swift, but he was not really a misanthropist, and no man loved laughter more, or could excite more uproarious merriment in others. I remember a sober Scotsman, by no means addicted to frivolous merriment, telling me that he had come out of Carlyle's house in physical pain from continuous laughter at an imaginary dialogue between a missionary and a negro which Carlyle had conducted entirely himself.

— * Carlyle's Early Life, i. 381. —

Carlyle, it must be remembered, knew Froude's historical methods quite as well as he knew Froude. It was because he knew them, and approved of them, that he asked Froude to be the historian of Cheyne Row. Froude's devotion to him had indeed been singular. During the last decade of his life Carlyle was very feeble, and required constant care. He came to lean upon Froude more and more, requiring his company in walks, and even in omnibuses, until Froude almost ceased to be his own master. The lecturing tour in the United States and the political visits to South Africa were permitted, because they were thought right. But Fraser's Magazine had to be given up, partly that employment might be found for a young man in whom Carlyle was interested, and the project for a new history of Charles V. was perforce abandoned. It has been said, though not by any one who knew the facts, that Froude profited in a pecuniary sense by exchanging history for biography. The exact opposite is the truth. From 1866 to 1869, the last years of his great book, Froude received from Messrs. Longman about fourteen hundred pounds a year, including his salary as editor of Fraser, which he relinquished at Carlyle's bidding. From 1877 to 1884 he did not receive more than seven hundred. Two volumes of history brought in about as much as three of biography, and there is no reason to suppose that Charles V. would have proved less popular than Henry VIII. or Elizabeth. Froude was unusually prosperous and successful as a man of letters, though it is of course impossible for the highest literary work to be adequately paid. He had to deal with liberal publishers, and after 1856 his position as a writer was assured. The idea that necessity drove him to fill his pockets at the expense of a dead friend's reputation is as preposterous in his case as it would have been in Lockhart's or Stanley's.

Had Froude been the cynic he is often called, he would have borne with callous indifference, as he did bear in dignified silence, the attacks made upon him for his revelations of Carlyle. But Froude was not what he seemed. Behind his stately presence, and lofty manner, and calmly audacious speech, there was a singularly sensitive nature. He would do what he thought right with perfect fearlessness, and without a moment's hesitation. When the consequences followed he was not always prepared for them, and people who were not worth thinking about could give him pain. Human beings are composite creatures, and the feminine element in man is more obvious than the masculine element in woman. Froude had a feminine disposition to be guided by feeling, and to remember old grievances as vividly as if they had happened the day before. He was also a typical west countryman in habit of mind, as well as in face, figure, and speech. His beautiful voice, exquisitely modulated, never raised in talk, was thoroughly Devonian. So too were his imperfect sense of the effect produced by what he said upon ordinary minds, and his love, which might almost be called mischievous, of giving small electric shocks. In the case of Carlyle, however, the out-cry was wholly unexpected, and for a time he was distressed, though never mastered, by it. What he could not understand, what it took him a long time to live down, was that friends who really knew him should believe him capable of baseness and treachery. Now that it is all over, that Froude's biography has taken its place in classical literature, and that Mrs. Carlyle's letters are acknowledged to be among the best in the language, the whole story appears like a nightmare. But it was real enough twenty years ago, when people who never read books of any kind thought that Froude was the name of the man that whitewashed Henry VIII. and blackened Carlyle. Froude would probably have been happier if he had turned upon his assailants once for all, as he once finally and decisively turned upon Freeman. Freeman, however, was an open enemy. A false friend is a more difficult person to dispose of, and even to deny the charge of deliberate treachery hardly consistent with self-respect. Long before Froude died the clamour against him had by all decent people been dropped. But he himself continued to feel the effect of it until he became Professor of History at Oxford. That rehabilitated him, where only he required it, in his own eyes. It was a public recognition by the country through the Prime Minister of the honour he had reflected upon Oxford since his virtual expulsion in 1849, and he felt himself again. From that time the whole incident was blotted from his mind, and he forgot that some of his friends had forgotten the meaning of friendship. The last two years of his life were indeed the fullest he had ever known. Forty-two lectures in two terms at the age of seventy-four are a serious undertaking. Happily he knew the sixteenth century so well that the process of refreshing his memory was rather a pleasure than a task, and he could have written good English in his sleep. Yet few even of his warmest admirers expected that in a year and a half he would compose three volumes which both for style and for substance are on a level with the best work of his prime. It was less surprising, and intensely characteristic, that his subjects should be the Reformation and the sea.

Froude's religious position is best stated in his own words, written when he was in South Africa, to a member of his family:

"I know by sad experience much of what is passing in your mind. Although my young days were chequered with much which I look back on with regret and shame, still I believe I always tried to learn what was true, and when I had found it to stick to it. The High Church theology was long attractive to me, but then I found, or thought I found, that it had no foundation, and indeed that very few of its professors in their heart of hearts believed what they were saying. Apostolic Succession, Sacramental Grace, and the rest of it, are very pretty, but are they facts? Is it a fact that any special mysterious power is communicated by a Bishop's hands? Is it a fact that a child's nature is changed by water and words—or that the bread when it is broken ceases to be bread? We cannot tell that it is not so, you say. But can we tell that it is so? and we ought to be able to tell before we believe it. All that fell away from me when I came in contact with the Cleavers and their friends. Their views never commended themselves to me wholly; but at least they were spiritual and not material. And election is a fact, although they express it oddly—and so is reprobation—and so is what they say of free will, and so is conversion. It is true that we bring natures into the world which are moulded by circumstances and by their own tendencies, as clay in the hands of the potter. Look round you and see that some are made for honour and some for dishonour. So far I agree with the Evangelicals still, and I agree too with them that if what they call faith—that is, a distinct conviction of sin, a resolution to say to oneself "Sammy, my boy, this won't do,"* a perception and love for what is right and good, and a loathing of the old self—can be put into one, and by the grace of God we see that it can be and is—the whole nature is changed, is what we call regenerated. This is certain—and it is to me certain also that the world and we who live in it, with all these mysterious conditions of our being, are no creation of accident or blind law. We were created for purposes unknown to us by Almighty God, who is using us and training us for His own objects—objects wholly unconceivable by us, but nevertheless which we know to exist, for Intelligence never works but for an end.

— * The reference is to Thackeray's story of a hairdresser named Samuel, who remarked, "Mr. Thackeray, there comes a time in the life of every man when he says to himself, 'Sammy, my boy, this won't do.'" The story was an especial favourite of Froude's. —

"Of other things which are popularly called religion, I have my opinion positive and negative. But religion to me is not opinion it is certainty. I cannot govern my actions or guide my deepest convictions by probabilities. The laws which we are to obey and the obligations to obey them are part of my being of which I am as sure as that I am alive. The things to argue about are by their nature uncertain, and therefore it is to me inconceivable that in them can lie Religion. I cannot tell whether these thoughts will be of any help to you. But it is better, in my judgment, to remain a proselyte of the gate—resolute to remain there till one receives a genuine conviction of some truths beyond—than for imagined relief from the pain of suspense to take up by an act of will a complete system of belief, Catholic or Calvinistic, and insist to one's own soul that it is, was, and shall be the whole and complete truth. Some people do this—deliberately blind their eyes, and because they never see again declare loudly that no one else can see. Other people, less happy, find by experience that they cannot believe what they have taken to in this way, and fly for a change to the next theory and then to the next. I remain for myself unconvinced of much which is generally called the essential part of things; but convinced with all my heart of what I regard as essential."

Froude made no secret of his religious opinions and they may be collected from his numerous books, especially perhaps from The Oxford Counter-Reformation. A curious paper, first published in 1879, called "A Siding at a Railway Station," is one of his most direct utterances on the subject. It will be found in the fourth series of Short Studies, and is in many respects the most remarkable of them all. "Some years' ago," it begins, "I was travelling by railway, no matter whence or whither." The railway is life, and the siding at which the train was suddenly stopped is the end that awaits all travellers through this world. The examination of the luggage is the judgment which will be passed upon all human actions hereafter. Wages received are placed on one side, and value to mankind of service rendered on the other. Naturally working men come out best. The worst show is made by idle and luxurious grandees. Authors occupy a middle position, and in Froude's own books "chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean as if no compositor had ever laboured in setting type for it. Pale and illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly prided myself. A few passages, however, survived here and there at long intervals. They were those on which I had laboured least and had almost forgotten, or those, as I observed in one or two instances, which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly journals." The hit at The Saturday Review is amusing enough, and Froude goes on to plead successfully that though he may have been ignorant, prejudiced, or careless, no charge of dishonesty could be established against him. Apart from his own personal case, the allegory means little more than the gospel of work which is the noblest part in the teaching of Carlyle. Titled personages come off badly, and the most ridiculous figure in the motley throng is an Archbishop. Not much sympathy is shown with any one, except with a widow who hopes to rejoin her husband, and sympathy is all that Froude can give her.

Of Froude's friendships much has been said. They were numerous, and drawn from very different classes. Beginning at Oxford, they increased rather than diminished throughout his life, notwithstanding the gaps which death inevitably and inexorably made. To one Fellow of Exeter who stood by him in his troubles, George Butler, afterwards Canon of Winchester, he remained always attached. Dean Stanley throughout life he loved, and another clerical friend, Cowley Powles. Of the many persons who felt Clough's early death as an irreparable calamity there was hardly one who felt it more than Froude. His affectionate reverence for Newman was proof against a mental and moral antagonism which could not be bridged. After Kingsley's death he wrote, from the Molt, to Mrs. Kingsley: "Dearest Fanny,—You tell me not to write, so I will say nothing beyond telling you how deeply I am affected by your thought of me. The old times are as fresh in my mind as in yours. You and Charles were the best and truest friends I ever had. We shall soon be all together again. God bless you now and in eternity.

"Your affectionate. J. A. FROUDE."

"Cowley Powles is here. It was he who first took me to Eversley."

It was when he came to London that Froude enlarged the circle of his friends, Carlyle being the greatest and the chief. Among the contributors to Fraser's Magazine those whom he knew best were the late Sir John Skelton, "Shirley," and the present Sir Theodore Martin, the biographer of the Prince Consort, whom some still prefer to associate with those delightful parodies, the Bon Gaultier Ballads. The enumeration of Froude's London acquaintances would be merely a social chronicle, with the supplement of some names, such as General Cluseret's, quite outside the ordinary groove. He could get on with any one, and he was interested in every one who had interesting qualities. After his second marriage his dinner-parties in Onslow Gardens were famous for their brilliancy and charm. His magnetic personality drew from people whatever they had, while his ease of manner made them feel at home. It was perhaps because he never pretended to know anything that only scholars realised how much he knew, and that he seemed to be not so much a man of letters as a man of the world. Of all the friends he made in later life there was not one that he valued more highly than Lord Wolseley. "I have been staying," he wrote to his daughter, from South Africa, "with Sir Garnet Wolseley and his brilliant staff. It was worth a voyage to South Africa to make so intimate an acquaintance with him." After his second return from the Cape, when his social life in London was taken up again, with his eldest daughter in her step- mother's place, there were added to the military and naval officers he had met, the Irish Protestants, who regarded him as their champion, and the wide circle of his ordinary associates, an Africander contingent, made up of all parties in that troubled area. There were, in fact, few phases of human life with which Froude was not familiar, from Devonshire fishermen to Cabinet Ministers. Although he knew and admired Mr. Chamberlain, his greatest political friends were Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby, with whom he almost invariably agreed. The man of science whom, after his own brother, he knew best, was Tyndall. Men of letters were familiar to him in every degree. Among the houses where he was a frequent and welcome guest were Knowsley, Highclere, Tortworth, and Castle Howard. In his own family there were troubles and bereavements. His eldest son, who died before him, gave him much trouble and anxiety. His second daughter died of consumption a few months after her stepmother, while he was in South Africa alone. Otherwise, his relations with his children were perfect and unbroken, for no father was more beloved and adored. Indeed, all intelligent children delighted in his company, because they could not help understanding him, and yet he paid them the acceptable compliment of talking to them as if they were grown up.

There is nothing in the world more evanescent than good conversation. Froude was one of the best and most agreeable talkers of his day. He could talk to old and young, to men, women, and children, to Devonshire seamen or labourers, to the most highly cultivated society of Oxford or London, with equal ease and equal enjoyment. He never tried to monopolise the conversation, and yet somehow the chief share fell naturally to him. If he were bored, he could be as silent as the grave. But when his interest was roused, and most things roused it, he always had something pointed and forcible to say. He was not always a sympathetic hearer. Once he sat between two extremely intellectual women who considered themselves leaders of advanced thought. When they left the room after dinner he turned to a friend of mine, and said simply, "I think all these bigots ought to be burnt." Such deplorable intolerance was happily rare. Less rare, perhaps, were his irresistible sense of the ludicrous and irrepressible tendency to sarcasm. Of a famous clergyman he said, "At least they have not put him into a bishop's apron, the emblem of our first parents' shame." "What can education do for a man," he once asked, "except enable him to tell a lie in five ways instead of one?" As a rule, Froude, like most good talkers, listened well, and responded readily. If he had not Carlyle's rich, exuberant humour, he was also without the prophet's leaning to dogmatism and anathema. Sardonic irony was his nearest approach to an offensive weapon, and even in that he was sparing. But he had a look which seemed to say, "Don't offer me any theories, or creeds, or speculations, for I have tried them all."

Perhaps I may be permitted in this connection to describe my one and only experience of Froude and his ways. It was after dinner, and the talk had fallen into the hands, or the mouth, of an eminent administrator, who seemed to be a pillar, a model of talent and virtue. His language was copious, his subject "schoolmaster Bishops," and the services they had rendered to the Church of England. Bishop Blomfield, for example, had procured the appointment of the Ecclesiastical Commission. There might, for aught we knew, be endless examples, and the prospect was appalling. The host was a Roman Catholic, and the guests were not ecclesiastical. Froude came to the rescue. In a gentle voice, and with the air of an anxious inquirer, he asked whether Dr. Blomfield had happened to acquaint the Commissioners with the nature and extent of his own emoluments. Then, without pausing for a reply, he added, still gently, "Because it always used to be said that there were only two persons who knew what the Bishop of London's income was; himself and the devil." The remark may not have been a new one. It was not offered as such, but it served its purpose, for the interrupted lecture was never resumed.

Froude's vast reading and his wide human experience enabled him to hold his own in any company, but he never paraded his knowledge, or lay in wait to trip people up. Although the prospect of going out worried him, and his first impulse was to refuse an invitation, he enjoyed society when he was in it, being neither vain nor shy. At Oxford he could not dine out. Late hours interfered with his work. But he was hospitable both to tutors and to undergraduates, liking to show himself at home in the old place. Except for the failure of his health, perhaps in spite of it, his enjoyment of his Oxford professorship was unmixed. He did not hold it long enough to feel the brevity of the generations which makes the real sadness of the place. Many ghosts he must have seen, but he had reached an age when men are prepared for them, and his academic career in the forties had come to such an unfortunate end that comparison of the past with the present can only have been cheerful and honourable. He found a Provost of Oriel and a Rector of Exeter who could read his books, and appreciate them, without prejudice against the author. But indeed, though he was capable of being profoundly bored, he was at his ease in the most diverse societies, and no form of conversation not absolutely foolish came amiss to him. He had read so many books, and seen so much of the world, he held such strong opinions, and expressed them with such placid freedom, that he never failed to command attention, or to deserve it. Contemptuous enough, perhaps too contemptuous, of human frailties, he at least knew how to make them entertaining, and his urbane irony dissolved pretentious egoism.

It is a familiar saying that men's characters and habits are formed in the earliest years of their lives. Froude was by profession and by choice a man of letters. He loved writing, and whatever he read, or heard, or saw, turned itself without effort into literary shape. The occupations and amusements of his life can be traced in his Short Studies. But he had not been reared in a literary atmosphere. He had been brought up among horses and dogs, with grooms and keepers, on the moors and the sea. He describes it himself as "the old wild scratch way, when the keeper was the rabbit-catcher, and sporting was enjoyed more for the adventure than for the bag." He never lost his love of sport, and he gave his own son the same training he had himself. Even in his last illness he liked the young man to go out shooting, and always asked what sport he had had. His own father had been a country gentleman, as well as a clergyman, and his brothers, while their health lasted, all rode to hounds. He himself never forgot how he had been put by Robert on a horse without a saddle, and thrown seventeen times in one afternoon without hurting himself on the soft Devonshire grass. He went out shooting with his brothers long before he could himself shoot. For his first two years at Oxford he had done little except ride, and boat, and play tennis. At Plas Gwynant he was as much out of doors as in, and even to the last his physical enjoyment of an expedition in the open air was intense. Yet this was the same man who could sit patiently down at Simancas in a room full of dusty, disorderly documents, ill written in a foreign tongue, and patiently decipher them all. If a healthy mind in a healthy body be, as the Roman satirist says, the greatest of blessings, Froude was certainly blessed. The hardness of his frame, and the soundness of his nerves, gave him the imperturbable temper which Marlborough is said to have valued more than money itself. Of money Froude was always careful, and he was most judicious in his investments. He held the Puritan view of luxury as a thing bad in itself, and the parent of evil, relaxing the moral fibre. The sternness of temperament he had inherited from his father was concealed by an easy, sociable disposition, inclined to make the best of the present, but it was always there. In the struggle between Knox and Mary Stuart all his sympathies are with Knox, who had the root of the matter in him, Calvinism and the moral law. Few imaginative artists could have resisted as he did the temptation to draw a dazzling picture of Mary's charms and accomplishments, scholarship and statesmanship, beauty and wit. Froude felt of her as Jehu felt of Jezebel, that she was the enemy of the people of God. So with his own contemporaries, such as Carlyle's "copper captain," Louis Napoleon.

He was never dazzled by the blaze of the Tuileries and the glare of temporary success. He might have said after Boileau, J' appelle un chat un chat, et Louis un fripon.

The peculiarity of Froude's nature was to combine this firm foundation with superficial layers of cynicism, paradox, and irony, as in his apology for the rack, his character of Henry VIII., his defence of Cranmer's churchmanship, and Parker's. He shared with Carlyle the belief that conventional views were sham views, and ought to be exposed. Ridicule, if not a test of truth, is at all events a weapon against falsehood, and has done much to clear the air of history. Froude's sense of humour was rather receptive than expansive, and he did not often display it in his writings. Tristram Shandy he knew almost by heart, and he never tired of Candide, or Zadig.

Voltaire's wit and Sterne's humour have not in their own lines been surpassed. But sure as Froude's taste was in such matters, he did not himself enter the lists as a competitor. He was too much occupied with his narrative, or his theory, as the case might be, to spare time for such diversion by the way. He was too earnest to be impartial.

Where is the impartial historian to be found? Macaulay said in Hallam. The clerical editor of Bishop Stubbs's Letters thinks that Hallam, who was an Erastian, had a violent prejudice against the Church. His impartial historian is Stubbs, for the simple reason that he agrees with him. Froude was for England against Rome and Spain. He could oppose the foreign policy of an English Government when he thought it wrong, as in the case of the Crimean War, and of Disraeli's aggressive Imperialism in 1877. But the English cause in the sixteenth century he regarded as national and religious, making for freedom and independence of policy and thought. To be free, to understand, to enjoy, said Thomas Hill Green, is the claim of the modern spirit. Froude would not have admitted that man in the philosophic sense was free, or that he could ever hope to understand the ultimate causes of things. And, though no man was more capable of enjoying the present moment, he would have sternly denied that pleasure, however refined, could be a legitimate aim in life. He was a disciple of the porch, and not of the garden. It was deeds of chivalry and endurance that he held up to the admiration of mankind. The hero of his History, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was not a man of brilliant gifts or dazzling attainments, but a sober, solid, servant of duty and of the State. To most people Burghley is a far less interesting figure than his haughty and splendid sovereign, or the beautiful and seductive queen against whom he protected her. Froude judged Burghley, as he judged Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, by the standards of political integrity and personal honour. The secret of Froude's influence and the source of his power is that beneath the attraction of his personality and the seductiveness of his writing there lay a bedrock of principle which could never be moved.

Professor Sanday, who preached the first University sermon at Oxford after Froude's death, referred to his "fifty years of unwearied literary activity." The period of course included, and was meant to include, The Nemesis of Faith.

"We all know," continued Dr. Sanday, "how the young and ardent Churchman followed his reason where it seemed to lead, and sacrificed a Fellowship, and, as it seemed, a career, to scruples of conscience .... Now we can see that the difficulties which led to it were real difficulties. It was right and not wrong that they should be raised and faced." It is the fashion to regard scruples of conscience as morbid, and the last man who troubled himself about a test was not a young and ardent Churchman, but Charles Bradlaugh. Froude was "ever a fighter," who wished always to fight fair. He preferred resigning his Fellowship to fighting for it on purely legal grounds, and holding it, if he could have held it, in the teeth of the College Statutes. More than twenty years elapsed before the tests which condemned him were abolished, and in that time there must have been many less orthodox Fellows than he. It was more than twenty years before he could lay aside the orders which in a rash moment under an evil system he had assumed. But he was a preacher, though a lay one, and his life was a struggle for the causes in which he believed. Ecclesiastical controversies never really interested him, except so far as they touched upon national life and character. He wished to see the work, of the sixteenth century continued in the nineteenth by the naval power and the Colonial possessions of England. "England" with him meant not merely that part of Great Britain which lies south of the Tweed, but all the dominions of the Sovereign, the British Empire as a whole. What Seeley called the expansion of England was to him the chief fact of the present, and the chief problem of the future. Events since his death have vindicated his foresight. He urged and predicted the Australian Federation, which he did not live to see. To the policy which impeded the Federation of South Africa he was steadily opposed. The moral which he drew from his travels in Australasia, and in the West Indies, was the need for strengthening imperial ties. Lord Beaconsfield's Imperialism was not to his taste, and he disliked every form of aggression or pretence. While he dreaded the intervention of party leaders, and desired the Colonies to take the initiative themselves, he thought that a common tariff was the direction in which true Imperialism should move. Whether he was right or wrong is too large a question to be discussed here. That matter must make its own proof. But in raising it Froude was a pioneer, and, though a man of letters, saw more plainly than practical politicians what were the questions they would have to solve. He despised local jealousies, and took large views. Many men, perhaps most men, contract their horizon with advancing years.

Froude's vision seemed to widen. Through the storms and mists of passion and prejudice which blinded the eyes of Liberals and Conservatives fighting each other at Westminster, he looked to the ultimate union of all British subjects in an England conterminous with the sovereignty of the Crown. It was that England of which he wrote the history. It was knowledge of her past, and belief in her future, that inspired the work of his life.

THE END