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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of Froude, by Herbert Paul
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Life of Froude
+
+Author: Herbert Paul
+
+Release Date: February 9, 2005 [EBook #14992]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF FROUDE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael Madden
+
+
+
+
+
+The Life of Froude
+
+By Herbert Paul
+
+London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1905.
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+Although eleven years have elapsed since Mr. Froude's death, no
+biography of him has, so far as I know, appeared. This book is an
+attempt to tell the public something about a man whose writings have
+a permanent place in the literature of England.
+
+It is a pleasure to acknowledge my obligation to Miss Margaret
+Froude for having allowed me the use of such written material as
+existed. A large number of Mr. Froude's letters were destroyed after
+his death, and it was not intended by the family that any biography
+of him should be written. Finding that I was engaged upon the task,
+Miss Froude supplied those facts, dates, and papers which were
+essential to the accuracy of the narrative. Mr. Froude's niece, Mrs.
+St. Leger Harrison, known to the world as Lucas Malet, has allowed
+me to use some of her uncle's letters to her mother.
+
+Lady Margaret Cecil has, with great kindness, permitted me to make
+copious extracts from Mr. Froude's letters to her mother, the late
+Countess of Derby. I must also express my gratitude to Sir Thomas
+Sanderson, Lord Derby's executor, to Cardinal Newman's literary
+representative Mr. Edward Bellasis, and to Mr. Arthur Clough, son of
+Froude's early friend the poet.
+
+Mr. James Rye, of Balliol College, Oxford, placed at my disposal,
+with singular generosity, the results of his careful examination
+into the charges made against Mr. Froude by Mr. Freeman.
+
+The Rector of Exeter was good enough to show me the entries in the
+college books bearing upon Mr. Froude's resignation of his
+Fellowship, and to tell me everything he knew on the subject.
+
+My indebtedness to the late Sir John Skelton's delightful book,
+The Table Talk of Shirley, will be obvious to my readers.
+
+I have, in conclusion, to thank my old friend Mr. Birrell, for
+lending me his very rare copy of the funeral sermon preached by
+Mr. Froude at Torquay.
+
+October 30, 1905.
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+CHILDHOOD
+
+IN reading biographies I always skip the genealogical details. To
+be born obscure and to die famous has been described as the acme of
+human felicity. However that may be, whether fame has anything to do
+with happiness or no, it is a man himself, and not his ancestors,
+whose life deserves, if it does deserve, to be written. Such was
+Froude's own opinion, and it is the opinion of most sensible people.
+Few, indeed, are the families which contain more than one remarkable
+figure, and this is the rock upon which the hereditary principle
+always in practice breaks. For human lineage is not subject to the
+scientific tests which alone could give it solid value as positive
+or negative evidence. There is nothing to show from what source,
+other than the ultimate source of every good and perfect gift,
+Froude derived his brilliant and splendid powers. He was a gentleman,
+and he did not care to find or make for himself a pedigree. He knew
+that the Froudes had been settled in Devonshire time out of mind as
+yeomen with small estates, and that one of them, to whom his own
+father always referred with contempt, had bought from the Heralds'
+College what Gibbon calls the most useless of all coats, a coat
+of arms. Froude's grandfather did a more sensible thing by marrying
+an heiress, a Devonshire heiress, Miss Hurrell, and thereby doubling
+his possessions. Although he died before he was five-and-twenty, he
+left four children behind him, and his only son was the
+historian's father.
+
+James Anthony Froude, known as Anthony to those who called him by
+his Christian name, was born at Dartington, two miles from Totnes,
+on St. George's Day, Shakespeare's birthday, the 23rd of April,
+1818. His father, who had taken a pass degree at Oxford, and had
+then taken orders, was by that time Rector of Dartington and
+Archdeacon of Totnes. Archdeacon Froude belonged to a type of
+clergyman now almost extinct in the Church of England, though with
+strong idiosyncrasies of his own. Orthodox without being spiritual,
+he was a landowner as well as a parson, a high and dry Churchman, an
+active magistrate, a zealous Tory, with a solid and unclerical
+income of two or three thousand a year. He was a personage in the
+county, as well as a dignitary of the Church. Every one in Devonshire
+knew the name of Froude, if only from "Parson Froude," no
+credit to his cloth, who appears as Parson Chowne in Blackmore's
+once popular novel, The Maid of Sker. But the Archdeacon was a man
+of blameless life, and not in the least like Parson Froude. A hard
+rider and passionately fond of hunting, he was a good judge of a
+horse and usually the best mounted man in the field. One of his
+exploits as an undergraduate was to jump the turnpike gate on the
+Abingdon road with pennies under his seat, between his knees and the
+saddle, and between his feet and the stirrups, without dropping one.
+
+Although he had been rather extravagant and something of a dandy, he
+was able to say that he could account for every sixpence he spent
+after the age of twenty-one. On leaving Oxford he settled down to
+the life of a country parson with conscientious thoroughness, and
+was reputed the best magistrate in the South Hams. Farming his own
+glebe, as he did, with skill and knowledge, perpetually occupied, as
+he was, with clerical or secular business, he found the Church of
+England, not then disturbed by any wave of enthusiasm, at once
+necessary and sufficient to his religious sense. His horror of
+Nonconformists was such that he would not have a copy of The
+Pilgrim's Progress in his house. He upheld the Bishop and all
+established institutions, believing that the way to heaven was to
+turn to the right and go straight on. There were many such
+clergymen in his day.
+
+In appearance he was a cold, hard, stern man, despising sentiment,
+reticent and self-restrained. But beneath the surface there lay deep
+emotions and an aesthetic sense, of which his drawings were the only
+outward sign. To these sketches he himself attached no value. "You
+can buy better at the nearest shop for sixpence," he would say, if
+he heard them praised. Yet good judges of art compared them with the
+early sketches of Turner, and Ruskin afterwards gave them
+enthusiastic praise. Mr. Froude had married, when quite a young man,
+Margaret Spedding, the daughter of an old college friend, from
+Armathwaite in Cumberland. Her nephew is known as the prince of
+Baconian scholars and the J. S. of Tennyson's poem. She was a woman
+of great beauty, deeply religious, belonging to a family more
+strongly given to letters and to science than the Froudes, whose
+tastes were rather for the active life of sport and adventure. One
+can imagine the Froudes of the sixteenth century manning the ships
+of Queen Bess and sailing with Frobisher or Drake. For many years
+Mrs. Froude was the mistress of a happy home, the mother of many
+handsome sons and fair daughters. The two eldest, Hurrell and
+Robert, were especially striking, brilliant lads, popular at Eton,
+their father's companions in the hunting-field or on the moors. But
+in Dartington Rectory, with all its outward signs of prosperity and
+welfare, there were the seeds of death. Before Anthony Froude, the
+youngest of eight, was three years old, his mother died of a
+decline, and within a few years the same illness proved fatal to
+five of her children. The whole aspect of life at Dartington was
+changed. The Archdeacon retired into himself and nursed his grief in
+silence, melancholy, isolated, austere.
+
+This irreparable calamity was made by circumstances doubly
+calamitous. Though destined to survive all his brothers and sisters,
+Anthony was a weak, sickly child, not considered never heard the
+mention of his mother's name, or was the Archdeacon himself capable
+of showing any tenderness whatever. In place of a mother the little
+boy had an aunt, who applied to him principles of Spartan severity.
+At the mature age of three he was ducked every morning at a trough,
+to harden him, in the ice-cold water from a spring, and whenever he
+was naughty he was whipped. It may have been from this unpleasant
+discipline that he derived the contempt for self-indulgence, and the
+indifference to pain, which distinguished him in after life. On the
+other hand, he was allowed to read what he liked, and devoured
+Grimm's Tales, The Seven Champions of Christendom, and The Arabian
+Nights. He was an imaginative and reflective child, full of the
+wonder in which philosophy begins.
+
+The boy felt from the first the romantic beauty of his home.
+Dartington Rectory, some two miles from Totnes, is surrounded by
+woods which overhang precipitously the clear waters of the River
+Dart. Dartington Hall, which stood near the rectory, is one of the
+oldest houses in England, originally built before the Conquest, and
+completed with great magnificence in the reign of Richard II. The
+vast banqueting-room was, in the nineteenth century, a ruin, and
+open to the sky. The remains of the old quadrangle were a treasure
+to local antiquaries, and the whole place was full of charm for an
+imaginative boy. Mr. Champernowne, the owner, was an intimate friend
+of the Archdeacon, to whom he left the guardianship of his children,
+so that the Froudes were as much at home in their squire's house as
+in the parsonage itself. Although most of his brothers and sisters
+were too old to be his companions, the group in which his first
+years were passed was an unusually spirited and vivacious one.
+Newman, who was one of Hurrell's visitors from Oxford, has described
+the young girls "blooming and in high spirits," full of gaiety and charm.*
+
+--
+* Newman's Letters and Correspondence, ii. 73.
+--
+
+The Froudes were a remarkable family. They had strong characters
+and decided tastes, but they had not their father's conventionality
+and preference for the high roads of life. They were devoted to sport,
+and at the same time abounded in mental vigour. All the brothers had
+the gift of drawing. John, though forced into a lawyer's office,
+would if left to himself have become an artist by profession. The
+nearest to Anthony in age was William, afterwards widely celebrated
+as a naval engineer. Then came Robert, the most attractive of the
+boys. A splendid athlete, compared by Anthony with a Greek statue,
+he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses
+were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died
+he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. The influence of
+his genial kindness was never forgotten by his youngest brother; but
+there was a stronger and more dominating personality of which the
+effect was less beneficial to a sensitive and nervous child.
+
+Richard Hurrell Froude is regarded by High Churchmen as an
+originator of the Oxford Movement, and he impressed all his
+contemporaries by the brilliancy of his gifts. Dean Church went so
+far as to compare him with Pascal. But his ideas of bringing up
+children were naturally crude, and his treatment of Anthony was more
+harsh than wise. His early character as seen at home is described by
+his mother in a letter written a year before her death, when he was
+seventeen. Fond as she was of him and proud of his brilliant
+promise, she did not know what to make of him, so wayward was he and
+inconsiderately selfish. "I am in a wretched state of health," the
+poor lady explained, "and quiet is important to my recovery and
+quite essential to my comfort, yet he disturbs it for what he calls
+'funny tormenting,' without the slightest feeling, twenty times a
+day. At one time he kept one of his brothers screaming, from a sort
+of teasing play, for near an hour under my window. At another he
+acted a wolf to his baby brother, whom he had promised never to
+frighten again."*
+
+--
+* Guiney's Hurrell Froude, p. 8.
+--
+
+Anthony was the baby brother, and though this form of teasing was
+soon given up, the temper which dictated it remained. Hurrell, it
+should be said, inflicted severe discipline upon himself to curb his
+own refractory nature. In applying the same to his little brother he
+showed that he did not understand the difference between Anthony's
+character and his own. But lack of insight and want of sympathy were
+among Hurrell's acknowledged defects.
+
+Conceiving that the child wanted spirit, Hurrell once took him up by
+the heels, and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom of a
+stream. Another time he threw him into deep water out of a boat to
+make him manly. But he was not satisfied by inspiring physical
+terror. Invoking the aid of the preternatural, he taught his brother
+that the hollow behind the house was haunted by a monstrous and
+malevolent phantom, to which, in the plenitude of his imagination,
+he gave the name of Peningre. Gradually the child discovered that
+Peningre was an illusion, and began to suspect that other ideas of
+Hurrell's might be illusions too. Superstition is the parent of
+scepticism from the cradle to the gave. At the same time his own
+faculty of invention was rather stimulated than repressed. He was
+encouraged in telling, as children will, imaginative stories of
+things which never occurred.
+
+In spite of ghosts and muddy water Anthony worshipped Hurrell, a
+born leader of men, who had a fascination for his brothers and
+sisters, though not perhaps of the most wholesome kind. The
+Archdeacon himself had no crotchets. He was a religious man, to whom
+religion meant duty rather than dogma, a light to the feet, and a
+lantern for the path. A Tory and a Churchman, he was yet a moderate
+Tory and a moderate Churchman; prudent, sensible, a man of the
+world. To Hurrell Dissenters were rogues and idiots, a Liberal was
+half an infidel, a Radical was, at least in intention, a thief. From
+the effect of this nonsense Anthony was saved for a time by his
+first school. At the age of nine he was sent to Buckfastleigh, five
+miles up the River Dart, where Mr. Lowndes, the rector and patron of
+the living, took boarders and taught them, mostly Devonshire boys.
+Buckfastleigh was not a bad school for the period. There was plenty
+of caning, but no bullying, and Latin was well taught. Froude was a
+gentle, amiable child, "such a very good-tempered little fellow
+that, in spite of his sawneyness, he is sure to be liked," as his
+eldest brother wrote in 1828. He suffered at this time from an
+internal weakness, which made games impossible. His passion, which
+he never lost, was for Greek, and especially for Homer. With a
+precocity which Mill or Macaulay might have envied, he had read both
+the Iliad and the Odyssey twice before he was eleven. The standard
+of accuracy at Buckfastleigh was not high, and Froude's scholarship
+was inexact. What he learnt there was to enjoy Homer, to feel on
+friendly terms with the Greeks and Trojans, at ease with the
+everlasting wanderer in the best story-book composed by man.
+Anthony's holidays were not altogether happy. He was made to work
+instead of amusing himself, and forced into an unwholesome
+precocity. Then at eleven he was sent to Westminster.
+
+In 1830 the reputation of Westminster stood high. The boarding-
+houses were well managed, the lagging in them was light, and their
+tone was good. Unhappily, in spite of the head master's
+remonstrances, Froude's father, who had spent a great deal of money
+on his other sons' education, insisted on placing him in college,
+which was then far too rough for a boy of his age and strength. On
+account of what he had read, rather than what he had learnt, at
+Buckfastleigh, he took a very high place, and was put with boys far
+older than himself. The lagging was excessively severe. The bullying
+was gross and unchecked. The sanitary accommodation was abominable.
+The language of the dormitory was indecent and profane. Froude,
+whose health prevented him from the effective use of nature's
+weapons, was woke by the hot points of cigars burning holes in his
+face, made drunk by being forced to swallow brandy punch, and
+repeatedly thrashed. He was also more than half starved, because the
+big fellows had the pick of the joints at dinner, and left the small
+fellows little besides the bone. Ox-tail soup at the pastrycook's
+took the place of a meal which the authorities were bound to
+provide. Scandalous as all this may have been, it was not peculiar
+to Westminster. The state of college at Winchester, and at Eton, was
+in many respects as bad. Public schools had not yet felt the
+influence of Arnold and of the reforming spirit. Head masters
+considered domestic details beneath them, and parents, if they felt
+any responsibility at all, persuaded themselves that boys were all
+the better for roughing it as a preparation for the discipline of
+the world. The case of Froude, however, was a peculiarly bad one. He
+was suffering from hernia, and the treatment might well have killed
+him. Although his lagging only lasted for a year, he was
+persistently bullied and tormented, until he forgot what he had
+learned, instead of adding to it. When the body is starved and ill-
+treated, the mind will not work. The head master, Dr. Williamson,
+was disappointed in a boy of whom he had expected so much, and wrote
+unfavourable reports. After enduring undeserved and disabling
+hardships for three years and a half, Froude was taken away from
+Westminster at the age of fifteen.
+
+To escape from such a den of horrors was at first a relief. But he
+soon found that his miseries were not over. He came home in
+disgrace. His misfortunes were regarded as his faults, and the worst
+construction was put upon everything he said or did. His clothes and
+books had been freely stolen in the big, unregulated dormitory. He
+was accused of having pawned them, and his denials were not
+believed. If he had had a mother, all might have been well, for no
+woman with a heart would assume that her child was lying. The
+Archdeacon, without a particle of evidence, assumed it at once, and
+beat the wretched boy severely in the presence of the approving
+Hurrell. Hurrell would have made an excellent inquisitor. His
+brother always spoke of him as peculiarly gifted in mind and in
+character; but he knew little of human nature, and he doubtless
+fancied that in torturing Anthony's body he was helping Anthony's
+soul. To alter two words in the fierce couplet of the satirist,
+
+He said his duty, both to man and God,
+Required such conduct, which seemed very odd.
+
+Anthony was threatened, in the true inquisitorial spirit, with a
+ series of floggings, until he should confess what he had not done.
+At last, however, he was set down as incorrigibly stupid, and given
+up as a bad job. The Archdeacon arrived at the conclusion that his
+youngest son was a fool, and might as well be apprenticed to a
+tanner. Having hoped that he would be off his hands as a student of
+Christ Church at sixteen, he was bitterly disappointed, and took no
+pains to conceal his disappointment.
+
+To Anthony himself it seemed a matter of indifference what became of
+him, and a hopeless mystery why he had been brought into the world.
+He had no friend. The consumption in the family was the boy's only
+hope. His mother had died of it, and his brother Robert, who had
+been kind to him, and taught him to ride. It was already showing
+itself in Hurrell. His own time could not, he thought, be long.
+Meanwhile, he was subjected to petty humiliations, in which the
+inventive genius of Hurrell may be traced. He was not, for instance,
+permitted to have clothes from a tailor. Old garments were found in
+the house, and made up for him in uncouth shapes by a woman in the
+village. His father seldom spoke to him, and never said a kind word
+to him. By way of keeping him quiet, he was set to copy out Barrow's
+sermons. It is difficult to understand how the sternest
+disciplinarian, being human, could have treated his own motherless
+boy with such severity. The Archdeacon acted, no doubt, upon a
+theory, the theory that sternness to children is the truest kindness
+in the long run.
+
+Well might Macaulay say that he would rather a boy should learn to
+lisp all the bad words in the language than grow up without a
+mother. Froude's interrupted studies were nothing compared to a
+childhood without love, and there was nobody to make him feel the
+meaning of the word. Fortunately, though his father was always at
+home, his brother was much away, and he was a good deal left to
+himself after Robert's death. Hurrell did not disdain to employ him
+in translating John of Salisbury's letters for his own Life of Becket.
+No more was heard of the tanner, who had perhaps been only a threat.
+While he wandered in solitude through the woods, or by the river,
+his health improved, he acquired a passion for nature, and in his
+father's library, which was excellent, he began eagerly to read. He
+devoured Sharon Turner's History of England, and the great work of
+Gibbon. Shakespeare and Spenser introduced him to the region of the
+spirit in its highest and deepest, its purest and noblest forms.
+Unhappily he also fell in with Byron, the worst poet that can come
+into the hands of a boy, and always retained for him an admiration
+which would now be thought excessive. By these means he gained much.
+He discovered what poetry was, what history was, and he learned also
+the lesson that no one can teach, the hard lesson of self-reliance.
+
+This was the period, as everybody knows, of the Oxford Movement, in
+which Hurrell Froude acted as a pioneer. Hurrell's ideal was the
+Church of the Middle Ages represented by Thomas Becket. In the
+vacations he brought some of his Tractarian friends home with him,
+and Anthony listened to their talk. Strange talk it seemed. They
+found out, these young men, that Dr. Arnold, one of the most
+devoutly religious men who ever lived, was not a Christian. The
+Reformation was an infamous rebellion against authority. Liberalism,
+not the Pope, was  antichrist. The Church was above the State, and
+the supreme ruler of the world. Transubstantiation, which the
+Archdeacon abhorred, was probably true. Hurrell Froude was a
+brilliant talker, a consummate dialectician, and an ardent
+proselytising controversialist. But his young listener knew a little
+history, and perceived that, to put it mildly, there were gaps in
+Hurrell's knowledge.
+
+When he heard that the Huguenots were despicable, that Charles I.
+was a saint, that the Old Pretender was James III., that the
+Revolution of 1688 was a crime, and that the Non-jurors were the
+true confessors of the English Church, it did not seem to square
+with his reading, or his reflections. Perhaps, after all, the
+infallible Hurrell might be wrong. One fear he had never been able
+to instil into his brother, and that was the fear of death. When
+asked what would happen if he were suddenly called to appear in the
+presence of God, Anthony replied that he was in the presence of God
+from morning to night and from night to morning. That abiding
+consciousness he never lost, and when his speculations went furthest
+they invariably stopped there.
+
+Left with his father and one sister, the boy drank in the air of
+Dartmoor, and grew to love Devonshire with an unalterable affection.
+He also continued his reading, and invaded theology. Newton on the
+Prophecies remarked that "if the Pope was not Antichrist, he had bad
+luck to be so like him," and Renan had not yet explained that
+Antichrist was neither the Pope nor the French Revolution, but the
+Emperor Nero. From Pearson on the Creed he learned the distinction
+between "believing" and "believing in." When we believe in a person,
+we trust him. When we believe a thing, we are not sure of it. This
+is one of the few theological distinctions which are also
+differences. Meanwhile, the Archdeacon had been watching his
+youngest son, and had observed that he had at least a taste for
+books. Perhaps he might not be the absolute dolt that Hurrell
+pronounced him. He had lost five years, so far as classical training
+was concerned, by the mismanagement of the Archdeacon himself.
+Still, he was only seventeen, and there was time to repair the
+waste. He was sent to a private tutor's in preparation for Oxford.
+His tutor, a dreamy, poetical High Churchman, devoted to Wordsworth
+and Keble, failed to understand his character or to give him an
+interest in his work, and a sixth year was added to the lost five.
+
+During this year his brother Hurrell died, and the tragic extinction
+of that commanding spirit seemed a presage of his own early doom.
+Two of his sisters, both lately married, died within a few months of
+Hurrell, and of each other. The Archdeacon, incapable of expressing
+emotion, became more reserved than ever, and scarcely spoke at all.
+Sadly was he disappointed in his children. Most of them went out of
+the world long before him. Not one of them distinguished himself in
+those regular professional courses which alone he understood as
+success. Hurrell joined ardently, while his life was spared, in the
+effort to counteract the Reformation and Romanise the Church of
+England. William, though he became a naval architect of the highest
+possible distinction, and performed invaluable services for his
+country, worked on his own account, and made his own experiments in
+his own fashion. Anthony, too, took his line, and went his way,
+whither his genius led him, indifferent to the opinion of the world.
+His had been a strange childhood, not without its redeeming
+features. Left to himself, seeing his brothers and sisters die
+around him, expecting soon to follow them, the boy grew up stern,
+hardy, and self-reliant. He was by no means a bookworm. He had
+learned to ride in the best mode, by falling off, and had acquired a
+passion for fishing which lasted as long as his life. There were few
+better yachtsmen in England than Froude, and he could manage a boat
+as well as any sailor in his native county. His religious education,
+as he always said himself, was thoroughly wholesome and sound,
+consisting of morality and the Bible. Sympathy no doubt he missed,
+and he used to regard the early death of his brother Robert as the
+loss of his best friend. For his father's character he had a
+profound admiration as an embodiment of all the manly virtues,
+stoical rather than Christian, never mawkish nor effeminate.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+OXFORD
+
+Westminster, it will have been seen, did less than nothing for
+Froude. His progress there was no progress at all, but a movement
+backwards, physical and mental deterioration. He recovered himself
+at home, his father's coldness and unkindness notwithstanding. But
+it was not until he went to Oxford that his real intellectual life
+began, and that he realised his own powers. In October, 1836, four
+months after Hurrell's death, he came into residence at Oriel. That
+distinguished society was then at the climax of its fame; Dr. Hawkins
+was beginning his long career as Provost; Newman and Church were
+Fellows; the Oriel Common Room had a reputation unrivalled in Oxford,
+and was famous far beyond the precincts of the University. But of
+these circumstances Froude thought little, or nothing. He
+felt free. For the first time in his life the means of social
+intercourse and enjoyment were at his disposal. His internal
+weakness had been overcome, and his health, in spite of all he had
+gone through, was good. He had an ample allowance, and facilities
+for spending it among pleasant companions in agreeable ways. He had
+shot up to his full height, five feet eleven inches, and from his
+handsome features there shone those piercing dark eyes which riveted
+attention where-ever they were turned. His loveless, cheerless
+boyhood was over, and the liberty of Oxford, which, even after the
+mild constraint of a public school, seems boundless, was to him the
+perfection of bliss. He began to develop those powers of
+conversation which in after years gave him an irresistible influence
+over men and women, young and old. Convinced that, like his brothers
+and sisters, he had but a short time to live, and having
+certainly been full of misery, he resolved to make the best of his
+time, and enjoy himself while he could. He was under no obligation
+to any one, unless it were to the Archdeacon for his pocket-money.
+His father and his brother, doubtless with the best intentions, had
+made life more painful for him after his mother's death than they
+could have made it if she had been alive. But Hurrell was gone, his
+father was in Devonshire, and he could do as he pleased. He lived
+with the idle set in college; riding, boating, and playing tennis,
+frequenting wines and suppers. From vicious excess his intellect and
+temperament preserved him. Deep down in his nature there was a
+strong Puritan element, to which his senses were subdued.
+Nevertheless, for two years he lived at Oxford in contented
+idleness, saying with Isaiah, and more literally than the prophet,
+
+"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die."
+
+It was a wholly unreformed Oxford to which Froude came. If it
+"breathed the last enchantments of the Middle Age," it was mediaeval
+in its system too, and the most active spirits of the place, the
+leaders of the Oxford Movement, were frank reactionaries, who hated
+the very name of reform. Even a reduction in the monstrous number of
+Irish Bishoprics pertaining to the establishment was indignantly
+denounced as sacrilege, and was the immediate cause of Keble's
+sermon on National Apostasy to which the famous "movement" has been
+traced. John Henry Newman was at that time residing in Oriel, not as
+a tutor, but as Vicar of St. Mary's. He was kind to Froude for
+Hurrell's sake, and introduced him to the reading set. The
+fascination of his character acted at once as a spell. Froude
+attended his sermons, and was fascinated still more. For a time,
+however, the effect was merely aesthetic. The young man enjoyed the
+voice, the eloquence, the thinking power of the preacher as he might
+have enjoyed a sonata of Beethoven's. But his acquaintance with the
+reading men was not kept up, and he led an idle, luxurious life.
+Nobody then dreamt of an Oxford Commission, and the Colleges, like
+the University, were left to themselves. They were not economically
+managed, and the expenses of the undergraduates were heavy. Their
+battels were high, and no check was put upon the bills which they
+chose to run up with tradesmen. Froude spent his father's: money,
+and enjoyed himself. The dissipation was not flagrant. He was never
+a sensualist, nor a Sybarite. Even then he had a frugal mind, and
+knew well the value of money. "I remember," he says in The Oxford
+Counter Reformation, an autobiographical essay--"I remember
+calculating that I could have lived at a boarding-house on contract,
+with every luxury which I had in college, at a reduction of fifty
+per cent."* He was not given to coarse indulgence, and idleness was
+probably his worst sin at Oxford. But his innocence of evil was not
+ignorance; and though he never led a fast life himself, he knew
+perfectly well how those lived who did.
+
+--
+* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 180.
+--
+
+An intellect like Froude's seldom slumbers long. He had to attend
+lectures, and his old love of Homer revived. Plato opened a new
+world, a word which never grows old, and becomes fresher the more it
+is explored. Herodotus proved more charming than The Arabian Nights.
+Thucydides showed how much wisdom may be contained in the form of
+history. Froude preferred Greek to Latin, and sat up at night to
+read the Philoctetes, the only work of literature that ever moved
+him to tears. Aeschylus divided his allegiance with Sophocles. But
+the author who most completely mastered him, and whom he most
+completely mastered, was Pindar. The Olympian Odes seemed to him
+like the Elgin Marbles in their serene and unapproachable splendour.
+All this classical reading, though it cannot have been fruitless,
+was not done systematically for the schools. Froude had no ambition,
+believing that he should soon die. But a reading-party during the
+Long Vacation of 1839 resulted in an engagement, which changed the
+course of his life.
+
+Hitherto he had been under the impression that nobody cared for him
+at all, and that it mattered not what became of him. The sense of
+being valued by another person made him value himself. He became
+ambitious, and worked hard for his degree. He remembered how the
+master of his first school had prophesied that he would be a Bishop.
+He did not want to be a Bishop, but he began to think that such
+grandeur would not have been predicted of a fool. Abandoning his
+idle habits, he read night and day that he might distinguish himself
+in the young lady's eyes. After six months her father interfered. He
+had no confidence in the stability of this very young suitor's
+character, and he put an end to the engagement. Froude was stunned
+by the blow, and gave up all hope of a first class. In any case
+there would have been difficulties. His early training in
+scholarship had not been accurate, and he suffered from the blunders
+of his education. But under the influence of excitement he had so
+far made up for lost time that he got, like Hurrell, a second class
+in the final classical schools. His qualified success gave him, no
+satisfaction. He was suffering from a bitter sense of disappointment
+and wrong. It seemed to him that he was marked out for misfortune,
+and that there was no one to help him or to take any trouble about
+him. Thrown back upon himself, however, he conquered his
+discouragement and resolved that he would be the master of his fate.
+
+It was in the year 1840 that Froude took his degree. Newman was then
+at the height of his power and influence. The Tracts for the Times,
+which Mrs. Browning in Aurora Leigh calls "tracts against the
+times," were popular with undergraduates, and High Churchmen were
+making numerous recruits. Newman's sermons are still read for their
+style. But we can hardly imagine the effect which they produced when
+they were delivered. The preacher's unrivalled command of English,
+his exquisitely musical voice, his utter unworldliness, the fervent
+evangelical piety which his high Anglican doctrine did not disturb,
+were less moving than his singular power, which he seemed to have
+derived from Christ Himself, of reading the human heart. The young
+men who listened to him felt, each of them, as if he had confessed
+his inmost thoughts to Newman, as if Newman were speaking to him
+alone. And yet, from his own point of view, there was a danger in
+his arguments, a danger which he probably did not see himself,
+peculiarly insidious to an acute, subtle, speculative mind like
+Froude's.
+
+Newman's intellect, when left to itself, was so clear, so powerful,
+so intense, that it cut through sophistry like a knife, and went
+straight from premisses to conclusion. But it was only left to
+itself within narrow and definite limits. He never suffered from
+religious doubts. From Evangelical Protestantism to Roman
+Catholicism he passed by slow degrees without once entering the
+domain of scepticism. Dissenting altogether from Bishop Butler's
+view that reason is the only faculty by which we can judge even of
+revelation, he set religion apart, outside reason altogether. From
+the pulpit of St. Mary's he told his congregation that Hume's
+argument against miracles was logically sound. It was really more
+probable that the witnesses should be mistaken than that Lazarus
+should have been raised from the dead. But, all the same, Lazarus
+was raised from the dead: we were required by faith to believe it,
+and logic had nothing to do with the matter. How Butler would have
+answered Hume, Butler to whom probability was the guide of life, we
+cannot tell. Newman's answer was not satisfactory to Froude. If Hume
+were right, how could he also be wrong? Newman might say, with
+Tertullian, Credo quia impossibile. But mankind in general are not
+convinced by paradox, and "to be suddenly told that the famous
+argument against miracles was logically valid after all was at least
+startling."*
+
+--
+* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 205.
+--
+
+Perplexed by this dilemma, Froude at Oxford as a graduate, taking
+pupils in what was then called science, and would now be called
+philosophy, for the Honour School of Literae Humaniores. He was soon
+offered, and accepted, a tutorship in Ireland. His pupils father,
+Mr. Cleaver, was rector of Delgany in the county of Wicklow. Mr.
+Cleaver was a dignified, stately clergyman of the Evangelical
+school. Froude had been taught by his brother at home, and by his
+friends at Oxford, to despise Evangelicals as silly, ignorant,
+ridiculous persons. He saw in Mr. Cleaver the perfect type of a
+Christian gentleman, cultivated, pious, and well bred. Mrs. Cleaver
+was worthy of her husband. They were both models of practical
+Christianity. They and their circle held all the opinions about
+Catholicism and the Reformation which Newman and the Anglo-Catholics
+denounced. The real thing was always among them, and they did not
+want any imitation. "A clergyman," says Froude, "who was afterwards
+a Bishop in the Irish Church, declared in my hearing that the theory
+of a Christian priesthood was a fiction; that the notion of the
+Sacraments as having a mechanical efficacy irrespective of their
+conscious effect upon the mind of the receiver was an idolatrous
+superstition; that the Church was a human institution, which had
+varied in form in different ages, and might vary again; that it was
+always fallible; that it might have Bishops in England, and dispense
+with Bishops in Scotland and Germany; that a Bishop was merely an
+officer; that the apostolical succession was probably false as a
+fact--and, if a fact, implied nothing but historical continuity. Yet
+the man who said these things had devoted his whole life to his
+Master's service--thought of nothing else, and cared for nothing
+else."*
+
+--
+* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 212.
+--
+
+Froude had been taught by his brother, and his brother's set, to
+believe that Dissenters were, morally and intellectually, the scum
+of the earth. Here were men who, though not Dissenters themselves,
+held doctrines practically undistinguishable from theirs, and yet
+united the highest mental training with the service of God and the
+imitation of Christ. There was in the Cleaver household none of that
+reserve which the Tractarians inculcated in matters of religion. The
+Christian standard was habitually held up as the guide of life and
+conduct, an example to be always followed whatever the immediate
+consequences that might ensue. Mr. Cleaver was a man of moderate
+fortune, who could be hospitable without pinching, and he was
+acquainted with the best Protestant society in Ireland. Public
+affairs were discussed in his house with full knowledge, and without
+the frivolity affected by public men. O'Connell was at that time
+supreme in the government of Ireland, though his reign was drawing
+to a close. The Whigs held office by virtue of a compact with the
+Irish leader, and their Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, Thomas
+Drummond, had gained the affections of the people by his sympathetic
+statesmanship. An epigrammatic speaker said in the House of Commons
+that Peel governed England, O'Connell governed Ireland, and the
+Whigs governed Downing Street. It was all coming to an end. Drummond
+died, the Whigs went out of office, Peel governed Ireland, and
+England too. Froude just saw the last phase of O'Connellism, and he
+did not like it. In politics he never looked very far below the
+surface of things, and the wrongs of Ireland did not appeal to him.
+That Protestantism was the religion of the English pale, and of the
+Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster, not of the Irish people, was a
+fact outside his thoughts. He saw two things clearly enough. One was
+the strength and beauty of the religious faith by which the Cleavers
+and their friends lived. The other was the misery, squalor, and
+chronic discontent of the Catholic population, then almost twice as
+large as after the famine it became. He did not pause to reflect
+upon what had been done by laws made in England, or upon the
+iniquity of taxing Ireland in tithes for the Church of a small
+minority. He concluded simply that Protestantism meant progress, and
+Catholicism involved stagnation. He heard dark stories of Ribbonism,
+and was gravely assured that if Mr. Cleaver's Catholic coachman,
+otherwise an excellent servant, were ordered to shoot his master, he
+would obey. Very likely Mr. Cleaver was right, though the event did
+not occur. What was the true origin of Ribbonism, what made it
+dangerous, why it had the sympathy of the people, were questions
+which Froude could hardly be expected to answer, inasmuch as they
+were not answered by Sir Robert Peel.
+
+While Froude was at Delgany there appeared the once famous Tract
+Ninety, last of the series, unless we are to reckon Monckton
+Milnes's One Tract More. The author of Tract Ninety was Newman, and
+the ferment it made was prodigious. It was a subtle, ingenious, and
+plausible attempt to prove that the Articles and other formularies
+of the English Church might be honestly interpreted in a Catholic
+sense, as embodying principles which the whole Catholic Church held
+before the Reformation, and held still. Mr. Cleaver and his circle
+were profoundly shocked. To them Catholicism meant Roman
+Catholicism, or, as they called it, Popery. If a man were not a
+Protestant, he had no business to remain in the United Church of
+England and Ireland. If he did remain in it, he was not merely
+mistaken, but dishonest, and sophistry could not purge him from the
+moral stain of treachery to the institution of which he was an
+officer. Froude's sense of chivalry was aroused, and he warmly
+defended Newman, whom he knew to be as honest as himself, besides
+being saintly and pure. If he had stopped there, all might have been
+well. Mr. Cleaver was himself high-minded, and could appreciate the
+virtue of standing up for an absent friend. But Froude went further.
+He believed Newman to be legally and historically right. The Church
+of England was designed to be comprehensive. Chatham had spoken of
+it, not unfairly, as having an Arminian liturgy and Calvinist
+articles. When the Book of Common Prayer assumed its present shape,
+every citizen had been required to conform, and the policy of
+Elizabeth was to exclude no one. The result was a compromise, and
+Mr. Cleaver would have found it hard to reconcile his principles
+with the form of absolution in the Visitation of the Sick. This was,
+in Mr. Cleaver's opinion, sophistry almost as bad as Newman's, and
+Froude's tutorship came to an end. There was no quarrel, and, after
+a tour through the south of Ireland, where he saw superstition and
+irreverence, solid churches, well-fed priests, and a starving
+peasantry in rags, Froude returned for a farewell visit to Delgany.
+On this occasion he met Dr. Pusey, who had been at Christ Church
+with Mr. Cleaver, and was then visiting Bray. Dr. Pusey, however,
+was not at his ease He was told by a clerical guest, afterwards a
+Bishop, with more freedom than courtesy, that they wanted no Popery
+brought to Ireland, they had enough of their own. The sequel is
+curious. For while Newman justified Mr. Cleaver by going over to
+Rome, his own sons, including Froude's pupil, became Puseyite
+clergymen of the highest possible type. Froude returned to Oxford at
+the beginning of 1842, and won the Chancellor's Prize for an English
+essay on the influence of political economy in the development of
+nations. In the summer he was elected to a Devonshire Fellowship at
+Exeter, and his future seemed secure. But his mind was not at rest.
+It was an age of ecclesiastical controversy, and Oxford was the
+centre of what now seems a storm in a teacup. Froude became mixed up
+in it. On the one hand was the personal influence of Newman, who
+raised more doubts than he solved. On the other hand Froude's
+experience of Evangelical Protestantism in Ireland, where he read
+for the first time The Pilgrim's Progress, contradicted the
+assumption of the Tractarians that High Catholicity was an essential
+note of true religion. Gradually the young Fellow became aware that
+High Church and Low Church did not exhaust the intellectual world.
+He read Carlyle's French revolution, and Hero Worship, and Past and
+Present. He read Emerson too. For Emerson and Carlyle the Church of
+England did not exist. Carlyle despised it.
+
+Emerson had probably not so much as given it a thought in his life.
+But what struck Froude most about them was that they dealt with
+actual phaenomena, with things and persons around them, with the
+world as it was. They did not appeal to tradition, or to antiquity,
+but to nature, and to the mind of man. The French Revolution, then
+but half a century old, was interpreted by Carlyle not as
+Antichrist, but as God's judgment upon sin.
+
+Perhaps one view was not more historical than the other. But the first
+was groundless, and second had at least some evidence in support of it.
+God may be, or rather must be, conceived to work through other instruments
+besides Christianity. "Neither in Jerusalem, nor on this mountain,
+shall men worship the Father." Carlyle completed what Newman had
+begun, and the dogmatic foundation of Froude's belief gave way. The
+two greatest geniuses of the age, as he thought them, agreeing in
+little else, agreed that Christianity did not rest upon reason. Then upon
+what did it rest? Reason appeals to one. Faith is the appanage of a
+few. From Carlyle Froude went to Goethe, then almost unknown at
+Oxford, a true philosopher as well as a great poet, an example of
+dignity, a liberator of the human soul.
+
+The Church as a profession is not suitable to a man in Froude's
+state of mind. But in Oxford at that time there flourished a lamentable
+system which would have been felt to be irreligious if the
+authorities of the place had known what religion really was. Most
+Fellows lost their Fellowships in a very short time unless they took
+orders, and Froude's Fellowship was in that sense a clerical one.
+They were ordained as a matter of course, the Bishop requiring no
+other title. They were not expected, unless they wished it, to take
+any parochial duty, and the notion that they had a "serious call" to
+keep their Fellowships can only be described as absurd. Froude had
+no other profession in view, and he persuaded himself that a Church
+established by law must allow a wider range of opinion than a
+voluntary communion could afford to tolerate. As we have seen, he
+had defended Tract Ninety, and he claimed for himself the latitude
+which he conceded to Newman. It was in his case a mistake, as he
+very soon discovered. But the system which encouraged it must bear a
+large part of the blame. Meanwhile he had been employed by Newman on
+an uncongenial task. After the discontinuance of Tracts for the
+Times, Newman projected another series, called Lives of the Saints.
+The idea was of course taken from the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum. But
+Newman had a definite polemical purpose. Just as he felt the force
+of Hume's argument against the probability of miracles, so he
+realised the difficulty of answering Gibbon's inquiry when miracles
+ceased. Had they ever ceased at all? Many Roman Catholics, if not
+the most enlightened and instructed, thought not. Newman conceived
+that the lives of English and Irish saints held much matter for
+edification, including marvels and portents of various kinds. He
+desired that these things should be believed, as he doubtless
+believed them. They proved, he thought, if they could be proved
+themselves, that supernatural power resided in the Church, and when
+the Church was concerned he laid his reason aside.
+
+He was extraordinarily sanguine. "Rationalise," he said to Froude,
+"when the evidence is weak, and this will give credibility for
+others, when you can show that the evidence is strong." Froude chose
+St. Neot, a contemporary of Alfred, in whose life the supernatural
+played a comparatively small part. He told his story as legend, not
+quite as Newman wanted it. "This is all," he said at the end, "and
+perhaps rather more than all, that is known of the life of the
+blessed St. Neot." His connection with the series ceased. But his
+curiosity was excited. He read far and wide in the Benedictine
+biographies. No trace of investigation into facts could he discover.
+If a tale was edifying, it was believed, and credibility had nothing
+to do with it. The saints were beatified conjurers, and any nonsense
+about them was swallowed, if it involved the miraculous element. The
+effect upon Froude may be left to his own words. "St. Patrick I
+found once lighted a fire with icicles, changed a French marauder
+into a wolf, and floated to Ireland on an altar stone. I thought it
+nonsense. I found it eventually uncertain whether Patricius was not
+a title, and whether any single apostle of that name had so much as
+existed."
+
+Froude's scepticism was too indiscriminate when it assailed the
+existence of St. Patrick, which is not now doubted by scholars,
+baseless as the Patrician legends may be. Colgan's Lives of Irish
+Saints had taken him back to Ireland, that he might examine the
+scenes described. He visited them under the best guidance; and
+Petre, the learned historian of the Round Towers, showed him a host
+of curious antiquities, including a utensil which had come to be
+called the Crown of Brian Boru. Legendary history made no impression
+upon Froude. The actual state of Ireland affected him with the
+deepest interest. A population of eight millions, fed chiefly upon
+potatoes, and multiplying like rabbits, light-hearted, reckless, and
+generous, never grudged hospitality, nor troubled themselves about
+paying their debts. Their kindness to strangers was unbounded. In
+the wilds of Mayo Froude caught the smallpox, and was nursed with a
+devotion which he always remembered, ungrateful as in some of his
+writings about Ireland he may seem. After his recovery he wandered
+about the coast, saw the station of Protestant missionaries at
+Achill, and was rowed out to Clare Island, where a disabled galleon
+from the Armada had been wrecked. His studies in hagiology led him
+to consider the whole question of the miraculous, and he found it
+impossible to work with Newman any more. A religion which rested
+upon such stories as Father Colgan's was a religion nurtured in
+lies.
+
+All this, however, had nothing to do with the Church of England by
+law established, and Froude was ordained deacon in 1845. The same
+year Newman seceded, and was received into the Church of Rome. No
+similar event, before or since, has excited such consternation and
+alarm. So impartial an observer as Mr. Disraeli thought that the
+Church of England did not in his time recover from the blow. We are
+only concerned with it here as it affected Froude. It affected him
+in a way unknown outside the family. Hurrell Froude, who abhorred
+private judgment as a Protestant error, had told his brothers that
+when they saw Newman and Keble disagree they might think for
+themselves. He felt sure that he was thereby guarding them against
+thinking for themselves at all. But now the event which he
+considered impossible had happened. Newman had gone to Rome. Keble
+remained faithful to the Church of his baptism. Which side Hurrell
+Froude would have taken nobody could say. He had died a clergyman of
+the Church of England at the age of thirty-three, nine years before.
+Anthony Froude had no inclination to follow Newman. But neither did
+he agree with Keble. He thought for himself. Of his brief clerical
+career there exists a singular record in the shape of a funeral
+sermon preached at St. Mary's Church, Torquay, on the second Sunday
+after Trinity, 1847. The subject was George May Coleridge, vicar of
+the parish, the poet's nephew, who had been cut off in the prime of
+life while Froude acted as his curate. The sermon itself is not
+remarkable, except for being written in unusually good English. The
+doctrine is strictly orthodox, and the simple life of a good clergyman
+devoted to his people is described with much tenderness of feeling.
+
+This sermon, of which he gave a copy to John Duke Coleridge, the
+future Lord Chief Justice of England, was Froude's first experiment
+in authorship, and it was at least harmless. As much cannot be said
+for the second, two anonymous stories, called Shadows of the Clouds
+and The Lieutenant's Daughter. The Lieutenant's Daughter has been
+long and deservedly forgotten. Shadows of the Clouds is a valuable
+piece of autobiography. Without literary merit, without any quality
+to attract the public, it gives a vivid and faithful account of the
+author's troubles at school and at home, together with a slight
+sketch of his unfortunate love-affair.
+
+Froude was a born story-teller, with an irresistible propensity for
+making books. The fascination which, throughout his life, he had for
+women showed itself almost before he was out of his teens; and in
+this case the feeling was abundantly returned. Nevertheless he
+could, within a few years, publish the whole narrative, changing
+only the names, and then feel genuine surprise that the other person
+concerned should be pained. He was not inconsiderate. Those who
+lived with him never heard from him a rough or unkind word. But his
+dramatic instinct was uncontrollable and had to be expressed. The
+Archdeacon read the book, and was naturally furious. If he could
+have been in any way convinced of his errors, which may be doubted,
+to publish an account of them was not the best way to begin.
+Reconciliation had been made impossible, and Anthony was left to his
+own devices. His miscellaneous reading was not checked by an
+ordination which imposed no duties. Goethe sent him to Spinoza, a
+"God-intoxicated man," and a philosophical genius, but not a pillar
+of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Vestiges of Creation, which had
+appeared in 1844, woke Oxford to the discovery that physical science
+might have something to say about the origin, or at least the
+growth, of the universe. The writer, Robert Chambers, whose name was
+not then known, so far anticipated Darwin that he dispensed with the
+necessity for a special creation of each plant and animal. He did
+not, any more than Darwin, attack the Christian religion, and he did
+not really go much farther than Lucretius. But he had more modern
+lights, he understood science, and he wrote in a popular style. He
+made a lively impression upon Froude, who learnt from him that
+natural phenomena were due to natural causes, at the same time that
+he acquired from Spinoza a disbelief in the freedom of the will.
+When Dr. Johnson said, "Sir, we know that the will is free, and
+there's an end on't," he did not understand the question. We all
+know that the will is free to act. But is man free to will? If
+everything about a man were within our cognisance, we could predict
+his conduct in given circumstances as certainly as a chemist can
+foretell the effect of mixing an acid with an alkali. I have no
+intention of expressing any opinion of my own upon this subject. The
+important thing is that Froude became in the philosophic sense a
+Determinist, and his conviction that Calvin was in that respect the
+best philosopher among theologians strengthened his attachment to
+the Protestant cause.
+
+Protestantism apart, however, Froude's position as a clergyman had
+become intolerable. He had been persuaded to accept ordination for
+the reason, among others, that the Church could be reformed better
+from within than from without.
+
+But there were few doctrines of the Church that he could honestly
+teach, and the straightforward course was to abandon the clerical
+profession. Nowadays a man in Froude's plight would only have to
+sign a paper, and he would be free. But before 1870 orders, even
+deacon's orders, were indelible. Neither a priest nor a deacon could
+sit in Parliament, or enter any other learned profession. Froude was
+in great difficulty and distress. He consulted his friends Arthur
+Stanley, Matthew Arnold, and Arthur Clough. Clough, though a layman,
+felt the same perplexity as himself. As a Fellow and Tutor of Oriel
+he had signed the Articles. Now that he no longer believed in them,
+ought he not to live up his appointments? The Provost, Dr. Hawkins,
+induced him to pause and reflect. Meanwhile he published a volume of
+poetry, including the celebrated Bothie, about which Froude wrote to
+him:
+
+"I was for ever falling upon lines which gave me uneasy twitchings;
+e.g. the end of the love scene:
+
+"And he fell at her feet, and buried his face in her apron.
+
+"I daresay the head would fall there, but what an image! It chimes
+in with your notion of the attractiveness of the working business.
+But our undisciplined ears have divided the ideas too long to bear
+to have them so abruptly shaken together. Love is an idle sort of a
+god, and comes in other hours than the working ones; at least I have
+always found it so. I don't think of it in my working time, and when
+I see a person I do love working (at whatever it may be), I have
+quite another set of thoughts about her. . . It would do excellently
+well for married affection, for it is the element in which it lives.
+But I don't think young love gets born then. I only speak for
+myself, and from a very limited experience. As to the story, I don't
+the least object to it on The Spectator's ground. I think it could
+not have been done in prose. Verse was wanted to give it dignity.
+But if we find it trivial, the fault is in our own varnished selves.
+We have been polished up so bright that we forget the stuff we are
+made of."
+
+Clough was in politics a Republican, and sympathised ardently with
+the French Revolution of 1848. So did Charles Kingsley, a Cambridge
+man, who was at that time on a visit to Exeter. But Kingsley, though
+a disciple of Carlyle, was also a hard-working clergyman, who held
+that the masses could be regenerated by Christian Socialism. Froude
+had no faith in Socialism, nor in Christianity as the Church
+understood it. In this year, 1848, Emerson also came to Oxford, and
+dined with Clough at Oriel, where they thought him like Newman.
+Froude was already an admirer of Emerson's essays, and laid his case
+before the American moralist. Emerson gave him, as might have been
+expected, no practical advice, but recommended him to read the
+Vedas. Nothing mattered much to Emerson, who took the opportunity to
+give a lecture in London on the Spiritual Unity of all Animated
+Beings. Froude attended it, and there first saw Carlyle, who burst,
+characteristically enough, into a shout of laughter at the close.
+Carlyle loved Emerson; but the Emersonian philosophy was to him like
+any other form of old clothes, only rather more grotesque than most.
+
+In the Long Vacation of 1848 Froude went alone to Ireland for the
+third time, and shut himself up at Killarney. From Killarney he
+wrote a long account of himself to Clough:
+
+"KILLARNEY, July 15, 1848.
+
+"I came over here where for the present I am all day in the woods
+and on the lake and retire at night into an unpleasant hotel, where
+I am sitting up writing this and waiting with the rest of the
+household rather anxiously for the arrival of a fresh wedded pair.
+Next week I move off across the lake to a sort of lodge of Lord
+Kenmare, where I have persuaded an old lady to take me into the
+family. I am going to live with them, and I am going to have her
+ladyship's own boudoir to scribble in. It is a wild place enough
+with porridge and potatoes to eat, varied with what fish I may
+provide for myself and arbutus berries if it comes to starving. The
+noble lord has been away for some years. They will put a deal table
+into the said boudoir for me, and if living under a noble roof has
+charms for me I have that at least to console myself with. I can't
+tell about your coming. There may be a rising in September, and you
+may be tempted to turn rebel, you know; and I don't know whether you
+like porridge, or whether a straw bed is to your--not 'taste,'
+touch is better, I suppose. It is perfectly beautiful here, or it
+would be if it wasn't for the swarm of people about one that are for
+ever insisting on one's saying so. Between hotel-keeper and carmen
+and boatmen and guides that describe to my honour the scenery, and
+young girls that insist on my honour taking a taste of the goats'
+milk, and a thousand other creatures that insist on boring me and
+being paid for it, I am really thankful every night when I get to my
+room and find all the pieces of me safe in their places. However, I
+shall do very well when I get to my lodge, and in the meantime I am
+contented to do ill. I have hopes of these young paddies after all.
+I think they will have a fight for it, or else their landlords will
+bully the Government into strong measures as they call them--and then
+will finally disgust whatever there is left of doubtful loyalty in
+the country into open unloyalty, and they will win without fighting.
+There is the most genuine hatred of the Irish landlords everywhere
+that I can remember to have heard expressed of persons or things. My
+landlady that is to be next week told me she believed it was God's
+doing. If God wished the people should be stirred up to fight, then
+it was all right they should do it; and if He didn't will, why
+surely then there would be no fighting at all. I am not sure it
+could have been expressed better. I have heard horrid stories in
+detail of the famine. They are getting historical now, and the
+people can look back at them and tell them quietly. It is very lucky
+for us that we are let to get off for the most part with
+generalities, and the knowledge of details is left to those who
+suffer them. I think if it was not so we should all go mad or shoot
+ourselves.
+
+"The echoes of English politics which come over here are very
+sickening: even The Spectator exasperates me with its d--d cold-
+water cure for all enthusiasm. When I see these beautiful mountain
+glens, I quite long to build myself a little den in the middle of
+them, and say good-bye to the world, with all its lies and its
+selfishness, till other times. I have still one great consolation
+here, and that is the rage and fury of the sqireens at the poor
+rates; six and sixpence in the pound with an estate mortgaged right
+up to high-water mark and the year's income anticipated is not the
+very most delightful prospect possible.
+
+"The crows are very fat and very plenty. They sit on the roadside
+and look at you with a kind of right of property. There are no
+beggars--at least, professional ones. They were all starved-dead,
+gone where at least I suppose the means of subsistence will be found
+for them. There is no begging or starving, I believe, in the two
+divisions of Kingdom Come. I see in The Spectator the undergraduates
+were energetically loyal at Commemoration--nice boys--and the dons
+have been snubbed about Guizot. Is there a chance for M---? Poor
+fellow, he is craving to be married, and ceteris paribus I suppose
+humanity allows it to be a claim, though John Mill doesn't. My
+wedding party have not arrived. It is impossible not to feel a
+kindly interest in them. At the bottom of all the agitation a
+wedding sets going in us all there is lying, I think a kind of
+misgiving, a secret pity for the fate of the poor rose which is
+picked now and must forthwith wither; and our boisterous
+jollification is but an awkward barely successful effort at
+concealing it. Well, good-bye. I hardly know when I look over
+these pages whether to wish you to get them or not.
+
+"Yours notwithstanding,
+"J.A.F."
+
+Ireland had been devastated, far more than decimated, by the famine,
+and was simmering with insurrection, like the Continent of Europe.
+The Corn Laws had gone, and the Whigs were back in office, but they
+could do nothing with Ireland. To Froude it appeared as if the
+disturbed state of the country were an emblem of distracted Churches
+and outworn creeds. Religion seemed to him hopelessly damaged, and
+he asked himself whether morality would not follow religion. If the
+Christian sanction were lost, would the difference between right and
+wrong survive? His own state of mind was thoroughly wretched. The
+creed in which he had been brought up was giving way under him, and
+he could find no principle of action at all. Brooding ceaselessly
+over these problems, he at the same time lowered his physical
+strength by abstinence, living upon bread, milk, and vegetables,
+giving up meat and wine. In this unpromising frame of mind, and in
+the course of solitary rambles, he composed The Nemesis of Faith.*
+The book is, both in substance and in style, quite unworthy of
+Froude. But in the life of a man who afterwards wrote what the world
+would not willingly let die it is an epoch of critical importance.
+To describe it in a word is impossible. To describe it in a few
+words is not easy. Froude himself called it in after life a "cry of
+pain," meaning that it was intended to relieve the intolerable
+pressure of his thoughts. It is not a novel, it is not a treatise,
+it is not poetry, it is not romance. It is the delineation of a
+mood; and though it was called, with some reason, sceptical, its
+moral, if it has a moral, is that scepticism leads to misconduct.
+That unpleasant and unverified hypothesis, soon rejected by Froude
+himself, has been revived by M. Bourget in Le Disciple, and L'Etape.
+The Nemesis of Faith is as unwholesome as either of these books, and
+has not their literary charm. It had few friends, because it
+disgusted free-thinking Liberals as much as it scandalised orthodox
+Conservatives. If it were read at all nowadays, as it is not, it
+would be read for the early sketches of Newman and Carlyle,
+afterwards amplified in memorable pages which are not likely to
+perish.
+
+--
+* Chapman, 1849.
+--
+
+In a letter to Charles Kingsley, written from Dartington on New
+Year's Day, 1849, Froude speaks with transparent candour of his
+book, and of his own mind:
+
+"I wish to give up my Fellowship. I hate the Articles. I have said I
+hate chapel to the Rector himself; and then I must live somehow, and
+England is not hospitable, and the parties here to whom I am in
+submission believe too devoutly in the God of this world to forgive
+an absolute apostasy. Under pain of lost favour for ever if I leave
+my provision at Oxford, I must find another, and immediately. There
+are many matters I wish to talk over with you. I have a book
+advertised. You may have seen it. It is too utterly subjective to
+please you. I can't help it. If the creatures breed, they must come
+to the birth. There is something in the thing, I know; for I cut a
+hole in my heart, and wrote with the blood. I wouldn't write such
+another at the cost of the same pain for anything short of direct
+promotion into heaven."
+
+Of Kingsley himself Froude wrote* to another clerical friend, friend
+of a lifetime, Cowley Powles: "Kingsley is such a fine fellow--I
+almost wish, though, he wouldn't write and talk Chartism, and be
+always in such a stringent excitement about it all. He dreams of
+nothing but barricades and provisional Governments and grand
+Smithfield bonfires, where the landlords are all roasting in the fat
+of their own prize oxen. He is so musical and beautiful in poetry,
+and so rough and harsh in prose, and he doesn't know the least that
+it is because in the first the art is carrying him out of himself,
+and making him forget just for a little that the age is so entirely
+out of joint." A very fine and discriminating piece of criticism.
+
+--
+* April 10th, 1849.
+--
+
+The immediate effect of The Nemesis, the only effect it ever had,
+was disastrous. Whatever else it might be, it was undoubtedly
+heretical, and in the Oxford of 1849 heresy was the unpardonable
+sin. The Senior Tutor of Exeter, the Reverend William Sewell, burnt
+the book during a lecture in the College Hall. Sewell, afterwards
+founder and first Warden of Radley, was a didactic Churchman, always
+talking or writing, seldom thinking, who contributed popular
+articles to The Quarterly Review. The editor, Lockhart, knew their
+value well enough. They tell one nothing, he said, they mean
+nothing, they are nothing, but they go down like bottled velvet.
+Sewell's eccentricities could not hurt Froude. But more serious
+consequences followed. The Governing Body of Exeter, the Rector* and
+Fellows, called upon him to resign his Fellowship. This they had no
+moral right to do, and Froude should have rejected the demand. For
+though his name and college were on the title-page of the book, the
+book itself was a work of fiction, and he could not justly be held
+responsible for the opinions of the characters. Expulsion was,
+however, held out to him as the alternative of resignation.
+
+--
+* Dr. Richards.
+--
+
+"If the Rector will permit me," he wrote from Oxford to Clough,
+"tomorrow I cease to be a Fellow of the College. But there is a
+doubt if he will permit it, and will not rather try to send me out
+in true heretic style. My book is therefore, as you may suppose,
+out. I know little of what is said, but it sells fast, and is being
+read, and is producing sorrow this time, I understand, as much as
+anger, but the two feelings will speedily unite."
+
+If he could have appealed to a court of law, the authorities would
+probably have failed for want of evidence, and Froude would have
+retained his Fellowship. But he was sensitive, and yielded to
+pressure. He signed the paper presented to him as if he had been a
+criminal, and shook the dust of the University from his feet. Within
+ten years a new Rector, quite as orthodox as the old, had invited
+him to replace his name on the books of the college. It was long,
+however, before he returned to an Oxford where only the buildings
+were the same. Twenty years from this date an atheistic treatise
+might have been written with perfect impunity by any Fellow of any
+college. Nobody would even have read it if atheism had been its only
+recommendation. The wise indifference of the wise had relieved true
+religion from the paralysis of official patronage. But in 1849 the
+action of the Rector and Fellows was heartily applauded by the
+Visitor, Bishop Phillpotts, the famous Henry of Exeter. Their
+behaviour was conscientious, and Dr. Richards, the Rector, was a
+model of dignified urbanity. It is unreasonable to blame men for not
+being in advance of their age.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+LIBERTY
+
+Froude's position was now, from a worldly point of view, deplorable.
+For the antagonism of High Churchmen he was of course prepared.
+"Never mind," he wrote to Clough of The Nemesis, "if the Puseyites
+hate it; they must fear it, and it will work in the mind they have
+made sick." But he was also assailed in the Protestant press as an
+awful example of what the Oxford Movement might engender. His book
+was denounced on all sides, even by freethinkers, who regarded it as
+a reproach to their cause. The professors of University College,
+London, had appointed him to a mastership at Hobart Town in
+Australia, for which he applied the year before in the hope that
+change of scene might help to re-settle his mind. On reading the
+attacks in the newspapers they pusillanimously asked him to
+withdraw, and he withdrew. A letter to Clough, dated the 6th of
+March, 1849, explains his intellectual and material position at this
+time in a vivid and striking manner.
+
+"I admire Matt. to a very great extent, only I don't see what
+business he has to parade his calmness, and lecture us on
+resignation, when he has never known what a storm is, and doesn't
+know what to resign himself to. I think he only knows the shady side
+of nature out of books. Still I think his versifying, and generally
+his aesthetic power is quite wonderful .... On the whole he shapes
+better than you, I think, but you have marble to cut out, and he has
+only clay .... Do you think that if the Council do ask me to give up
+I might fairly ask Lord Brougham as their President to get me helped
+instead to ever so poor an honest living in the Colonies? I can't
+turn hack writer, and I must have something fixed to do. Congreve is
+down-hearted about Oxford: not so I. I quite look to coming back in
+a very few years."
+
+The Archdeacon, conceiving that the best remedy for free thought was
+short commons, stopped his son's allowance. Froude would have been
+alone in the world, if the brave and generous Kingsley had not come
+to his assistance. Like a true Christian, he invited Froude to his
+house, and made him at home there. To appreciate the magnanimity of
+this offer we must consider that Kinglsey was himself suspected of
+being a heretic, and that his prominent association with Froude
+brought him letters of remonstrance by every post. He said nothing
+about them, and Froude, in perfect ignorance of what he was
+inflicting upon his host, stayed two months with him at Ilfracombe
+and Lynmouth. Yet Kingsley did not, and could not, agree with
+Froude. He was a resolved, serious Christian, and never dreamt of
+giving up his ministry. He did not in the least agree with Froude,
+who made no impression upon him in argument. He acted from kindness,
+and respect for integrity.
+
+Froude, however, could not stay permanently with the Kingsleys. His
+father would have nothing to do with him, and in his son's opinion
+was right to leave him with the consequences of his own errors. But
+the outcry against him had been so violent and excessive as to
+provoke a reaction. Froude might be an "infidel," he was not a
+criminal, and in resigning his Fellowship he had shown more honesty
+than prudence. His position excited the sympathy of influential
+persons. Crabb Robinson, though an entire stranger to him, wrote a
+public protest against Froude's treatment. Other men, not less
+distinguished, went farther. Chevalier Bunsen, the Prussian
+Minister, Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, and others
+whose names he never knew, subscribed a considerable sum of money
+for maintaining the unpopular writer at a German university while he
+made a serious study of theological science. But he had had enough
+of theology, and the munificent offer was declined, though Bunsen
+harangued him enthusiastically for five hours in Carlton Gardens on
+the exquisite adaptation of Evangelical doctrines to the human soul,
+until Froude began to suspect that they must have originated in the
+soul itself.
+
+At this time a greater change than the loss of his Fellowship came
+upon Froude. While staying with the Kingsleys at Ilfracombe, he met
+Mrs. Kingsley's sister, Charlotte Grenfell, the Argemone of Yeast, a
+lady of somewhat wilful, yet most brilliant spirit, with a small
+fortune of her own. Miss Grenfell had joined the Church of Rome two
+years before, and at that time thought of entering a convent. This
+idea was extremely distasteful to her sister and her sister's
+husband. Their favourite remedy for feminine caprice was marriage,
+and they soon had the satisfaction of seeing Miss Grenfell become
+Mrs. Froude. There were some difficulties in the way, for Froude's
+prospects were by no means assured, and Mrs. Kingsley felt
+occasional scruples. But Froude had confidence in himself, and when
+his mind was made up he would not look back.
+
+"You remember," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley, in 1849, "I warned you
+that I intended to take my own way in life, doing (as I always have
+done) in all important matters just what I should think good, at
+whatever risk of consequences, and taking no other person's opinion
+when it crossed with my own. Now in this matter I feel certain that
+the way to save Charlotte most pain is to shorten the struggle, and
+that will be best done by being short, peremptory, and decided in
+allowing no dictation and no interference .... Charlotte herself is
+really magnificent. Every letter shows me larger nobleness of heart.
+You cannot go back now, Mrs. Kingsley."
+
+Mrs. Kingsley did not go back, and Froude had his way. Before the
+wedding, however, another and a novel experience awaited him. His
+misfortunes aroused the interest of a rich manufacturer at
+Manchester, Mr. Darbishire, who offered him a resident tutorship,
+and would have taken him into his own firm, even, as it would seem,
+into his own family, if he had desired to become a man of business,
+and to live in a smoky town. But Froude was engaged to be married,
+and had a passionate love of the country. His keen, clear, rapid
+intelligence would probably have served him well in commercial
+affairs when once he had learnt to understand them. He was reserved
+for a very different destiny, and he gratefully declined Mr.
+Darbishire's offer. Nevertheless, his stay at Manchester as private
+tutor had some share in his mental development. He made acquaintance
+with interesting persons, such as Harriet Martineau, Geraldine
+Jewsbury, Mrs. Gaskell, and William Edward Forster, then known as a
+young Quaker who had devoted himself, in the true Quaker spirit of
+self-sacrifice, to relieving the sufferers from the Irish famine.
+Besides Manchester friends, Froude imbibed Manchester principles. He
+had been half inclined to sympathise with the socialism of Louis
+Blanc and other French revolutionists. Manchester cured him. He
+adopted the creed of individualism, private enterprise, no
+interference by Government, and free trade. In these matters he did
+not, at that time, go with Carlyle, as in ecclesiastical matters he
+had not gone with Newman. His mind was intensely practical, though
+in personal questions of self-interest he was careless, and even
+indifferent. Henceforth he abandoned speculation, as well
+philosophical as theological, and reverted to the historical studies
+of his youth. Philosophy at Oxford in those days meant Plato,
+Aristotle, and Bishop Butler. Froude was a good Greek scholar, and
+he had the true Oxford reverence for Butler. But he had not gone
+deeper into philosophy than his examinations and his pupils
+required. He liked positive results, and metaphysicians always
+suggested to him the movements of a squirrel in a cage.
+
+The alternative to business was literature. Biographies of literary
+men, said Carlyle, are the most wretched documents in human history,
+except the Newgate Calendar. But Carlyle said many things he did not
+believe, and this was probably one of them. The truth is, that the
+literary profession, like the commercial, requires some little
+capital with which to set out, and Froude received this with his
+wife. Besides it he had brilliant talents, unflagging industry, and
+powers of writing such as have seldom been given to any of the sons
+of men. While at Manchester he composed The Cat's Pilgrimage, the
+earliest of his Short Studies in date. The moral of this fanciful
+fable is very like the moral of Candide.
+
+The discontented cat, tired of her monotonously comfortable place on
+the hearthrug, goes out into the world, and gets nothing more than
+experience for her pains. She finds the other animals occupied with
+their own concerns, and enjoying life because they do not go beyond
+them. Not a very elevating paper, perhaps, but better than The
+Nemesis of Faith, and Froude's last word on the subjects that had
+tormented his youth.
+
+He recoiled from materialism, finding that it offered no explanation
+of the universe. Faith in God he had never entirely lost, and on
+that he founded his henceforth unshaken belief in the providential
+government of the world. Whatever might be the origin of the
+Christian religion, it furnished the best guide of life; and
+spiritual truth, as Bunsen said, was independent of history. He had
+no sort of sympathy with those who rejected belief in Christianity
+altogether, still less with those who abandoned Theism. Although he
+could not be a minister of the Church, he was content to be a
+member, understanding the Church to be what he was brought up to
+think it, the national organ of religion, a Protestant, evangelical
+establishment under the authority of the law and the supremacy of
+the Crown.
+
+Froude returned to Manchester immediately after his marriage, but
+his wife did not like the place nor the people. They looked about
+for a country home, and were fortunate enough to find the most
+enchanting spot in North Wales. Plas Gwynant, the shining place,
+stands on a rising ground surrounded by woods, at the foot of
+Snowdon, between Capel Curig and Beddgelert. Beyond the lawn and
+meadow is Dinas Lake. A cherry orchard stood close to the house
+door, and a torrent poured through a rocky ravine in the grounds,
+falling into a pool below. A mile up the valley was the glittering
+lake, Lyn Gwynant, with a boat and plenty of fishing. Good shooting
+was also within reach.
+
+To this ideal home Froude came with his wife in the summer of 1850.
+Here began a new life of cloudless happiness and perfect peace. His
+spiritual difficulties fell away from him, and he found that the
+Church in which he had been born was comprehensive enough for him,
+as for others. He was not called upon to solve problems which had
+baffled the subtlest intellects, and would baffle them till the end
+of time. Religion could be made practical, and not until its
+practical lessons had been exhausted was it necessary to go farther
+afield. "Do the duty that lies nearest you," said Goethe, who knew
+art and science, literature and life, as few men have known them.
+Froude was never idle, and never at a loss for amusement. Although
+he wrote regularly, and his love of reading was a passion, he had
+the keenest enjoyment of sport and expeditions, of country air and
+sights and sounds, of natural beauty and physical exercise. It was
+impossible to be dull in his company, for he was the prince of
+conversers, drawing out as much as he gave. No wonder that there
+were numerous visitors at Plas Gwynant. He was the best and warmest
+of friends. In London he would always lay aside his work for the day
+to entertain one of his contemporaries at Oxford, and at Plas
+Gwynant they found a hospitable welcome. He would fish with them, or
+shoot with them, or boat with them, or walk with them, discussing
+every subject under heaven. Perhaps the most valued of his guests
+was Clough, who had then written most of his poetry, and projected
+new enterprises, not knowing how short his life would be.
+
+Besides Clough, Matthew Arnold came to Plas Gwynant, and Charles
+Kingsley, and John Conington, the Oxford Professor of Latin, and Max
+Muller, the great philologist. A letter to Max Muller, dated the
+25th of June, 1851, gives a pleasant picture of existence there.
+
+"I shall be so glad to see you in July. Come and stay as long as
+work will let you, and you can endure our hospitality. We are poor,
+and so are not living at a high rate. I can't give you any wine,
+because I haven't a drop in the house, and you must bring your own
+cigars, as I am come down to pipes. But to set against that, you
+shall have the best dinner in Wales every day--fresh trout, Welsh
+mutton, as much bitter ale as you can drink; a bedroom and a little
+sitting-room joining it all for your own self, and the most
+beautiful look-out from the window that I have ever seen. You may
+vary your retirement. You may change your rooms for the flower-
+garden, which is an island in the river, or for the edge of the
+waterfall, the music of which will every night lull you to sleep.
+Last of all, you will have the society of myself, and of my wife,
+and, what ought to weigh with you too, you will give us the great
+pleasure of yours."
+
+Clough neither fished, nor shot, nor boated, but as a walking
+companion there was no one, in Froude's opinion, to be put above
+him. For fishing he gave pre-eminence to Kingsley, and together they
+carried up their coracles to waters higher than ordinary boats could
+reach. Kingsley was ardent in all forms of sport, and an enthusiast
+for Maurician theology, holding, as he said, that it had pleased God
+to show him and Maurice things which He had concealed from Carlyle.
+He had concealed them also from Froude, who regarded Carlyle as his
+teacher, feeling that he owed him his emancipation from clerical
+bonds.
+
+Froude and Kingsley did not agree either in theology or in politics.
+"I meant to say," Froude wrote to his wife's brother-in-law in 1851,
+"that the philosophical necessity of the Incarnation as a fact must
+have been as cogent to the earliest thinkers as to ourselves. If we
+may say it must have been, they might say so. And they might, and
+indeed must, have concluded, each at their several date, that the
+highest historical person known to them must have been the Incarnate
+God; so that unless the Incarnation was the first fact in human
+history, there must have been a time when they would have used the
+argument and it would have led them wrong."
+
+Concerning Kingsley's Socialism, especially as shown in Hypatia,
+Froude was cold and critical. "It is by no means as yet clear to
+me," he wrote about this time, "that all good people are Socialists,
+and that therefore whoever sticks to the old thing is a bad fellow.
+Whatever is has no end of claims on us. I have no doubt that we
+could not get on without the devil. If it had not been so, he would
+not have been. The ideas must be content to fight a long time before
+they assimilate all the wholesome flesh in the universe, and we
+cannot leave what works somehow for what only promises to work, and
+has yet by no means largely realised that promise. I consider it a
+bad sign in the thinkers among the Christian Socialists if they set
+to cursing those who don't agree with them. The multitudes must, but
+the thinkers should not. I cannot believe that if Clement of
+Alexandria had been asked whether he candidly believed Tacitus was
+damned because he was a heathen he would have said 'Yes.' Indeed, on
+indifferent matters (supposing he had been alive in Tacitus's time),
+I don't think he would have minded writing a leader in the Acta
+Diurna, even though Tacitus followed on the other side!"
+
+Oxford, and its old clothes, Froude had cast behind him. He had
+never taken priest's orders, and the clerical disabilities imposed
+upon him were not only cruel, but ridiculous. Shut out from the law,
+he turned to literature, and became a regular reviewer. There was
+not so much reviewing then as there is now, but it was better paid.
+His services were soon in great request, for he wrote an
+incomparable style.
+
+The origin of Froude's style is not obscure. Too original to be an
+imitator, he was in his handling of English an apt pupil of Newman.
+There is the same ease, the same grace, the same lightness of
+elastic strength. Froude, like Newman, can pass from racy,
+colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each
+other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our
+grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full. His vocabulary
+was large and various. He was familiar with every device of
+rhetoric. He could play with every pipe in the language, and sound
+what stop he pleased. Oxford men used to talk very much in those
+days, and have talked more or less ever since, about the Oriel
+style. Perhaps the best example of it is Church, the accomplished
+Dean of St. Paul's. Church does not rival Newman and Froude at their
+best. But he never, as they sometimes do, falls into loose and
+slipshod writing. He was the fine flower of the old Oxford
+education, growing in hedged gardens, sheltered from the winds of
+heaven, such as Catullus painted in everlasting colours long
+centuries ago. Froude was a man of the world, who knew the classics,
+and the minds of men, and cities, and governments, and the various
+races which make up the medley of the universe. He wrote for the
+multitude who read books for relaxation, who want to have their
+facts clearly stated, and their thinking done for them. He satisfied
+all their requirements, and yet he expressed himself with the
+natural eloquence of a fastidious scholar. Lucky indeed were the
+editors who could obtain the services of such a reviewer, and he was
+fortunate in being able to recommend with power the poetry of his
+friend, Matthew Arnold.*
+
+--
+* His recommendation was entirely sincere. "Matt. A.'s Sohrab and
+Rustum," he wrote to Clough, "is to my taste all but perfect."
+--
+
+Although Froude enjoyed with avidity the conversation of his chosen
+friends, he was not satisfied with intellectual epicureanism. He was
+resolved to make for himself a name, to leave behind him some not
+unworthy memorial. The history of the Reformation attracted him
+strongly. If an historian is a man of science, or a mere chronicler,
+then certainly Froude was not an historian. He made no claim to be
+impartial. He held that the Oxford Movement was not only endangering
+the National Church, but injuring the national character and
+corrupting men's knowledge of the past. He believed in the
+Reformation first as an historic fact, and secondly as a beneficent
+revolt of the laity against clerical dominion. He denied that since
+the Reformation there had been one Catholic Church, and as an
+Englishman he asserted in the language of the Articles that the
+Bishop of Rome had no jurisdiction within this realm of England. He
+wanted to vindicate the reformers, and to prove that in the struggle
+against Papal Supremacy English patriots took the side of the king.
+He was roused to indignation by slanders against the character of
+Elizabeth; and he held, as almost every one now holds, that the
+attempt to make an innocent saint of Mary Stuart was futile. Even
+More and Fisher he refused to accept as candidates for the crown of
+martyrdom. They were both excellent men. More was, in some respects,
+a great man. They were certainly far more virtuous than the king who
+put them to death. But they were executed for treason, not for
+heresy, and to clear their memory it is necessary to show that they
+had no part in conspiring with a foreign Power against their lawful
+sovereign. That Power, the Church of Rome, a Power till 1870, Froude
+cordially hated. He regarded it as an obstacle to progress, an enemy
+of freedom, an enslaver of the intellect and the soul. The English
+Catholics of his own time were mild, honourable, and loyal. Although
+they had been relieved of their disabilities, they had no power.
+Froude's reading and reflection led him to infer that when the
+Church was powerful it aimed a deadly blow at English independence,
+and that Henry VIII., with all his moral failings, was entitled to
+the credit of averting it. These opinions were not new. They were
+held by most people when Froude was a boy. It was from Oxford that
+an attack upon them came, and from Oxford came also, in the person
+of Froude, their champion.
+
+Froude's historical work took at first the form of essays, chiefly
+in The Westminster Review and Fraser's Magazine. The Rolls Series of
+State Papers had not then begun, and the reign of Henry was
+imperfectly understood. Froude was  especially attracted by the age
+of Elizabeth, who admired her father as a monarch, whatever she may
+have thought of him as a man. It was an age of mighty dramatists, of
+divine poets, of statesmen wise and magnanimous, if not great, of
+seamen who made England, not Spain, the ruler of the seas. It was
+with the seamen that Froude began. His essay on England's Forgotten
+Worthies, which appeared in The Westminster Review for 1852, was
+suggested by a new, and very bad, edition of Hakluyt. It inspired
+Kingsley with the idea of his historical novel, Westward Ho! and
+Tennyson drew from it, many years later, the story of his noble
+poem, The Revenge. The eloquence is splendid, and the patriotic
+fervour stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet. The cruelties
+of the Spaniards in South America, perpetrated in the name of Holy
+Church, are described with unflinching fidelity and unsparing truth.
+For instance, four hundred French Huguenots were massacred in cold
+blood by Spaniards, who invaded their settlement in Florida at a
+time when France was at peace with Spain. These Protestants were
+flayed alive, and, to show that it was done in the cause of
+religion, an inscription was suspended over their bodies, "Not as
+Frenchmen, but as heretics." Even at this distance of time it is
+satisfactory to reflect that these defenders of the faith were not
+left to the slow judgment of God. A French privateer, Dominique de
+Gourges, whose name deserves to be held in honour and remembrance,
+sailed from Rochelle, collected a body of American Indians, swooped
+down upon the Spanish forts, and hanged their pious inmates,
+wretches not less guilty than the authors of St. Bartholomew, with
+the appropriate legend, "Not as Spaniards, but as murderers." "It
+was at such a time," says Froude, "and to take their part amidst
+such scenes as these, that the English navigators appeared along the
+shores of South America as the armed soldiers of the Reformation,
+and as the avengers of humanity." Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh, Davis,
+Grenville, are bright names in the annals of British seamanship. But
+they were not merely staunch patriots, and loyal subjects of the
+great Queen; they were pioneers of civil and religious freedom from
+the most grievous yoke and most intolerable bondage that had ever
+oppressed mankind.
+
+In The Westminster for 1853 appeared Froude's essay on the Book of
+Job, which may be taken as his final expression of theological
+belief. Henceforward he turned from theology to history, from
+speculation to fact. Even his friendship for Frederic Maurice could
+not rouse him to any great interest in the latter's expulsion from
+King's College. "As thinkers," he wrote to Clough on the 22nd of
+November, 1853, "Maurice, and still more the Mauricians, appear to
+me the most hopelessly imbecile that any section of the world have
+been driven to believe in. I am glad you liked Job, though my
+writing it was a mere accident, and I am not likely to do more of
+the kind. I am going to stick to the History in spite of your
+discouragement, and I believe I shall make something of it. At
+any rate one has substantial stuff between one's fingers to be moulding
+at, and not those slime and sea sand ladders to the moon 'opinion.'"
+
+Froude pursued his studies, reading all the collections of original
+documents in Strype and other chroniclers. Why, he asked himself
+should Henry, this bloody and ferocious tyrant, have been so popular
+in his own lifetime? Parliament, judges, juries, all the articulate
+classes of the community, why had they stood by him? No doubt he
+could dissolve Parliament, and dismiss the judges. But to submit
+without a struggle, without even protest or remonstrance, was not
+like Englishmen, before or since. When Erasmus visited England he
+found that the laity were the best read and the best behaved in
+Europe, while the clergy were gluttonous, profligate, and
+avaricious. No historian ever prepared himself more thoroughly for
+his task than Froude. Sir Francis Palgrave, the Deputy Keeper of the
+Records under Sir John Romilly, offered to let him see the
+unpublished documents in the Chapter House at Westminster which
+dealt with the later years of Wolsey's Government, and to the action
+of Parliament after the Cardinal' s fall. He examined them
+thoroughly, and accepted Parker's proposal that he should write the
+history of the period. But he had to leave Plas Gwynant. The London
+Library, which Carlyle had founded, sufficed for contributions to
+magazines. History was a more serious affair, and it was necessary
+for him to be, if not in London, at least near a railway. He
+returned to his native county, and took a house at Babbicombe, from
+which, after three years, he moved to Bideford. He made frequent
+visits to London, where he was the guest of his publisher, John
+Parker, at whose table he met Arthur Helps, John and Richard Doyle,
+Cornewall Lewis, Richard Trench, then Dean of Westminster, and Henry
+Thomas Buckle, once famous as a scientific historian. He called on
+the Carlyles at their house in Chelsea, and began an intimacy only
+broken by death. Carlyle himself was an excellent adviser in
+Froude's peculiar field. He had the same Puritan leanings, the same
+sympathy with the Reformation, the same hostility to ecclesiastical
+interference with secular affairs, unless, as in the case of John
+Knox, the interference was directed against Rome. Froude considered
+him not unlike Knox in humour, keenness of intellect, integrity, and
+daring. History was the one form of literature outside Goethe and
+Burns for which he really cared. He had translated Wilhelm Meister
+in 1824, and it was probably at his suggestion that Froude
+translated Elective Affinities for Bohn's Library in 1850. Scottish
+history and Scottish character Carlyle knew as he knew his Bible.
+His assistance and encouragement, which were freely given, proved
+invaluable to Froude.
+
+Froude settled steadily down to work, dividing his time between
+London and Devonshire. Shooting and fishing had for the time to be
+dropped. For recreation he joined an archery club, where, as James
+Spedding told him, you were always sure of your game. In after life
+Froude, who never bore malice, used to say that his father had been
+right in leaving him to his own resources, and that the necessity of
+providing for himself was, in his instance, as in so many others,
+the foundation of his career. He owed much to his publisher, John
+Parker, who was liberal, generous, and confiding. Publishers, like
+mothers-in-law, have got a bad name from bad jokes. Parker, by
+trusting Froude, and relieving him from anxiety while he wrote,
+smoothed the way for a memorable contribution to English history
+which after many vicissitudes has now an established place as a work
+of genius and research.
+
+The principles on which he worked are explained in a contribution to
+the volume of Oxford Essays for the year 1855.  The subject of this
+brilliant though forgotten paper is the best means of teaching
+English history, and the author's judgments upon modern historians
+are peculiar. Hume and Hallam, the latter of whom was still living,
+are indiscriminately condemned. Macaulay, whose first two volumes
+were already famous, is ignored. The Oxford examiners are severely
+censured for prescribing Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors as
+authoritative, and Carlyle's Cromwell, a collection of materials
+rather than a book, is pronounced to be the one good modern history,
+though Froude denounces, with friendly candour, Carlyle's
+"distempered antagonism to the prevailing fashions of the age." The
+most characteristic part of this essay, however, is that which
+recommends the Statutes, with their preambles, as the best text-
+book, and the following passage would be confidently assigned by
+most critics to the History itself:
+
+"Who now questions, to mention an extreme instance, that Anne
+Boleyn's death was the result of the licentious caprice of Henry?
+and yet her own father, the Earl of Wiltshire, her uncle, the Duke
+of Norfolk, the hero of Flodden Field, the Privy Council, the House
+of Lords, the Archbishop and Bishopsm, the House of Commons, the
+Grand Jury of Middlesex, and three other juries, assented without,
+as far as we know, an opposing voice, to the proofs of her guilt,
+and approved of the execution of the sentence against her."
+
+Froude was not, however, so much absorbed in the work of his life
+that he could not form and express strong opinions upon the great
+events passing around him. His view of the Russian war and of the
+French alliance was set forth with much plainness of speech in a
+letter to Max Muller:*
+
+"I felt in the autumn (and you were angry at me for saying so) that
+the very worst thing which could happen for Europe would be the
+success of the policy with which France and England were managing
+things. Happily the gods were against it too, as now, after having
+between us wasted sixty millions of money and fifty thousand human
+lives, we are beginning to discover. But I have no hope that things
+will go right, or that men will think reasonably, until they have
+first exhausted every mode of human folly. I still think Louis
+Napoleon the d--d'est rascal in Europe (for which again you will be
+angry with me), and that his reception the other day in London will
+hereafter appear in history as simply the most shameful episode in
+the English annals. Thinking this, you will not consider my opinion
+good for anything, and therefore I need not inflict it upon you.
+Humbugs, however, will explode in the present state of the
+atmosphere, and the Austrian humbug, for instance, is at last, God
+be praised for it, exploding. John Bull, I suppose, will work
+himself into a fine fever about that; but he will think none the
+worse of the old ladies in Downing Street who are made fools of: and
+will be none the better disposed to listen to people who told him
+all along how it would be. However, in the penal fatuity which has
+taken possession of our big bow-wow people, and in even the general
+folly, I see great ground for comfort to quiet people like myself;
+and if I live fifteen years, I still hope I shall see a Republic
+among us."
+
+--
+* April 30th, 1855.
+--
+
+Froude's Republicanism did not last. His opinion of Louis Napoleon
+never altered.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE HISTORY
+
+"It has not yet become superfluous to insist," said the Regius
+Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge on the
+26th of January, 1903, "that history is a science, no less and no
+more." If this view is correct and exhaustive, Froude was no
+historian. He must remain outside the pale in the company of
+Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Mommsen. Among literary
+historians, the special detestation of the pseudo-scientific school,
+Froude was pre-eminent. Few things excite more suspicion than a good
+style, and no theory is more plausible than that which associates
+clearness of expression with shallowness of thought. Froude,
+however, was no fine writer, no coiner of phrases for phrases' sake.
+A mere chronicler of events he would hardly have cared to be. He had
+a doctrine to propound, a gospel to preach. "The Reformation," he
+said, "was the hinge on which all modern history turned,"* and he
+regarded the Reformation as a revolt of the laity against the
+clergy, rather than a contest between two sets of rival dogmas for
+supremacy over the human mind. That is the key of the historical
+position which he took up from the first, and always defended. He
+held the Church of Rome to have been the enemy of human freedom, and
+of British independence. He was devoid of theological prejudice, and
+never reviled Catholicism as Newman reviled it before his
+conversion. But he held that the reformers, alike in England, in
+France, and in Germany, were fighting for truth, honesty, and
+private judgment against priestcraft and ecclesiastical tyranny. The
+scepticism and cynicism of which he was often accused were on the
+surface. They were provoked by what he felt to be hypocrisy and
+sham. They were not his true self. He believed firmly unflinchingly,
+and always in "the grand, simple landmarks of morality," which
+existed before all Churches, and would exist if all Churches
+disappeared.
+
+Ou gar tanun ge kachthes, all' aei pote
+Ze tauta, koudeis oiden ex hotou phane
+
+["For they are not of today or yesterday, but these things
+live for ever, but no one knows from whence they appear."
+Sophocles, Antigone, 456.]
+
+Before Abraham was they were, and it is impossible to imagine a
+time when they will have ceased to be.
+
+--
+* Lectures on the Council of Trent, p. 1.
+--
+
+
+Froude was an Erastian, holding that the Church should be
+subordinate to the State. True religion is incompatible with
+persecution. But true religion is rare, and the best modern security
+against the persecutor is the secular power. Mr. Spurgeon once
+excited great applause from members of his Church by declaring that
+the Baptists had never persecuted. When the cheers had subsided he
+explained that it was because they had never had a chance. Froude
+was convinced that ecclesiastics could not be trusted, and that they
+would oppress the laity unless the laity muzzled them. He held that
+the reformers had been calumniated, that their services were in
+danger of being forgotten, and that the modern attempt to ignore the
+Reformation was not only unhistorical, but disingenuous. He wrote
+partly to rehabilitate them, and partly to prove that Henry VIII.
+had conferred great benefits upon England by his repudiation of
+Papal authority. He took, as he considered it his duty to take, the
+side of individual liberty against ecclesiastical authority, and of
+England against Rome. The idea that an historian was to have no
+opinions of his own, or that, having them, he was to conceal them,
+never entered his mind.
+
+That Froude had any prejudice against the Church of England as such
+is a baseless fancy. He believed in the Church of his childhood,
+and, unless the word be used in the narrow sense of the clerical
+profession, he never left it to the end of his days. It was to him,
+as it was to his father, a Protestant Church, out of communion with
+Rome, cut off from the Pope and his court by the great upheaval of
+the sixteenth century. It is unreasonable, and indeed foolish, to
+say that that opinion disqualified him to be the historian of Henry
+VIII., and Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth. The Catholicism of Lingard is
+not considered to be a disqualification by sensible Protestants.
+Froude's faults as an historian were of a different kind, and had
+nothing to do with his ecclesiastical views. He was not the only
+Erastian, nor was he an Erastian pure and simple. He has left it on
+record that Macaulay's unfairness to Cranmer in the celebrated
+review of Hallam's Constitutional History first suggested to him the
+project of his own book. His besetting sin was not so much
+Erastianism, or secularism, as a love of paradox. Henry VIII seemed
+to him not merely a great statesman and a true patriot, but a victim
+of persistent misrepresentation, whose lofty motives had been
+concealed, and displaced by vile, baseless calumnies. More and
+Fisher, honoured for three centuries as saints, he suspected, and,
+as he thought, discovered to have been traitors who justly expiated
+their offences on the block. He was not satisfied with proving that
+there was a case for Henry, and that the triumph of Rome would have
+been the end of civil as well as spiritual freedom: he must go on to
+whitewash the tyrant himself, and to prove that his marriage with
+Anne Boleyn, like his separation from Katharine of Aragon, was
+simply the result of an unselfish desire to provide the country with
+a male heir. The refusal of More and Fisher to acknowledge the royal
+supremacy may show that they were Catholics first and Englishmen
+afterwards, without impugning their personal integrity, or
+justifying the malice of Thomas Cromwell. To judge Henry as if he
+were a constitutional king with a secure title, in no more danger
+from Catholics than Louis XIV was from Huguenots, is doubtless
+preposterous. If the Catholics had got the upper hand, they would
+have deposed him, and put him to death. In that fell strife of
+mighty opposites the voice of toleration was not raised, and would
+not have been heard. Tyrant as he was himself, Henry in his battle
+against Rome did represent the English people, and his cause was
+theirs. Froude brought out this great truth, and to bring it out was
+a great service. Unfortunately he went too far the other way, and
+impartial readers who had no sympathy with Cardinal Campeggio were
+revolted by what looked like a defence of cruel persecution. The
+welfare of a nation is more important in history than the observance
+of any marriage; and if Henry had been guided by mere desire, there
+was no reason why he should marry Anne Boleyn at all. Froude's
+achievement, which, despite all criticism, remains, was marred or
+modified by his too obvious zeal for upsetting established
+conclusions and reversing settled beliefs.
+
+The moment that Froude had made up his mind, which was not till
+after long and careful research, he began to paint a picture. The
+lights were delicately and adroitly arranged. The artist's eye set
+all accessories in the most telling positions. He was an advocate,
+an incomparably brilliant advocate, in his mode of presenting a
+case. But it was his own case, the case in which he believed, not a
+case he had been retained to defend. When he came to deal with
+Elizabeth he was on firmer ground. By that time the Reformation was
+an accomplished fact, and the fiercest controversies lay behind him.
+Disgusted as he was with the scandals invented against the virgin
+queen, he did not shrink from exposing the duplicity and meanness
+which tarnish the lustre of her imperishable renown. Like Knox, he
+was insensible to the charms of Mary Stuart, and that is a
+deficiency hard to forgive in a man. Yet who can deny that Elizabeth
+only did to Mary as Mary would have done to her? The morality of the
+Guises was as much a part of Mary as her scholarship, her grace, her
+profound statecraft, the courage which a voluptuous life never
+imparted. Froude was not thinking of her, or of any woman. He was
+thinking of England. Between the fall of Wolsey and the defeat of
+the Armada was decided the great question whether England should be
+Catholic or Protestant, bond or free. The dazzling Queen of Scots,
+like the virtuous Chancellor and the holy Bishop, were on the wrong
+side. Henry and Elizabeth, with all their faults, were on the right
+one. That is the pith and marrow of Froude's book. Those who think
+that in history there is no side may blame him. He followed Carlyle.
+"Froude is a man of genius," said Jowett: "he has been abominably
+treated." "Il a vu iuste," said a young critic of our own day* in
+reply to the usual charges of inaccuracy. The real object of his
+attack was that ecclesiastical corruption which belongs to no Church
+exclusively, and is older than Christianity itself.
+
+--
+* Arthur Strong.
+--
+
+The main portion of Froude's life for nearly twenty years was
+occupied with his History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the
+defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is on a large scale, in twelve
+volumes. Every chapter bears ample proof of laborious study. Froude
+neglected no source of information, and spared himself no pains in
+pursuit of it. At the Record Office, in the British Museum, at
+Hatfield, among the priceless archives preserved in the Spanish
+village of Simancas, he toiled with unquenchable ardour and
+unrelenting assiduity. Nine-tenths of his authorities were in
+manuscript. They were in five languages. They filled nine hundred
+volumes. Excellent linguist as he was, Froude could hardly avoid
+falling into some errors. With his general accuracy as an historian
+I shall have to deal in a later part of this book. Here I am only
+concerned to prove that he took unlimited pains. He kept no
+secretary, he was his own copyist, and he was not a good proof-
+reader. Those natural blots, quas aut incuria fudit, aut humaria
+parum cavit natura, are to be found, no doubt, in his pages.  From a
+conscientious obedience to truth as he understood it, and a resolute
+determination to present it as he saw it, he never swerved. He was
+not a chronicler, but an artist, a moralist, and a man of genius.
+Unless an historian can put himself into the place of the men about
+whom he is writing, think their thoughts, share their hopes, their
+aspirations, and their fears, he had better be taking a healthy walk
+than poring over dusty documents. A paste-pot, a pair of scissors,
+the mechanical precision of a copying clerk, are all useful in their
+way; but they no more make an historian than a cowl makes a monk.
+
+Polloi men narthekophoroi Bakchoi de te pauroi
+["There are many officials, but few inspired." Zenobius, 5.77]
+
+There are many writers of history, but very few historians. Froude
+wrote with a definite purpose, which he never concealed from
+himself, or from others. He believed, and he thought he could prove,
+that the Reformation freed England from a cruel and degrading yoke,
+that the things which were Caesar's should be rendered to Caesar,
+and that the Church should be restricted within its own proper
+sphere. Those, if such there be, who think that an historian should
+have no opinions are entitled to condemn him. Those who simply
+disagree with him are not. No man is hindered by any other cause
+than laziness, incompetence, or more immediately profitable
+occupations, from writing a history of the same period in exactly
+the opposite sense.
+
+Froude's earliest chapters were set in type, and distributed among a
+few friends whose judgment he trusted. The most sympathetic was
+Carlyle, who pronounced the introductory survey of England's social
+condition at the opening of the sixteenth century to be just what it
+ought to have been. Carlyle's marginal notes upon the first two
+chapters are extremely interesting, and doubly characteristic,
+because they illustrate at the same time his practical shrewdness
+and his intense prejudice. For these reasons, and also because in
+many instances his advice was followed, it may be worth while to
+give some account of his pencil jottings, written when Carlyle's
+hand was still firm, and as legible as they were fifty years ago.
+Upon the first chapter as a whole, Carlyle's judgment, though
+critical, was highly favourable.
+
+"This," he wrote, "is a vigorous, sunny, calm, and wonderfully
+effective delineation; pleasant to read; and bids fair to give much
+elucidation to what is coming. Curious too as got mainly from good
+reading of the Statutes at large! Might there be with advantage (or
+not) some subdivision into sections, with headings, etc? Also, here
+and there, some condensation of the excerpts given--condensation
+into narrative where too longwinded? Item, for symmetry's sake (were
+there nothing else) is not some outline of spiritual England a
+little to be expected? Or will that come piece-meal as we proceed?
+Hint, then, somewhere to that effect? Also remember a little that
+there was an Europe as well as an England? In sum, Euge." Such
+praise from such a man was balm to Froude's wounds and tonic to his
+nerves. Practically expelled from his college, regarded by his own
+family as almost a black sheep, he found himself taken up, and
+treated as an equal, by a writer of European fame, whom of all his
+contemporaries he most admired. In deference to Carlyle he rewrote
+his opening paragraphs, and added useful dates. European history and
+spiritual England do come into far greater prominence "as we
+proceed." The abbreviation and summary of extracts might, I think,
+have been carried farther with advantage. But it is curious that
+Froude was attacked for the precisely opposite fault of treating his
+authorities with too much freedom. Carlyle, who knew what historical
+labour was, saw at once that Froude dealt with his material as a
+born student and an ardent lover of truth. His suggestions were
+always excellent, as sound and just as they were careful and kind.
+One criticism, which Froude disregarded, shows not only Carlyle's
+wide knowledge (that appears throughout), but also that his long
+residence south of the Tweed never made him really English. It
+refers to Froude's description of the English volunteers at Calais
+who "were for years the terror of Normandy," and of Englishmen
+generally as "the finest people in all Europe," nurtured in profuse
+abundance on "great shins of beef."
+
+"This," says Carlyle, "seems to me exaggerated; what we call John-
+Bullish. The English are not, in fact, stronger, braver, truer, or
+better than the other Teutonic races: they never fought better than
+the Dutch, Prussians, Swedes, etc., have done. For the rest, modify
+a little: Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops (bread
+boiled in beer), Robert Burns on oatmeal porridge; and Mahomet and
+the Caliphs conquered the world on barley meal."
+
+David Hume would have thoroughly approved of this note. Froude's
+patriotism was incorrigible, and he left the passage as it stood. A
+little farther on Carlyle's hatred of political economy, in which
+Froude fully shared, breaks out with amusing vigour. "If," wrote the
+younger historian, "the tendency of trade to assume a form of mere
+self-interest be irresistible," etc. "And is it?" comments the
+elder. "Let us all get prussic acid, then." A recent speculator
+preferred cyanide of potassium. But if "mere self-interest"
+comprises fraudulent balance-sheets, it cannot claim any support
+from political economy. When Carlyle drew up a petition to the House
+of Commons for amending the law of copyright, he was guided by self-
+interest, but it was not a counsel of despair. The City Companies,
+says Froude, "are all which now remain of a vast organisation which
+once penetrated the entire trading life of England--an organisation
+set on foot to realise that impossible condition of commercial
+excellence under which man should deal faithfully with his brother,
+and all wares offered for sale, of whatever kind, should honestly be
+what they pretend to be."
+
+For "impossible" Carlyle proposed "highly necessary, if highly
+difficult," and a similar change was made. But why people who do not
+understand political economy should be more honest than those who do
+neither master nor disciple condescended to explain. It is much
+easier to preach than to argue. More valuable than these gibes is
+Carlyle's reminder that guilds were not peculiar to England.
+
+"In Lubeck, Augsburg, Nurnberg, Dantzig, not to speak of Venice,
+Genoa, Pisa,--George Hudson and the Gospel of Cheap and Nasty were
+totally unknown entities. The German Gilds even made poetry
+together; Herr Sachs of Nurnberg was one of the finest pious genial
+master shoemakers that ever lived anywhere--his shoes and rhymes
+alike genuine (I can speak for the rhymes) and worthy."
+
+It is strange that Carlyle should have taken the trouble to correct
+a misquotation from Juvenal, and still stranger that Froude should
+have left the words uncorrected. Misquotation was a too frequent
+habit with him. In his second chapter he applies to Henry the famous
+passage in Tacitus's character of Galba, and changes capax imperii
+to dignus imperil, though dignus would have required imperio, and
+would then have made inferior sense. Some of Carlyle's queries were
+productive of really substantial results; for instance, the simple
+words "such as" brought out the fact that the spoils of the
+monasteries were in part devoted to national defence. "Inveterate
+frenzy" is Froude's description of the years covered by the reign of
+Edward IV. "Fine healthy years in the main, for all their fighting,"
+notes Carlyle. "See the Paston Letters, for one proof." Some of his
+recommendations are racily colloquial. "Give us time of day" is his
+mode of asking for more dates. Henry's instructions to his Secretary
+or Ambassador at Rome he pronounces "very rough matter to set upon
+the table uncooked," and recommends an Appendix, unluckily without
+avail. "Abridge, redact," he exclaims towards the end, but there was
+no abridgment and no redaction. On the other hand, "prestige,"
+stigmatised by Carlyle as "a bad newspaper word," was rejected for
+"influence," and his insistence that English only should be used in
+the text, foreign languages being confined to notes, was accepted by
+Froude. That "new doctrines ever gain readiest hearing among the
+common people" he left to stand as a general proposition, although,
+as Carlyle reminded him, "in Germany it was by no means the common
+people who believed Luther first, but the Elector of Saxony, Philip
+of Hesse, etc., etc.--Scotland too."
+
+The conclusion at which Carlyle arrived after reading the second
+chapter is less favourable than his verdict upon the first.
+Inasmuch, however, as some of the modifications suggested were made,
+though by no means all of them, and as Carlyle's notions of history
+are worth knowing on their own account, I will transcribe his words,
+which are dated the 27th of September, 1855:
+
+"This chapter contains a great deal of well meditated knowledge,
+just insight, and sound thinking; seems calculated to explain the
+Phaenomenon of the Reformation to an unusual degree, in fact has
+great merit of many kinds, historical among the rest. But it seems
+to me (1) to be more of a Dissertation than a Narrative; to want
+dates, specific details, outline of every kind. (2) The management
+might surely be mended? It does not "begin at the beginning" (which
+indeed is the most difficult of all things, but also the most
+indispensable); the story is not clear; or rather, as hinted above,
+there is no story, but an explanation of some story supposed to be
+already known, which is contrary to rule in writing 'History.' On
+the whole, the Author seems to have such a conception of the subject
+as were well worth a better setting forth; and if this is all he has
+yet written of his Book, I could almost advise him to start afresh,
+and remodel all this second chapter. This is a high demand; but the
+excellence attainable by him seems also high. The rule throughout
+is, that events should speak. Commentary ought to be sparing; clear
+insight, definite conviction, brought about with a minimum of
+Commentary; that is always the Art of History. Alter or not,
+however, there is such a generous breadth of intelligence, of manly
+sympathy, sound judgment, and in general of luminous solidity,
+promised in this Book, that I will gladly read it, however it be put
+together. Would it not be better to specify a little what Martin
+Luther is about, and keep up a chronological intercourse, more or
+less strict, with the great Continental ocean of Reform, the better
+to understand the tides from it that ebb and flow in these Narrow
+Seas? Some notice of Wiclif too I expected in some form or other.
+Once more, Go on and prosper!"
+
+The notice of Wycliffe does seem a rather unreasonable expectation,
+and a history of England loses identity if it becomes a history of
+Europe. But Carlyle's principles, whether he always acted upon them
+himself or no, are excellent, and, though Froude's second chapter
+was not quite rewritten, the effect of them may be seen in the rest
+of the book.
+
+Carlyle's influence upon Froude, which happily never extended to his
+style, confirmed him in his attachment to Protestantism and his
+hatred of Rome. It also accounted for much of Froude's belief in
+despots. In democracy he had no faith. Manhood suffrage in England,
+would, he thought, even in the wonderful year 1588, the last of his
+History, have restored the Pope. This was perhaps a little
+inconsistent with his theory that Henry VIII. had been popular with
+all classes. Yet at least Froude could distinguish one despot from
+another. He was entirely opposed, as we have seen, to the alliance
+with Louis Napoleon against Russia, which culminated in the Crimean
+War. Otherwise his sympathy with Liberalism was chiefly academic. He
+rejoiced in the University Commission, and in the consequent removal
+of religious tests for undergraduates. But he took Carlyle's Latter-
+Day Pamphlets for gospel, and had no faith in peace by great
+Exhibitions, or progress by political reform. The war with Russia
+justified the first part of his creed, and even Liberals in the
+House of Commons seemed tacitly to agree with the second. To the
+glorification of mere money-making, the worship of the golden calf,
+the sincerest and the most fashionable of all worships, both he and
+Carlyle were equally opposed. They were agreed with the Socialists
+and with Ruskin in their dislike of seeing bricks and mortar
+substituted for green fields, smoky chimneys for church towers,
+myriads of factory hands for the rural population of England.
+Carlyle still called himself a Radical, a believer in root and
+branch change, but moral rather than political. His faith in
+representative institutions had been shaken by reflecting that the
+Long Parliament, the best ever assembled in England, would have
+given up the cause of the Civil War if it had not been for Cromwell
+and the army. Although he had been one of Peel's warmest supporters
+in 1846, he had come to dread Liberalism as tending towards anarchy,
+and he adopted the singular verbal fallacy that a low franchise
+would mean a low standard of politics. Froude, though he still
+called himself a Liberal, and in some respects always was so, swore
+by Carlyle, acknowledged him as his master, and repeated his creed.
+Carlyle had many admirers, but few disciples, and he naturally set
+great value on Froude's adhesion. He had always a great contempt for
+universal suffrage. It would have given, he said grimly, the same
+voice in the government of Palestine to Jesus Christ and to Judas
+Iscariot. But whatever might have happened to Judas, the Son of man
+had not where to lay His head, and would certainly have been
+excluded under any system which met the approval of Carlyle. In
+Latter-Day Pamphlets Carlyle had made a tremendous attack upon
+Downing Street, and the administrative deficiencies which the
+Crimean campaign disclosed could be treated as confirmatory evidence
+in his favour. As a matter of fact, Lord Aberdeen and Lord
+Palmerston were all the same to him. He was denouncing the
+Parliamentary system, which has borne up against worse Ministers
+than the Duke of Newcastle. If Sebastopol had been taken after the
+Alma, as it well might have been, Carlyle would not have altered his
+tone. Nothing would have prevented him from delivering his message,
+or Froude from accepting it.
+
+The first two volumes of the History appeared in 1856. They dealt
+with the latter part of Henry's reign, when he had rid himself of
+Wolsey, and was personally ruling England with the aid of Thomas
+Cromwell. Froude had to describe the dissolution of the monasteries,
+and besides describing he justified it. He had to depict the
+absolute government of Henry; and he argued that it was a necessity
+of the times. We must not transfer the passions of one age to the
+controversies of another. In the seventeenth century the issue was
+between the Stuart kings and their Parliaments, or, in other words,
+between the Crown and the people. In the sixteenth century king and
+Parliament were united against an alien power, the Catholic Church,
+and a foreign prince, the Pope. Before England was free she had to
+become Protestant, and Henry, whatever his motives, was on the
+Protestant side. That he was himself an unscrupulous tyrant is
+beside the point. He was an ephemeral phaemomenon, and, as a matter
+of fact, his tyranny, which the people never felt, died with him.
+The Church of Rome was a permanent fact, immortal, if not
+unchangeable, which would have reduced England, if it had prevailed,
+to the condition of France, Italy, and Spain. Whether Henry VIII.
+was a good man, or a bad one, is not the question. Bishop Stubbs,
+who cannot be accused of anti-ecclesiastical, or anti-theological
+prejudice, calls him a "grand, gross figure," not to be tried and
+condemned by ordinary standards of private morals. The only interest
+of his character now is its bearing upon the fate of England. If the
+Pope, and not the king, had become head of the English Church, would
+it have been for the advantage of the English people? By frankly
+taking the king's side Froude made two different and influential
+sets of enemies, especially at Oxford. High Churchmen, then and for
+the rest of his life, assailed him for hostility to "the Church,"
+forgetting or ignoring the fact that the Church of England is not
+the Church of Rome. Liberals, on the other hand, mistook him for a
+friend of lawless despotism, as if Henry's opponents had been
+constitutional statesmen, and not arrogant Churchmen, hating liberty
+even more than he did.
+
+That Froude had no faith in modern Liberalism is true enough. His
+political leader in 1856 was neither Palmerston nor Cobden, but
+Carlyle. In 1529 he would have been a King's man and not a Pope's
+man, an Englishman first and a Churchman afterwards. Lord Melbourne
+used to declare, in his paradoxical manner, that Henry VIII. was the
+greatest man who ever lived, because he always had his own way.
+
+Strength is not greatness, and Melbourne must not be taken
+literally. What can be pleaded for Henry, without paradox and with
+truth, is that he imposed upon Catholic and Protestant alike the
+supremacy of the law. Froude preached the subordination of the
+Church to the State; and while supporters of the voluntary principle
+regarded him with suspicion, adherents to the sacerdotal principle
+shrank from him with horror.
+
+The reviews of Froude's earliest volumes were mostly unfavourable.
+The Times indeed was appreciative and sympathetic. But The Christian
+Remembrancer was emphatic in its censure, and The Edinburgh Review,
+of which Henry Reeve had just become editor, was vehemently hostile.
+
+After all, however, an author depends, not upon this party, nor upon
+that party, but upon the general public. The public took to
+Froude's History from the first. They took to it because it
+interested them, and carried them on. Paradoxical it might be.
+Partial it might be. Readable it undoubtedly was. Parker's confidence
+was more than justified. The book sold as no history had sold except
+Gibbon's and Macaulay's. There were no obscure, no ugly sentences.
+The reader was carried down the stream with a motion all the
+pleasanter because it was barely perceptible. The name of the author
+was in all mouths. His old college perceived that he was a credit,
+not a disgrace to it, and the Rector of Exeter* courteously invited
+him to replace his name on the books. The Committee of the Athenaeum
+elected him an honorary member of the Club. Even the Archdeacon, now
+a very old man, discovered at last that his youngest son was an
+honour to the name of Froude. He knew something of ecclesiastical
+history, and he understood that the character of Henry, which
+certainly left much to be desired, might have been blackened of set
+purpose by ecclesiastical historians. Froude's reputation was made.
+The reviewers, most of whom knew nothing about the subject, could
+not hurt him. He had followed his bent, and chosen his vocation
+well. The gift of narrative was his, and he had had thoughts of
+turning novelist. But to write a novel, or at least a successful
+novel, was a thing he could never do. He had not the spirit of
+romance. If there was anything romantic in him, it was love of
+England, and of the sea. From the ocean rovers of Elizabeth to the
+colonial path-finders of his own day, he delighted in men who
+carried the name and fame of England to distant places of the earth.
+He was an advocate rather than a judge. He held so strongly the
+correctness of his own views, and the importance of having a right
+judgment in all things, that he sometimes gave undue prominence to
+the facts which supported his theory. It was only fair and
+reasonable that critics should draw attention to this characteristic
+of Froude as an historian. That he deliberately falsified history is
+a baseless delusion. A sterner moralist, a more strenuous worker, it
+would have been difficult to find. An artist he could not help
+being, for it was in the blood. Once his fingers grasped the pen,
+they began instinctively to draw a picture. He was not, like Macaulay,
+a rhetorician. He had inherited from his father a contempt for
+oratory, and he did not speak well in public. But when he had studied
+a period he saw it in a series of moving scenes as the figures passed
+along the stage. That he was not always accurate in detail is
+notorious. Accuracy is a question of degree. There are mistakes in
+Macaulay. There are mistakes in Gibbon. Humanum est effete. An
+historian must be judged not by the number of slips he has made in
+names or dates, but by the general conformity of his representation
+with the object. Canaletto painted pictures of Venice in which there
+was not a palace out of drawing, nor a brick out of place. Yet not all
+Canaletto's Venetian pictures would give a stranger much idea of the
+atmosphere of Venice. Glance at one Turner, in which a Venetian could
+hardly identify a building or a canal, and there lies before you the
+Queen of the Sea. Serious blunders have been discovered by microscopic
+criticism in Carlyle's French Revolution; it remains the most vivid
+and impressive version of a tremendous drama that has ever been given
+to the world. Froude and Carlyle had the same scorn of the multitude,
+the same belief in destiny, the same love of truth. Froude was more
+sceptical, less inclined to hero-worship, far more academic in thought
+and style. They agreed in setting the moral lessons of history above
+any theory of scientific development, and in cultivating the human
+interest of the narrative as that which alone abides.
+
+--
+* Dr. Lightfoot.
+--
+
+That Froude set out with a polemical purpose is not to be denied. He
+had seen enough of the Romanist or Anglican revival to dislike it
+heartily, and he held that Protestant countries were the most
+prosperous because they were morally the best. Although he did not
+accept the Evangelical theology, he thought Calvinism the most
+philosophic form of religious belief, and Puritanism the soundest
+sort of ethical creed. The Church of England as understood by his
+father was to him the healthiest of ecclesiastical institutions,
+teaching godliness, inculcating duty, saying as little as possible
+about dogma. Religion, he said, was meant to be obeyed, not to be
+examined. The sun was invaluable, unless you looked at it
+If you looked at it, you saw neither it nor anything else. But for
+the Reformation, England, like France, might be under a worthless
+despot sanctified by the Church, or, like Spain, be trampled under
+the feet of priests. The statutes of Henry VIII. were the title-
+deeds of the English Church. Henry established the supremacy of the
+State by letters patent, praemunire, and conge d'elire. The old
+bluebeard Henry, who spent his whole time in murdering his wives,
+was a nursery toy. The real Henry put two wives to death by lawful
+means on definite and substantial charges of which death was the
+penalty. His subjects were quite as anxious as he could be that he
+should have a male heir, and few now suppose that Anne Boleyn, or
+Katharine Howard, was faithful to her husband. The Church of Rome
+would have dethroned Henry and incited his subjects to rebellion. It
+was war to the knife, and the King won.
+
+Froude regarded Henry's victory as the salvation of England. The
+dissolution of the monasteries was an incident in the struggle,
+necessary for the public interest, and justified by the evidence.
+Although part of their confiscated property was bestowed upon
+statesmen and courtiers, part went to found new Cathedral colleges,
+or grammar schools, and part to strengthen the national defences.
+Henry was a strange mixture, quite as much patriot as tyrant, and
+not safe enough on his throne to tolerate Popery. In Froude's view
+he stood for the nation. More and Fisher were for a foreign power.
+The time with which Froude chose to deal was full of blazing fire,
+which the ashes of three hundred years imperfectly covered. He did
+not realise the ordeal to which he was exposing himself, the malice
+he was stirring up. His whole life had been a preparation for the
+task. When he had the free run of his father's library after leaving
+Westminster, it was to the historical shelves that he went first;
+and while his brother talked eloquently about the evils of the
+Reformation, he himself was studying its causes. His own
+entanglement in the Anglican revival was personal, accidental, and
+brief. It was due entirely to his affectionate admiration for
+Newman, aided perhaps, if by anything, by curiosity to know
+something about the lives of the saints. For a real saint, such as
+Hugh of Lincoln, he had a sincere reverence, and loved to show it.
+The miraculous element disgusted him, and the more he read of
+ecclesiastical performances the more anti-ecclesiastical he became.
+
+The article in The Edinburgh Review for July, 1858, upon Froude's
+first four volumes is an elaborate, an able, and a bitter attack.
+Henry Reeve, the editor of The Edinburgh at that time, and for many
+years afterwards, was not himself a scholar, like his illustrious
+predecessor, Cornewall Lewis. He was a Whig of the most conventional
+type, regarding Macaulay and Hallam as the ideal historians,
+suspicious of novelty, and dismayed by paradox. Froude's critic
+belonged to a more advanced school of Liberalism, and shuddered at
+the glorification of a "tyrant" like Henry VIII. That he had also
+some reason for personally detesting Froude is plain from his
+malicious references to the Lives of the Saints, and to The Nemesis
+of Faith, which Froude himself had, so far as he could, suppressed.
+When Froude's name was restored to the books of Exeter College in
+1858, he wrote to Dr. Lightfoot, the Rector, that he regretted the
+publication both of The Nemesis and of Shadows of the Clouds. His
+object in future, he added, would be to defend the Church of
+England. That his idea of the Church was the same as Lightfoot's is
+improbable. Froude meant the Church of the Reformation, of private
+judgment, of an open Bible, of lay independence of bishop or priest.
+To that Church he was faithful, and he sympathised in sentiment, if
+he did not agree in dogma, with evangelical Christians. With
+Catholics, Roman or Anglican, he neither had nor pretended to have
+any sympathy at all. The Reformation is a convenient name for a
+complex European movement, difficult to describe, and almost
+impossible to define; but so far as it was English and constitutional,
+it is embodied in the legislation of Henry VIII., which substituted
+the supremacy of the Crown for the supremacy of the Pope. It was
+because Froude wrote avowedly in defence of that change that he
+incurred the bitter hostility of a powerful section in the English
+Church. He also irritated, partly perhaps because his tone betrayed
+the influence of Carlyle, a large body of Liberal opinion to which all
+despotism and persecution were obnoxious. The compliments, the
+reluctant compliments, of The Edinburgh reviewer must be taken as the
+admissions of an enemy. He acknowledges fully and frankly the
+thoroughness of Froude's research among the State Papers of the reign,
+not merely those printed and published by Robert Lemon, but "a large
+manuscript collection of copies of letters, minutes of council,
+theological tracts, parliamentary petitions, depositions upon trials,
+and miscellaneous communications upon the state of the country
+furnished by agents of the Government, all relating to the early years
+of the English Reformation." No historian has ever been more diligent
+than Froude was in reading and collating manuscripts. For Henry's
+reign alone he read and transcribed six hundred and eighty-seven pages
+in his small, close handwriting. That in so doing, and in working
+without assistance, he should sometimes fall into error was
+unavoidable. But he never spared himself. He was the most laborious of
+students, and his History was as difficult to write as it is easy to
+read. He had, as this hostile reviewer says, a "genuine love of
+historical research," and there is point in the same critic's
+complaint that his pages are "over-loaded with long quotations from
+State Papers."
+
+What, then, it will be asked, was the real gist of the charges made
+against Froude by The Edinburgh Review? The question at issue was
+nothing less than the whole policy of Henry's reign, and the motives
+of the King. The character of Henry is one of the most puzzling in
+historical literature, and Froude had to deal with the most
+difficult part of it. To the virtues of his earlier days Erasmus is
+an unimpeachable witness. The power of his mind and the excellence
+of his education are beyond dispute. He held the Catholic faith, he
+was not naturally cruel, and, compared with Francis I., or with
+Henry of Navarre, he was not licentious. But he was brought up to
+believe that the ordinary rules of morality do not govern kings.
+That the king can do no wrong is now a maxim of the Constitution,
+and merely means that Ministers are responsible for the acts of the
+Crown. Henry could scarcely have been made to understand, even if
+there had been any one to tell him, what a constitutional monarch
+was. Though forced to admit, and taught by experience, that he could
+not safely tax his subjects without the formal sanction of
+Parliament, he was in theory absolute, and he held it his duty to
+rule as well as to reign. When Charles I. argued, a century later,
+that a king was not bound to keep faith with his subjects, it may be
+doubted whether he deceived himself. The thoughts of men are widened
+with the process of the suns. His duty to God Henry would always
+have acknowledged. A historian so widely different from Froude as
+Bishop Stubbs has pointed out that, if mere self-indulgence had been
+the king's object, the infinite pains he took to obtain a Papal
+divorce from Katharine of Aragon would have been thrown away. That
+he had a duty to his neighbour, male or female, never entered his
+head. His subjects were his own, to deal with as he pleased.
+Revolting as this theory may seem now, it was held by most people
+then, and there was not a man in England, not Sir Thomas More
+himself, who would have told the King that it was untrue.
+
+It is with the divorce of Katharine that the difficulty of
+estimating Henry begins. Froude's narrative sets out with the
+marriage of Anne Boleyn. Here the reviewer plants his first arrow.
+The divorce was a nullity, having no authority  higher than
+Cranmer's. Anne Boleyn, as is likely enough from other causes, was
+never the King's wife, and Elizabeth was illegitimate, though she
+had of course a Parliamentary title to the throne. It seems clear,
+however, that inasmuch as Katharine had been his brother Prince
+Arthur's wife, the King could not lawfully marry her, according to
+the canons of the Catholic Church. Why did he marry Anne Boleyn? The
+reviewer says because he was in love with her, and triumphantly
+refers to the King's letters, printed in the Appendix of Hearne's
+Ayesbury.* They are undoubtedly love-letters, and they contain one
+indelicate expression. Compared with Mirabeau's letters to Sophie de
+Monnier, they are cold and chaste. Froude says that the King wanted
+a male heir, and he gives the same reason for the scandalously
+indecent haste with which Jane Seymour was married the day after
+Anne's execution. The character of Henry VIII. is only important now
+as it bears upon the policy of his reign. That Froude washed him too
+white is almost as certain as that Lingard painted him too black.
+The notion that lust supplies the key to his marriages and their
+consequences is utterly ridiculous. The most dissolute of English
+kings was content, and more than content, with one wife. On the
+other hand, Froude does at least give a clue when he suggests that
+these frequent marriages were political moves. A female sovereign
+reigning in her own right had never been known in England, and up to
+the birth of Jane Seymour's son Edward the whole kingdom
+passionately desired that there should be a Prince of Wales. Edward
+himself was but a sickly child, and was not expected to live even
+for the short span of his actual career. Credulous indeed must they
+be who maintain the innocence either of Anne Boleyn or of Katharine
+Howard, and there seems small use in holding with the learned Father
+Gasquet that Anne was not guilty of the offences imputed to her, but
+had done something too bad to be mentioned on a trial for incest. It
+is a question of evidence, and the evidence is lost. But the Grand
+Jury which presented Anne was respectable, the Court which convicted
+her was distinguished, and neither she nor any of her paramours
+denied their guilt on the scaffold. Simple adultery in a queen was
+capital then, if indeed it be not capital now. In an ordinary
+husband Henry's conduct would have been revolting. It is not
+attractive in him. Stubbs pleads that we cannot judge him, and
+abandons the attempt in despair.
+
+--
+* Oxford, 1720.
+--
+
+As he rejects with equal decision both the Roman Catholic picture
+and Froude's, he only puts us all to ignorance again. Froude is at
+least intelligible.
+
+It is a fact, and not a fancy, that Henry provided from the spoils
+of the monasteries for the defence of the realm, that he founded new
+bishoprics from the same source, that he disarmed the ecclesiastical
+tribunals, and broke the bonds of Rome. The corruption of at least
+the smaller monasteries, some of which were suppressed by Wolsey
+before the rise of Cromwell, is established by the balance of
+evidence, and the disappearance of the Black Book which set forth
+their condition was only to be expected in the reign of Mary. The
+crime which weighs most upon the memory of the King is the execution
+of Fisher and More.
+
+More, though he persecuted heretics, is the saint and philosopher of
+the age. Of Fisher Macaulay says that he was worthy to have lived in
+a better age, and died in a better cause. But what if these good
+men, from purely conscientious motives, would have brought over a
+Spanish army to coerce their Protestant fellow-subjects and their
+lawful sovereign? That, and not speculative error, is the real
+charge against them. Henry did all he could to put himself in the
+wrong. His atrocious request that More "would not use many words on
+the scaffold" makes one hate him after the lapse of well-nigh four
+hundred years. The question, however, is not one of personal
+feeling. Good men go wrong. Bad men are made by providence to be
+instruments for good. It is not More, nor Fisher, it is the
+Bluebeard of the children's history-books who gave England Miles
+Coverdale's Bible, who freed her from the yoke that oppressed France
+till the Revolution, and oppresses Spain to-day. Froude's first four
+volumes are an eloquent indictment of Ultramontanism, a plea for the
+Reformation, a sustained argument for English liberties and freedom
+of thought. No such book can be impartial in the sense of admitting
+that there is as much to be said on one side as on the other. Froude
+replied to The Edinburgh Review in Fraser's Magazine for September,
+1858, and in the following month the reviewer retorted. He did not
+really shake the foundation of Froude's case, which was the same as
+Luther's. Luther, like Froude, was no democrat. To both of them the
+Reformation was a protest against ecclesiastical tyranny, or for
+spiritual freedom. "The comedy has ended in a marriage," said
+Erasmus of Luther and Luther's wife. It was not a comedy, and it had
+not ended.
+
+Froude sometimes goes too far. When he defends the Boiling Act,
+under which human beings were actually boiled alive in Smithfield,
+he shakes confidence in his judgment. He sets too much value upon
+the verdicts of Henry's tribunals, forgetting Macaulay's emphatic
+declaration that State trials before 1688 were murder under the
+forms of law. Although the subject of his Prize Essay at Oxford was
+"The Influence of the Science of Political Economy upon the Moral
+and Social Welfare of a Nation," he never to the end of his life
+understood what political economy was. Misled by Carlyle, he
+conceived it to be a sort of "Gospel," a rival system to the
+Christian religion, instead of useful generalisations from the
+observed course of trade. He never got rid of the idea that
+Governments could fix the rate of wages and the price of goods. A
+more serious fault found by The Edinburgh reviewer, the ablest of
+all Froude's critics, was the implication rather than the assertion
+that Henry VIII.'s Parliaments represented the people. The House of
+Commons in the sixteenth century was really chosen through the
+Sheriffs by the Crown, and the preambles of the Statutes, upon which
+Froude relied as evidence of contemporary opinion, showed the
+opinion of the Government rather than the opinion of the people.
+
+They are not of course on that account to be neglected. Although the
+House of Commons was no result of popular election, it consisted of
+representative Englishmen, who would hardly have acquiesced in
+statements notoriously untrue. Henry neither obtained nor asked the
+opinion of the people, as we understand the phrase. The "dim common
+populations" had no more to do with the Government of England then
+than they have to do with the Government of India now. At the same
+time it must be remembered that the King could not rely upon mere
+force. He had no standing army, and a popular rising would have
+swept him almost without resistance from his throne. It is almost as
+hard for us to imagine his position as to understand his character.
+Parliament, judges, magistrates, were subordinate to his sovereign
+will and pleasure. From the authority of the Pope he cut himself
+free, and neither Clement VII. nor Paul III. was strong enough to
+stand up against him. He could hold his own with France, with the
+Empire, with Spain. The one Power he never ventured to defy was the
+English people. It was the essence of the Tudor monarchy to rely
+upon the masses rather than the classes, to keep the aristocracy
+down by expressing the popular will. So far as Henry took part in
+it, the Reformation was not religious at all. As Macaulay drily
+remarks, he was a good Catholic who preferred to be his own Pope. He
+knew very well that Englishmen would like him none the worse for
+resisting the pretensions of Rome, for insisting on the royal
+supremacy, for taking every possible step to secure the succession
+in the male Tudor line. If in his callous indifference to the fate
+of the men or women who stood in his way he appears scarcely human,
+we must consider, with Bishop Stubbs, his awful isolation. The whole
+burden of the State was upon him, and he could not share it. Not
+till the reign of his elder daughter did his subjects realise the
+horrors from which he had delivered them.
+
+Hostile criticism, though it affected the opinion of scholars, did
+Froude no harm with the public. Macaulay's popularity was at its
+height in 1858. But Macaulay passes lightly in his Introduction over
+the sixteenth century, and the reign of Henry VIII., or at least the
+latter part of it, had never been so copiously illustrated before.
+The Oxford Movement, which treated the Reformation as a
+discreditable incident worthy of oblivion, had not much influence
+with the laity. Nine Englishmen in ten were quite prepared to
+glorify the reformers, and were by no means sorry to find how much
+evidence there was for the good old English view of a Parliamentary
+Church. The Statutes of Supremacy and of Praemunire, even the
+execution of More and Fisher, reminded them that the Bishop of Rome
+neither had nor ought to have any jurisdiction within this realm of
+England. That "gospel light first dawned from Boleyn's eyes" might
+be a paradox. It was, however, a paradox which contained a truth,
+and it was by no means disagreeable to find that a popular king was
+not a mere monster of iniquity. If Henry had been what Catholic
+historians represented him, the mob would have pulled his palace
+about his ears. The public bought the book, and read it; for the
+style, though very unlike Macaulay's, was quite as easy to read. In
+1860 appeared the two volumes dealing with Edward VI. And Mary,
+which complete the former half of this great book. After the brief
+and disturbed period of Edward's minority and Somerset's
+Protectorate, the country enjoyed a true Catholic reign. Whatever
+may have been the religion of Henry, there could be no doubt about
+Mary's. Mary had only one use for Protestants, and that was to burn
+them. Among her first victims were Latimer and Ridley, two bright
+ornaments of Christian faith and practice, who committed the deadly
+sin of believing that it was against the truth of Christ's natural
+body to be in heaven and earth at the same time. To them soon
+succeeded Cranmer, the father of the English liturgy, not a man of
+unblemished character, but incomparably superior to Gardiner, to
+Bonner, or to Pole. For Cranmer Froude had a peculiar affection, and
+his account of the Archbishop's martyrdom is unsurpassed by any
+other passage in the History. I need make no apology for quoting the
+end of it; "So perished Cranmer. He was brought out with the eyes of
+his soul blinded to make sport for his enemies, and in his death he
+brought upon them a wider destruction than he had effected by his
+teaching while alive. Pole was appointed next day to the See of
+Canterbury; but in other respects the Court had overreached
+themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept the
+recantation, they would have left the Archbishop to die broken-
+hearted, pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn, and the
+Reformation would have been disgraced in its champion. They were
+tempted, by an evil spirit of revenge, into an act unsanctioned even
+by their own bloody laws; and they gave him an opportunity of
+redeeming his fame, and of writing his name in the roll of martyrs.
+The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure
+under a single and peculiar trial. The Apostle, though forewarned,
+denied his Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who
+knew his nature in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the
+rock on which He would build His Church."
+
+It used to be said of Ernest Renan that he was toniours seminariste,
+and there is a flavour of the pulpit in these beautiful sentences.
+Beautiful indeed they are, and not more beautiful than true. The
+implacable Mary, whose ghastly epithet clings to her for all time,
+like the shirt of Nessus, found in Pole an apt and zealous pupil in
+persecution. Both are excellent specimens of their Church, because
+according to that Church they are absolutely blameless. Punctilious
+in the discharge of all religious duties, they were chaste, sober,
+frugal, and honest. They made long prayers. They tithed mint, and
+anise, and cummin. They made clean the outside of the cup and
+platter. They firmly believed that they were pleasing the Deity they
+worshipped when they deluged England with blood. The spirit of the
+Marian martyrs is one of the noblest tributes to the power of true
+religion that the annals of Christendom contain. Henry' s victims
+were few and conspicuous. Their crime, or alleged crime, was
+treason. Mary's were obscure, and numbered by the hundred. Many of
+them were artisans and mechanics, who, as Burghley afterwards said,
+knew no faith except that they were called upon to abjure. They went
+to the stake without a murmur, sustained against the terrors of
+demonology by their own English hearts, by the love of their
+friends, and by the grace of God. Tennyson, in his play of Queen
+Mary, has put into the mouth of Pole some highly edifying sentiments
+on the want of true faith which prompts persecution. Pole's example
+was very different from these precepts. For the wretched Mary there
+may be some excuse; she was perhaps not wholly sane. Her fixed idea,
+that if she killed Protestants enough Heaven would give her a son,
+was the conviction of a lunatic. Her own husband fled from her, and
+left her with no earthly consolation save the stake. But Pole was
+sane enough when he burnt better Christians than himself. The true
+story of Mary's reign deserved to be told as Froude could tell it.
+The tale has two sides, and is a warning which has been taken to
+heart. Mary's subjects could not rebel. Her Spanish husband had
+behind him the military strength of a great Power. But never again,
+except during the brief and disastrous period which led to the
+expulsion of the second James, has England endured a Catholic
+sovereign. Neither her rulers nor her laws have always been just to
+Catholics. To tolerate intolerance, though a truly Christian lesson,
+is hard to learn. Mary Tudor and Reginald Pole taught the English
+people once for all what the triumph of Catholicism meant. So long
+as they are not supreme, Catholics are the best of subjects, of
+citizens, of neighbours, of friends. There is only one country in
+Europe where they are supreme now, and that country is Spain. They
+might have been supreme in England for at least a century if it had
+not been for the daughter of Katharine of Aragon and the Legate of
+Julius III.
+
+Froude had now completed the first part of his great History. The
+second part, the reign of Elizabeth, was reserved for future issue
+in separately numbered volumes. The death of Macaulay in December,
+1859, left Froude the most famous of living English historians, and
+the ugly duckling of the brood had become the glory of the family.
+The reception of his first six volumes was a curious one. The
+general public read, and admired. The few critics who were competent
+to form an instructed and impartial opinion perceived that, while
+there were errors in detail, the story of the English Reformation,
+and of the Catholic reaction which followed it, had been for the
+first time thoroughly told. Many years afterwards Froude said to
+Tennyson that the most essential quality in an historian was
+imagination. This true and profound remark is peculiarly liable to
+be misunderstood. People who do not know what imagination means are
+apt to confound it with invention, although the latter quality is
+really the last resort of those who are destitute of the former.
+Froude was an ardent lover of the truth, and desired nothing so much
+as to tell it. But it must be the truth as perceived by him, not as
+it might appear to others.* His readers are expected, if not to see
+with his eyes, at least to look from his point of view. Honestly
+believing that the Reformation was a great and beneficent fact in
+the progress of mankind, he was incapable of treating it as a sinful
+rebellion against the authority of the Church. Holding Henry VIII.,
+with all his faults, to have been the champion of the laity against
+the clergy, of spiritual and intellectual freedom against the Roman
+yoke, he could not represent him as a monster of wickedness,
+trampling on morality for his own selfish ends. Doing full justice
+to the conscientiousness of Mary Tudor, excusing her more than some
+think she ought to be excused, he depicted the heroes of her bloody
+reign not only in Latimer and Ridley, but in the scores and hundreds
+of lowlier persons who died for the faith of Christ.
+
+--
+* "Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth or error, but
+that anything is true to a man which he troweth? and not rather, as
+the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, and attainable
+it is, but that its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our
+moral as well as our intellectual being?"--Newman's Grammar of
+Assent, p. 311.
+--
+
+Protestant as he was, however, Froude was an Englishman first and a
+Protestant afterwards. One might say of his history, as was said of
+the drama which Tennyson founded upon the fifth and sixth volumes,
+that the true heroine is the English people. Much of his popularity
+was due to his patriotism and his Protestantism. On the other hand
+he gave deep and lasting offence to High Churchmen, which they
+neither forgot nor forgave. They could not bear the spectacle of a
+Church established by statute, of the king in place of the Pope, of
+Cromwell and Cranmer justified, of More and Fisher condemned. While
+not unwilling to profit by Erastianism, they liked its origin kept
+out of sight. Bishops appointed by the Crown and sitting in the
+House of Lords, though awkward facts, were too familiar to be
+upsetting. The secular and Parliamentary origin of praemunire and
+conge d' elire were less notorious and more disagreeable subjects.
+They were indeed to be found in Hallam. But Hallam had not the
+popularity or the influence of Froude. Constitutional histories are
+for the learned classes. Froude wrote for men of the world. The
+consummate dexterity of his style was only observed by trained
+critics; its ease and grace were the unconscious delight of the
+humblest reader. Froude gave to the Protestant cause the same sort
+of distinction which Newman had given to the Oxford Movement.
+Newman's University sermons are neither learned nor profound. Yet
+the preacher's mastery of the English language in all its rich and
+manifold resources has, and must always have, an irresistible charm.
+The mantle of Newman had fallen on Froude, and Froude had also the
+indefatigable diligence of the born historian. None of his mistakes
+were due to carelessness. They proceeded rather from the multitude
+of the documents he studied and the self-reliance which led him to
+dispense with all external aid. He had of course friendly reviewers,
+such as William Bodham Donne; afterwards Examiner of Plays, in
+Fraser, and Charles Kingsley in Macmillan. Kingsley, however, though
+Lord Palmerston made him Professor of Modern History at Cambridge,
+was not altogether the best ally for an historian. It was in
+defending Froude that Kingsley made his unfortunate attack upon
+Newman, which led to his own discomfiture in the first Preface to
+the Apologia. Froude was unable to support his champion's irrelevant
+and unlucky onslaught. Newman's casuistry was a fair subject for
+criticism; his personal integrity should have been above suspicion,
+and Kingsley's insinuations against it only recoiled upon himself.
+No one, as his History shows, could do ampler justice to individual
+Catholics than Froude, and his feelings for Newman were never
+altered, either by disagreement or by time.
+
+The first part of the History had just been finished when a sudden
+bereavement altered the whole course of Froude's life. On the 21st
+of April, 1860, Mrs. Froude died. Her religious opinions had been
+very different from her husband's. She had always leant towards the
+Church of Rome, though after her marriage she did not conform to it.
+He was probably under Mrs. Froude's influence when he wrote his
+Essay on the Philosophy of Catholicism in 1851, reprinted in the
+first series of Short Studies, which does not strike one as at all
+characteristic of him, and is certainly quite different from his
+noble discourse on the Book of Job, published two years later. Mrs.
+Froude never cared for London, and had always lived in the country.
+After her death Froude took for the first time a London house, and
+settled himself with his children in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park.
+
+Later in the same year died his publisher, John Parker the younger,
+of a painful and distressing illness, through which Froude nursed
+him with tender affection. The elder Parker kept on the business,
+and brought out the remaining volumes of Froude's History. His son
+had been editor of Fraser's Magazine, and in that position Froude
+succeeded him at the beginning of 1861. He thus found a regular
+occupation besides his History. Fraser had a high literary
+reputation, and among its regular contributors was John Skelton,
+writing under the name of "Shirley," who became one of Froude's most
+intimate friends. In the Table Talk of Shirley* are some interesting
+extracts from Froude's letters, as well as a very vivid description
+of Froude himself. On the 12th of January, when he was only just
+installed, Froude began a correspondence kept up for thirty years by
+a brief note about Thelatta, a  political romance by Skelton, with
+an odd, mixed portrait of Canning and Disraeli, very pleasant to
+read, but now almost, I do not know why, neglected.
+
+--
+* Blackwood, 1895.
+--
+
+Froude is hardly just to it. "I have read Thalatta," he writes, "and
+now what shall I say? for it is so charming, and it might be so much
+more charming. There is no mistake about its value. The yacht scene
+made me groan over the recollections of days and occupations exactly
+the same. To wander round the world in a hundred tons schooner would
+be my highest realisation of human felicity." Even the name of the
+book must have appealed to Froude. For more than almost any other
+man of letters he loved the sea. Yachting was his passion. He
+pursued it in youth despite of qualms, and in later life they
+disappeared. Constitutionally fearless, and an excellent sailor, a
+voyage was to him the best of holidays, invigorating the body and
+refreshing the brain.
+
+Froude was already at work on the reign of Elizabeth, and in March,
+1861, he went to Spain for two months. This was the occasion of his
+earliest visit to Simancas, where he was allowed free access to the
+diplomatic correspondence and other records there collected and
+kept. The advantage to Froude of these documents, especially the
+despatches from the Spanish Ambassadors in London to the Government
+at Madrid, was enormous, and it is from them that the last volumes
+of the History derive their peculiar value. He used his
+opportunities to the utmost, and his bulky, voluminous transcripts
+may be seen at the British Museum. His plan was to take rooms at
+Valladolid, from which he drove to Simancas, a wretched little
+village, and worked for the day. The unpublished materials which he
+found at his disposal were such as scarcely any historian had ever
+enjoyed before.
+
+A few months after his return to England, on the 12th of September,
+1861, he married his second wife, Henrietta Warre. Miss Warre, who
+had been his first wife's intimate friend, was exactly suited to
+him, and their union was one of perfect happiness. So long as he was
+editor of Fraser, Froude felt it his duty to write pretty regularly
+for it, so that his hands were constantly full. But of course his
+main business for the next ten years was the continuation of his
+History, which involved frequent visits to Simancas, as well as many
+to the British Museum, the Record Office, and Hatfield House.
+
+From the Marquess of Salisbury, father of the late Prime Minister,
+Froude received permission to search the Cecil papers at Hatfield,
+which, though less numerous than those in the Record Office, are
+invaluable to students of Elizabeth's reign. His investigations at
+Hatfield were begun in April, 1862, and led, among other
+consequences, to one of his most valued friendships. With Lady
+Salisbury, afterwards Lady Derby, he kept up for more than thirty
+years a correspondence which only ended with his death. It was
+Froude who introduced Lady Salisbury to Carlyle, and she thoroughly
+appreciated the genius of both. Her intimate knowledge of politics
+was completed when Lord Derby sat in Disraeli's Cabinet. But she was
+always behind the scenes, and it was from her that Froude obtained
+most of his political information. Their earliest communications,
+however, referred to the Elizabethan part of the History, especially
+to the career and influence of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. A
+preliminary letter shows the thoroughness of Froude's methods. The
+date is the 5th of March, 1862.
+
+"DEAR LADY SALISBURY,--If Lord Salisbury has not repented of his
+kind promise to me, I shall in a few weeks be in a condition to
+avail myself of it, and I write to ask you whether about the
+beginning of next month I may be permitted to examine the papers at
+Hatfield. I am unwilling to trouble Lord Salisbury more than
+necessary. I have therefore examined every other collection within
+my reach first, that I might know clearly what I wanted. Obliged as
+I am to confine myself for the present to the first ten years of
+Elizabeth's reign, there will not be much which I shall have to
+examine there, the great bulk of Lord Burleigh's papers for that
+time being in the Record Office--but if I can be allowed a few days'
+work, I believe I can turn them to good account. With my very best
+thanks for your own and Salisbury's goodness in this matter, I
+remain, faithfully yours,
+
+"J. A. FROUDE."
+
+A few days later he writes: "I have seen Stewart and looked through
+the catalogue. There appear to be about eight volumes which I wish
+to examine. The volumes which I marked as containing matter at
+present important to me are Vols. 2 and 3 on the war with France and
+Scotland from 1559 to 1563, Vols. 138, 152, 153, 154, 155 on the
+disputes relating to the succession to the English Crown, and the
+respective claims of the Queen of Scots, Lady Catherine Grey, Lord
+Darnley, and Laqy Margaret Lennox. I noted the volumes only. I did
+not take notice of the pages because as far as I could see the
+volumes appeared to be given up to special subjects, and I should
+wish therefore to read them through."
+
+His growing admiration for Cecil appears in the following extracts:
+
+"I could only do real justice to such a collection by being allowed
+to read through the whole of it volume by volume--and for such a
+large permission as that I fear it may be dangerous to ask. Lord
+Salisbury, however, whatever my faults may be, could find no one who
+has a more genuine admiration for his ancestor."
+
+October 16th, 1864.--"I cannot say beforehand the papers which I wish
+to examine, as I cannot tell what the collection may contain. My
+object is to have everything which admits of being learnt about the
+period--especially what may throw light on Lord Burleigh's
+character. He, it is more and more clear to me, was the solitary
+author of Elizabeth's and England's greatness."
+
+"I shall return from Simancas," he writes from Valladolid, "more a
+Cecil maniac than ever. In the Duke of Norfolk's conspiracy, the
+Queen seems to have fairly given up the reins to him. It is
+impossible to read the correspondence between Philip, Alva, the
+Pope, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Queen of Scots, the deliberate
+arrangements for Elizabeth's murder, without shivering to think how
+near a chance it was. Cecil was the one only man they feared, and
+the skill with which he dug mines below theirs, and pulled the
+strings of the whole of Europe against them, was truly splendid.
+Elizabeth had lost her head with it all, but she knew it and did not
+interfere. There are a great many letters of the Queen of Scots at
+Simancas, some of them of the deepest interest. She remains the same
+as I have always thought her--brilliant, cruel, ruthless, and
+perfectly unfeeling."
+
+Although Froude's admiration for Elizabeth steadily diminished with
+the progress of his researches, even students of his History will be
+surprised by such a verdict as this:
+
+"I am slowly drawing to the end of my long journey through the
+Records. By far the largest part of Burghley's papers is here [in
+the Record Office], and not at Hatfield. The private letters which
+passed between him and Walsingham about Elizabeth have destroyed
+finally the prejudice that still clung to me that, notwithstanding
+her many faults, she was a woman of ability. Evidently in their
+opinion she had no ability at all worth calling by the name."
+
+Two or three extracts will complete the part of this correspondence
+which deals with the composition of the History. "I have been
+incessantly busy in the Record Office since my return to London. The
+more completely I examine the MSS. elsewhere the better use I shall
+be able to make of yours. I have still two months of this kind
+before me, and my intention, if you did not yourself write to me
+first, was to ask you to let me go to Hatfield for a week or two
+about Easter."
+
+"I am now sufficiently master of the story to be able to make very
+good (I daresay complete) use of the Hatfield papers in my present
+condition. I feel as if there were very few dark places left in
+Queen Elizabeth's proceedings anywhere. I substantially end, in a
+blaze of fireworks, with the Armada. The concentrated interest of
+the reign lies in the period now under my hands. It is all action,
+and I shall use my materials badly if I cannot make it as
+interesting as a novel."
+
+Nothing was neglected by Froude which could throw light upon the
+splendid and illustrious Queen who raised England from the depths of
+degradation to the height of renown. It was at the zenith of
+Elizabeth's career that Froude stopped. His original intention had
+been to continue till her death. But the ample scale on which he had
+planned his book was so much enlarged by his copious quotations from
+the manuscripts at Simancas that by the time he reached his eleventh
+volume he substituted for the death of Elizabeth on his title-page
+the defeat of the Armada. With the year 1588, then, he closed his
+labours. Even the perverse critics who had assumed to treat the
+History of Henry VIII. as an anti-ecclesiastical pamphlet were
+compelled to show more respect for volumes which gave so much novel
+information to the world. Moreover Henry's daughter was a very
+different person from her father. Scandal about Queen Elizabeth had
+been chiefly confined to Roman Catholics, and few Englishmen had
+forgotten who made England the mistress of the seas. The old
+religion had a strong fascination for her, and every one knows how
+she interrupted Dean Nowell when he preached against images. She
+declined to be the head of the Church in the sense arrogated by
+Henry, and yet she would by no means admit the supremacy of the
+Pope. If she ever felt any inclination towards Rome, the massacre of
+St. Bartholomew checked it for ever. Gregory XIII. and Catherine de Medici
+were rulers to her taste. On the other hand she resisted the persecuting
+tendencies of her Bishops, and spared the life even of such a wretch as
+Bonner. It is possible that she believed in transubstantiation. It
+is certain that she objected to the marriage of the clergy, and
+showed scant courtesy to the wife of her own favourite Archbishop
+Parker. Nor would she suffer the Bishops, except as Peers, to meddle
+in affairs of State. A magnificent princess, every inch a queen, she
+could not forget that the English people had saved her life from the
+clutches of her sister, and it was for them, not for any Minister,
+courtier, or lover, that she really cared.
+
+Froude was no idolater of Elizabeth, and he became more unfavourable
+to her as he proceeded. He dwells minutely upon all her intrigues,
+in which she was as petty as in great matters she was grand. For her
+rival, Mary Stuart, he had neither respect nor mercy. To her
+intellect indeed, which was quite on a par with Elizabeth's, he does
+full justice. But neither her beauty nor her wit, neither her
+scholarship nor her statesmanship, neither her passion nor her
+courage, could blind him to her selfishness, her immorality, and the
+fact that she represented the Catholic cause. His account of her
+execution certainly lacks sentiment, and Mrs. Norton accused him of
+writing like a disappointed lover. His sympathies are with John
+Knox, and the Regent Murray, and Maitland of Lethington. But the man
+who believes that Mary was not concerned in the murder of her
+husband will believe anything, even that she did not reward the
+murderer of her brother, or that she would have spared Elizabeth if
+Elizabeth had been in her power. And at least Froude does not, like
+some more modern writers, degrade her to the level of a kitchen
+wench. Froude's Elizabeth was the subject of bitter, hostile,
+sometimes violent, criticism in The Saturday Review, the property of
+an ardent High Churchman, Beresford Hope. In the next chapter I
+shall deal with these articles at more length. It is enough to say
+here that they were directed not merely at Froude's accuracy as an
+historian, but at his truthfulness as a man, suggesting that the
+mode in which he had manipulated authorities accessible to every one
+threw grave doubts upon his version of what he read at Simancas.
+Froude knew very well that he should make enemies. His belief that
+history had been cericalised, and required to be laicised, was
+regarded as peculiarly offensive in one who had been himself
+ordained.
+
+Mary Stuart, moreover, had stalwart champions beyond the border who
+were neither clerical nor ecclesiastical. "I fear," Froude wrote on
+the 22nd of May, 1862, to his Scottish friend Skelton, who was
+himself much interested in the subject--"I fear my book will bring
+all your people about my ears. Mary Stuart, from my point of view,
+was something between Rachel and a pantheress."
+
+The success of the History had been long since assured, and each
+successive pair of volumes met with a cordial welcome. Many people
+disagreed with Froude on many points. He expected disagreement, and
+did not mind it. But no one could fail to see the evidence of  patient,
+thorough research which every chapter, almost every page,
+contains. Indeed, it might be said with justice, or at least with
+some plausibility, that the long and frequent extracts from the
+despatches of De Feria, de Quadra, de Silva, and Don Guereau,
+successively Ambassadors from Philip to Elizabeth, water-log the
+book, and make it too like a series of extracts with explanatory
+comments. Of Froude's own style there could not be two opinions. His
+bitterest antagonists were forced to admit that it was the
+perfection of easy, graceful narrative, without the majestic
+splendour of Gibbon, but also without the mechanical hardness of
+Macaulay. Froude did not stop deliberately, as other historians have
+stopped, to paint pictures or draw portraits, and there are few
+writers from whom it is more difficult to make typical or
+characteristic extracts. Yet, as I have already quoted from his
+account of Cranmer's execution, it may not be inappropriate that I
+should cite some of the thoughts suggested to him by the death of
+Knox. Morton's epitaph is well known.
+
+"There lies one," said the Earl over the coffin, "who never feared
+the face of mortal man." "Morton," says Froude, "spoke only of what
+he knew; the full measure of Knox's greatness neither he nor any man
+could then estimate. It is as we look back over that stormy time,
+and weigh the actors in it one against the other, that he stands out
+in his full proportions. No grander figure can be found, in the
+entire history of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox.
+Cromwell and Burghley rank beside him for the work which they
+effected, but, as politicians and statesmen, they had to labour with
+instruments which soiled their hands in touching them. In purity, in
+uprightness, in courage, truth and stainless honour, the Regent and
+Latimer were perhaps his equals; but Murray was intellectually far
+below him and the sphere of Latimer's influence was on a smaller
+scale. The time has come when English history may do justice to one
+but for whom the Reformation would have been overthrown among
+ourselves; for the spirit which Knox created saved Scotland; and if
+Scotland had been Catholic again, neither the wisdom of Elizabeth's
+Ministers, nor the teaching of her Bishops, nor her own chicaneries,
+would have preserved England from revolution. His was the voice that
+taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal
+in the sight of God with the proudest peer or prelate that had
+trampled on his forefathers. He was the one antagonist whom Mary
+Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive. He it was who had
+raised the poor commons of his country into a stern and rugged
+people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious and fanatical, but
+who nevertheless were men whom neither king, noble, nor priest could
+force again to submit to tyranny. And his reward has been the
+ingratitude of those who should have done most honour to his
+memory."
+
+The spirit of this fine passage may be due to the great Scotsman
+with whom Froude's name will always be inseparably associated. But
+Froude knew the subject as Carlyle did not pretend to know it, and
+his verdict is as authoritative as it is just. It is knowledge, even
+more than brilliancy, that these twelve volumes evince. Froude had
+mastered the sixteenth century as Macaulay mastered the seventeenth,
+with the same minute, patient industry. When he came to write he
+wrote with such apparent facility that those who did not know the
+meaning of historical research thought him shallow and superficial.
+
+The period during which Froude was studying the reign of Elizabeth
+must be pronounced the happiest of his life. He was a born
+historian, and loved research. He had opportunities of acquiring
+knowledge opened to no one before, and it concerned those events
+which above all others attracted him. His second wife was the most
+sympathetic of companions, thoroughly understanding all his moods.
+She was fond of society, and induced him to frequent it. Froude was
+disinclined to go out in the evening, and would, if he had been left
+to himself, have stayed at home. He wrote to Lady Salisbury: "I must
+trust to your kindness to make allowance for my old-fashioned ways.
+I am so much engaged in the week that I give my Sunday evenings to
+my children, and never go out." But when he was in company he talked
+better than almost any one else, and he had a magnetic power of
+fascination which men as well as women often found quite
+irresistible. Living in London, he saw people of all sorts, and the
+puritan sternness which lay at the root of his character was
+concealed by the cynical humour which gave zest to his conversation.
+He had not forgotten his native county, and in 1863 he took a house
+at Salcombe on the southern coast of Devonshire. Ringrone, which he
+rented from Lord Kingsale, is a beautiful spot, now a hotel, then
+remote from railways, and an ideal refuge for a student. "We have a
+sea like the Mediterranean," he tells Skelton, "and estuaries
+beautiful as Loch Fyne, the green water washing our garden wall, and
+boats and mackerel." Froude worked there, however, besides yachting,
+fishing, and shooting.
+
+In 1864, for instance, he "floundered all the summer among the
+extinct mine-shafts of Scotch politics--the most damnable set of
+pitfalls mortal man was ever set to blunder through in the dark."
+His study opened on the garden, from which the sea-view is one of
+the finest in England. Froude loved Devonshire folk, and enjoyed
+talking to them in their own dialect, or smoking with them on the
+shore. He was particularly fond of the indignant expostulation of a
+poor woman whose husband had been injured by his own chopper, and
+obliged in consequence to keep his bed. If, she said, it had been "a
+visitation of Providence, or the like of that there," he would have
+borne it patiently. "But to come upon a man in the wood-house" was
+not in the fitness of things. Froude's favourite places of worship
+in London were Westminster Abbey during Dean Stanley's time, and
+afterwards the Temple Church, as may be gathered from his Short
+Study on the Templars. In Devonshire he frequented an old-fashioned
+church where stringed instruments were still played, and was much
+delighted with the remark of a fiddler which he overheard. "Who is
+the King of glory?" had been given out as the anthem. While the
+fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the
+rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's the King of glory."
+
+As an editor Froude was tolerant and catholic. "On controverted
+points," he said, "I approve myself of the practice of the
+Reformation. When St. Paul's Cross pulpit was occupied one Sunday by
+a Lutheran, the next by a Catholic, the next by a Calvinist, all
+sides had a hearing, and the preachers knew that they would be
+pulled up before the same audience for what they might say." His own
+literary judgments were rather conventional. The mixture of classes
+in Clough's Bothie disturbed him. The genius of Matthew Arnold he
+had recognised at once, but then Arnold was a classical, academic
+poet. About Tennyson he agreed with the rest of the world, while
+Tennyson, who was a personal friend, paid him the great compliment
+of taking from him the subject of a poem and the material of a play.
+His prejudice against Browning's style, much as he liked Browning
+himself, was hard to overcome, and on this point he had a serious
+difference with his friend Skelton. "Browning's verse!" he exclaims.
+"With intellect, thought, power, grace, all the charms in detail
+which poetry should have, it rings after all like a bell of lead."
+This was in 1863, when Browning had published Men and Women, and
+Dramatic Lyrics. However, he admitted Skelton's article on the other
+side, and added, with magnificent candour, that "to this generation
+Browning's poetry is as uninteresting as Shakespeare's Sonnets were
+to the last century." The most fervent Browningite could have said
+no more than that. To Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads Froude was
+conspicuously fair. There was much in them which offended his
+Puritanism, but he was disgusted with the virulence of the critics,
+and he allowed Skelton to write in Fraser a qualified apology.
+
+"The Saturday Review temperament," he wrote, "is ten thousand
+thousand times more damnable than the worst of Swinburne's skits.
+Modern respectability is so utterly without God, faith, heart; it
+shows so singular an ingenuity in and injuring everything that is
+noble and good, and so systematic a preference for what is mean and
+paltry, that I am not surprised at a young fellow dashing his heels
+into the face of it .... When there is any kind of true genius, we
+have no right to drive it mad. We must deal with it wisely, justly,
+fairly."*
+
+--
+* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 137.
+--
+
+Froude was an excellent editor; appreciative, discriminating, and
+alert. He prided himself on Carlyle's approval, though perhaps
+Carlyle was not the best judge of such things. His energy was
+multifarious. Besides his History and his magazine, he found time
+for a stray lecture at odd times, and he could always reckon upon a
+good audience. His discourse at the Royal Institution in February,
+1864, on "The Science of History," for which he was "called an
+atheist," is in the main a criticism of Buckle, the one really
+scientific historian. According to Buckle, the history of mankind
+was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the
+past that made the impossibility of predicting the future. Great men
+were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle
+more erratic in their behaviour. Political economy was history in
+little, illustrating the regularity of human, like all other
+natural, forces. But can we predict historical events, as we can
+predict an eclipse? That is Froude's answer to Buckle, in the form
+of a question.
+
+"Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he
+lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the
+feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had
+grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was
+to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as Napoleon's,
+are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made
+the greatest progress are the arts of destruction." It is difficult
+to see the atheism in all this, but the common sense is plain
+enough. Froude belonged to the school of literary historians, such
+as were Thucydides and Tacitus, Gibbon and Finlay, not to the school
+of Buckle, or, as we should now say, of Professor Bury.
+
+In 1865 Froude removed from Clifton Place, Hyde Park, to Onslow
+Gardens in South Kensington, where he lived for the next quarter of
+a century. In 1868 the students of St. Andrews chose him to be Lord
+Rector of the University, and on the 23rd of March, 1869, he
+delivered his Inaugural Address on Education, which compared the
+plain living and high thinking of the Scottish Universities with the
+expensive and luxurious idleness that he remembered at Oxford.
+Froude was delighted with the compliment the students had paid him,
+and they were equally charmed with their Rector. In fact, his visit
+to St. Andrews produced in 1869 a suggestion that he should become
+the Parliamentary representative of that University and of
+Edinburgh. But the injustice of the law as it then stood
+disqualified him as a candidate. His deacon's orders, the shadowy
+remnant of a mistaken choice, stood in his way. Next year, in 1870,
+Bouverie's Act passed, and Froude was one of the first to take
+advantage of it by becoming again, what he had really never ceased
+to be, a layman. As he did not enter the House of Commons, it is
+idle to speculate on what might have been his political career.
+Probably it would have been undistinguished. He was not a good
+speaker, and he was a bad party man. His butler, who had been long
+with him, and knew him well, was once asked by a canvassing agent
+what his master's politics were. "Well," he said reflectively, "when
+the Liberals are in, Mr. Froude is sometimes a Conservative. When
+the Conservatives are in, Mr. Froude is always a Liberal." His own
+master, Carlyle, had been in early life an ardent reformer, and had
+hoped great things from the Act of 1832. Perhaps he did not know
+very clearly what he expected. At any rate he was disappointed, and,
+though he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Peel alter the abolition
+of the Corn Laws, he regarded the Reform Act of 1867 with indignant
+disgust.
+
+Froude had a fitful and uncertain admiration for Disraeli. Gladstone
+he never liked or trusted, and did not take the trouble to
+understand. He had been brought up to despise oratory, he had caught
+from Carlyle a horror of democracy, he disliked the Anglo-Catholic
+party in the Church of England, and Gladstone's financial genius was
+out of his line. The Liberal Government of 1868 was in his opinion
+criminally indifferent to the Colonies. An earnest advocate of
+Federation, he did not see that the best way of retaining colonial
+loyalty was to preserve colonial independence intact. Nevertheless
+Froude was a pioneer of the modern movement, still in progress, for
+a closer union with the scattered parts of the British Empire. He
+feared that the Colonies would go if some effort were not made to
+retain them, and he turned over in his mind the various means of
+building up a federal system. Although Canadian Federation was
+emphatically Canadian in its origin, and had been adopted in
+principle by Cardwell during the Government of Lord Russell, it was
+Lord Carnarvon who carried it out, and he had no warmer supporter
+than Froude.
+
+Of Froude's favourite recreations at this time the best account is
+to be found in his two Short Studies on A Fortnight in Kerry. From
+1868 to 1870 he rented from Lord Lansdowne a place called Derreen,
+thirty-six miles from Killarney, and seventeen from Kenmare, where
+he spent the best part of the summer and autumn. If Froude did not
+altogether understand the Irish people, at least the Irish
+Catholics, and had no sympathy with their political aspirations, he
+loved their humour, and the scenery of "the most beautiful island in
+the world" had been familiar to him from his early manhood. In one
+of his youthful rambles he had been struck down by small-pox, and
+nursed with a devotion which he never forgot. Yet between him and
+the Celt, as between him and the Catholic, there was a mysterious,
+impassable barrier. They had not the same fundamental ideas of right
+and wrong. They did not in very truth worship the same God. But of
+Froude and the Irish I shall have to speak more at length hereafter.
+In Kerry he enjoyed himself, while at the same time he finished his
+History of England, and his description of the country is
+enchanting.
+
+"A glance out of the window in the morning showed that I had not
+overrated the general charm of the situation. The colours were
+unlike those of any mountain scenery to which I was accustomed
+elsewhere. The temperature is many degrees higher than that of the
+Scotch highlands. The Gulf Stream impinges full upon the mouths of
+its long bays. Every tide carries the flood of warm water forty
+miles inland, and the vegetation consequently is rarely or never
+checked by frost even two thousand feet above the sea-level. Thus
+the mountains have a greenness altogether peculiar, stretches of
+grass as rich as water-meadows reaching between the crags and
+precipices to the very summits. The rock, chiefly old red sandstone,
+is purple. The heather, of which there are enormous masses, is in
+many places waist deep." Yachting and fishing, fishing and yachting,
+were the staple amusements at Derreen. Nothing was more
+characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air.
+Sport, in the proper sense of the term, he also loved. "I always
+consider," he said, "that the proudest moment of my life was, when
+sliding down a shale heap, I got a right and left at woodcocks." For
+luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never
+cared at all. But let him once more explain himself in his own
+words. "I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my
+five brace of grouse. I see no amusement in dawdling over a lowland
+moor where the packs are as thick as chickens in a poultry-yard. I
+like better than most things a day with my own dogs in scattered
+covers, when I know not what may rise--a woodcock, an odd pheasant,
+a snipe in the out-lying willow-bed, and perhaps a mallard or a
+teal. A hare or two falls in agreeably when the mistress of the
+house takes an interest in the bag. I detest battues and hot
+corners, and slaughter for slaughter's sake. I wish every tenant in
+England had his share in amusements which in moderation are good for
+us all, and was allowed to shoot such birds or beasts as were bred
+on his own farm, any clause in his lease to the contrary
+notwithstanding." Considering that this passage was written ten
+years before the Ground Game Act, it must be admitted that the
+sentiment is remarkably liberal. The chief interest of these
+papers,* however, is not political, but personal. They show what
+Froude's natural tastes were, the tastes of a sportsman and a
+country gentleman. He had long outgrown the weakness of his boyhood,
+and his physical health was robust. With a firm foot and a strong
+head he walked freely over cliffs where a false step would have
+meant a fall of a thousand feet. No man of letters was ever more
+devoted to exercise and sport. Though subject, like most men, and
+all editors, to fits of despondency, he had a sound mind in a
+healthy frame, and his pessimism was purely theoretical.
+
+--
+* Short Studies, vol. ii. pp. 217-308.
+--
+
+Froude's History, the great work of his life, was completed in 1870.
+He deliberately chose, after the twelve volumes, to leave Elizabeth
+at the height of her power, mistress of the seas, with Spain crushed
+at her feet. As he says himself, in the opening paragraph of his own
+Conclusion, "Chess-players, when they have brought their game to a
+point at which the result can be foreseen with certainty, regard
+their contest as ended, and sweep the pieces from the board." Froude
+had accomplished his purpose. He had rewritten the story of the
+Reformation. He had proved that the Church of England, though in a
+sense it dated from St. Austin of Canterbury, became under Henry
+VIII. a self-contained institution, independent of Rome and subject
+to the supremacy of the Crown.
+
+Elizabeth altered the form of words in which her father had
+expressed his ecclesiastical authority; but the substance was in
+both cases the same. The sovereign was everything. The Bishop of
+Rome was nothing. There has never been in the Church of England
+since the divorce of Katharine any power to make a Bishop without
+the authority of the Crown, or to change a doctrine without the
+authority of Parliament, nor has any layman been legally subject to
+temporal punishment by the ecclesiastical courts. Convocation cannot
+touch an article or a formulary. King, Lords, and Commons can make
+new formularies or abolish the old. The laity owe no allegiance to
+the Canons, and in every theological suit the final appeal is to the
+King in Council, now the Judicial Committee. Since the accession of
+Elizabeth divine service has been performed in English, and the
+English Bible has been open to every one who can read. Yet there are
+people who talk as if the Reformation meant nothing, was nothing,
+never occurred at all. This theory, like the shallow sentimentalism
+which made an innocent saint and martyr of Mary Stuart, has never
+recovered from the crushing onslaught of Froude.
+
+Mr. Swinburne in the Encyclopaedia Britannica reduces the latter
+theory to an absurdity, by demonstrating that if Mary was innocent
+she was a fool. In his defence of Elizabeth Froude stops short of
+many admirers. He was disgusted by her feminine weakness for
+masculine flattery; he dwells with almost tedious minuteness upon
+her smallest intrigues; he exposes her parsimonious ingratitude to
+her dauntless and unrivalled seamen. Yet for all that he brings out
+the vital difference between her and Mary Tudor, between the
+Protestant and Catholic systems of government. Elizabeth boasted,
+and boasted truly, that she did not persecute opinion. If people
+were good citizens and loyal subjects, it was all the same to her
+whether they went to church or to mass. Had it been possible to
+adopt and apply in the sixteenth century the modern doctrine of
+contemptuous indifference to sectarian quarrels, there was not one
+of her subjects more capable of appreciating and acting upon it than
+the great Queen herself. But in that case she would have estranged
+her friends without conciliating her opponents. She would have
+forfeited her throne and her life. Pius V. had not merely
+excommunicated her, which was a barren and ineffective threat, a
+telum imbelle sine ictu; he had also purported to depose her as a
+heretic, and to release her subjects from the duty of allegiance.
+Another Vicar of Christ, Gregory XIII., went farther. He intimated,
+not obscurely, that whosoever removed such a monster from the world
+would be doing God's service. This at least was no idle menace.
+Those great leaders of Protestantism in Europe, Coligny, Murray,
+William the Silent, were successively murdered within a few years.
+That was, as Fra Paolo said when he saw the dagger (stilus) which
+had wounded him, the style (stylus) of the Roman Court. It is all
+very well to say that Gregory was a blasphemous, murderous old
+bigot, and might have been left to the God of justice and mercy, who
+would deal with him in His own good time. Before that time came,
+Elizabeth might have been in her grave, Mary Stuart might have been
+on the English throne, and the liberties of England might have been
+as the liberties of Spain.
+
+Elizabeth never felt personal fear. But she was not a private
+individual. She was an English sovereign, and the keynote of all her
+subtle, intricate, tortuous policy was the resolute determination,
+from which she never flinched, that England should be independent,
+spiritually as well as politically independent, of a foreign yoke.
+Her connection with the Protestants was political, not theological,
+for doctrinally she was farther from Geneva than from Rome. Her own
+Bishops she despised, not unjustly, as time-servers, calling them
+"doctors," not prelates. Although she did not really believe that
+any human person, or any human formula, was required between the
+Almighty and His creatures, she preferred the mass and the breviary
+to the Book of Common Prayer. The Inquisition was the one part of
+the Catholic system which she really abhorred. For the first twenty
+years of her reign mass was celebrated in private houses with
+impunity, though to celebrate it was against the law. No part of her
+policy is more odious to modern notions of tolerance and
+enlightenment than prohibition of the mass. Nothing shows more
+clearly the importance of understanding the mental atmosphere of a
+past age before we attempt to judge those who lived in it. Even
+Oliver Cromwell, fifty years after Elizabeth's death, declared that
+he would not tolerate the mass, and in general principles of
+religious freedom he was far ahead of his age. Cromwell no doubt,
+unlike Elizabeth, was a Protestant in the religious sense. But that
+was not his reason. The mass to him, and still more to Elizabeth,
+was a definite symbol of political disaffection. It was a rallying
+point for those who held that a heretical sovereign had no right to
+reign, and might lawfully be deposed, if not worse. Between the
+Catholics of our day and the Catholics of Elizabeth's time there is
+a great gulf fixed. What has fixed it is a question too complex to
+be discussed in this place. Catholics still revere the memory of
+Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who gave his blessing
+to Campian and Parsons on their way to stir up rebellion in England,
+as well as in Ireland, and to assassinate Elizabeth if opportunity
+should serve. God said, "Thou shall do no murder." The Pope,
+however, thought that God had spoken too broadly, and that some
+qualification was required. The sixth commandment could not have
+been intended for the protection of heretics; and the Jesuits, if
+they did not inspire, at least believed him. Campian is regarded by
+thousands of good men and women, who would not hurt a fly, as a
+martyr to the faith, and to the faith as he conceived it he was a
+martyr. He endured torture and death without flinching rather than
+acknowledge that Elizabeth was lawful sovereign over the whole
+English realm. His courage was splendid. There never, for the matter
+of that, was a braver man than Guy Fawkes. But when Campian
+pretended that his mission to England was purely religious he was
+tampering with words in order to deceive. To him the removal of
+Elizabeth would have been a religious act. The Queen did all she
+could to make him save his life by recantation, even applying the
+cruel and lawless machinery of the rack. If his errand had been
+merely to preach what he regarded as Catholic truth, she would have
+let him go, as she checked the persecuting tendencies of her Bishops
+over and over again. But it was as much her duty to defend England
+from the invasion of the Jesuits as to defend her from the invasion
+of the Spanish Armada. Both indeed were parts of one and the same
+enterprise, the forcible reduction of England to dependence upon the
+Catholic powers. Although in God's good providence it was foiled, it
+very nearly succeeded; and if Elizabeth had not removed Campian,
+Campian might, as Babington certainly would, have remove her.
+
+The Pope had been directly concerned in the massacre of St.
+Bartholomew, and his great ally, Philip II., is said to have laughed
+for the first time when he heard of it. More than a hundred years
+afterwards the pious Bossuet thanked God for the frightful slaughter
+of the Huguenots which followed the revocation of the Edict of
+Nantes. While Mary Tudor burnt poor and humble persons who could be
+no possible danger to the State because they would not renounce the
+only form of Christian faith they had ever known, Elizabeth executed
+for treason powerful and influential men sent by the Pope to kill
+her. When, after many long years, she reluctantly consented to Mary
+Stuart's death on the scaffold, Mary had been implicated in a plot
+to take her life and succeed her as queen. Mary would have made much
+shorter work of her. If that is called persecution, the word ceases
+to have any meaning.
+
+Froude quotes with approval, as well he might, the words of
+Campian's admiring biographer Richard Simpson, himself a Catholic, a
+most learned and accomplished man. "The eternal truths of
+Catholicism were made the vehicle for opinions about the authority
+of the Holy See which could not be held by Englishmen loyal to the
+Government; and true patriotism united to a false religion overcame
+the true  religion wedded to opinions that were unpatriotic in
+regard to the liberties of Englishmen, and treasonable to the
+English Government." In those days there was only one kind of
+English Government possible; the Government of Elizabeth, Burghley,
+and Walsingham. Parliamentary Government did not exist. Even the
+right of free speech in the House of Commons was never recognised by
+the Queen. If the English Government had fallen, England would have
+been at the mercy of a Papal legate. Protestantism was synonymous
+with patriotism, and good Catholics could not be good Englishmen
+while there was a heretical sovereign on the throne. After the
+Armada things were different. Spain was crushed. Sixtus V. was not a
+man to waste money, which he loved, in support of a losing cause.
+What Froude wrote to establish, and succeeded in establishing, was
+that between 1529 and 1588 the Reformation saved England from the
+tyranny of Rome and the proud foot of a Spanish conqueror.
+
+The true hero of Froude's History is not Henry VIII., but Cecil, the
+firm, incorruptible, sagacious Minister who saved Elizabeth's
+throne, and made England the leading anti-Catholic country. Of a
+greater man than Cecil, John Knox, he was however almost an
+idolater. He considered that Knox surpassed in worldly wisdom even
+Maitland of Lethington, who was certainly not hampered by
+theological prejudice. With Puritanism itself he had much natural
+affinity, and as a determinist the philosophical side of Calvinism
+attracted him as strongly as it attracted Jonathan Edwards. Froude
+combined, perhaps illogically, a belief in predestination with a
+deep sense of moral duty and the responsibility of man. Every reader
+of his History must have been struck by his respect for all the
+manly virtues, even in those with whom he has otherwise no sympathy,
+and his corresponding contempt for weakness and self-indulgence. In
+his second and final Address to the students of St. Andrews he took
+Calvinism as his theme.* By this time Froude had acquired a great
+name, and was known all over the world as the most brilliant of
+living English historians. Although his uncompromising treatment of
+Mary Stuart had provoked remonstrance, his eulogy of Knox and Murray
+was congenial to the Scottish temperament, with which he had much in
+common. It was indeed from St. Andrews alone that he had hitherto
+received any public recognition. He was grateful to the students,
+and gave them of his best, so that this lecture may be taken as an
+epitome of his moral and religious belief.
+
+--
+* Short Studies, vol. ii. pp. 1-60.
+--
+
+"Calvinism," he told these lads, "was the spirit which rises in
+revolt against untruth; the spirit which, as I have shown you, has
+appeared and reappeared, and in due time will appear again, unless
+God be a delusion and man be as the beasts that perish. For it is but
+the inflashing upon the conscience with overwhelming force of the
+nature and origin of the laws by which mankind are governed--laws
+which exist, whether we acknowledge them or whether we deny them, and
+will have their way, to our weal or woe, according to the attitude in
+which we please to place ourselves towards them--inherent, like
+electricity, in the nature of things, not made by us, not to be
+altered by us, but to be discerned and obeyed by us at our
+everlasting peril." The essence of Froude's belief, not otherwise
+dogmatic, was a constant sense of God's presence and overruling
+power. Sceptical his mind in many ways was. The two things he never
+doubted, and would not doubt, were theism and the moral law. Without
+God there would be no religion. Without morality there would be no
+difference between right and wrong. This simple creed was sufficient
+for him, as it has been sufficient for some of the greatest men who
+ever lived. Epicureanism in all its forms was alien to his nature.
+"It is not true," he said at St. Andrews, "that goodness is
+synonymous with happiness. The most perfect being who ever trod the
+soil of this planet was called the Man of Sorrows. If happiness means
+absence of care and inexperience of painful emotion, the best
+securities for it are a hard heart and a good digestion. If morality
+has no better foundation than a tendency to promote happiness, its
+sanction is but a feeble uncertainty." Remembering where he stood,
+and speaking from the fulness of his mind, Froude exclaimed: "Norman
+Leslie did not kill Cardinal Beaton down in the castle yonder because
+he was a Catholic, but because he was a murderer. The Catholics chose
+to add to their already incredible creed a fresh article, that they
+were entitled to hang and burn those who differed from them; and in
+this quarrel the Calvinists, Bible in hand, appealed to the God of
+battles."
+
+The importance of this striking Address is largely due to the fact
+that it was composed immediately after the History had been finished,
+and may be regarded as an epilogue. It breathes the spirit, though it
+discards the trappings, of Puritanism and the Reformation. Luther
+"was one of the grandest men that ever lived on earth. Never was any
+one more loyal to the light that was in him, braver, truer, or wider-
+minded in the noblest sense of the word." About Calvinism Froude
+disagreed with Carlyle, who loved to use the old formulas, though he
+certainly did not use them in the old sense. "It is astonishing to
+find," Froude wrote to Skelton, "how little in ordinary life the
+Calvinists talked or wrote about doctrine. The doctrine was never
+more than the dress. The living creature was wholly moral and
+political--so at least I think myself." Such language was almost
+enough to bring John Knox out of his grave. Could he have heard it,
+he would have felt that he was being confounded with Maitland, who
+thought God "ane nursery bogill." But though the attempt to represent
+Knox or Calvin as undogmatic may be fanciful, it is the purest,
+noblest, and most permanent part of Calvinism that Froude invited the
+students of St. Andrews to cherish and preserve.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+FROUDE AND FREEMAN
+
+Froude's reputation as an historian was seriously damaged for a time
+by the persistent attacks of The Saturday Review. It is difficult for
+the present generation to understand the influence which that
+celebrated periodical exercised, or the terror which it inspired,
+forty years ago. The first editor, Douglas Cook, was a master of his
+craft, and his colleagues included the most brilliant writers of the
+day. Matthew Arnold, who was not one of them, paid them the
+compliment of treating them as the special champions of Philistia,
+the chosen garrison of Gath. On most subjects they were fairly
+impartial, holding that there was nothing new and nothing true, and
+that if there were it wouldn't matter. But the proprietor* of the
+paper at that time was a High Churchman, and on ecclesiastical
+questions he put forward his authority. Within that sphere he would
+not tolerate either neutrality or difference of opinion. To him, and
+to those who thought like him, Froude's History was anathema. Their
+detested Reformation was set upon its legs again; Bishop Fisher was
+removed from his pedestal; the Church of England, which since Keble's
+assize sermon had been the Church of the Fathers, was shown to be
+Protestant in its character and Parliamentary in its constitution.
+The Oxford Movement seemed to be discredited, and that by a man who
+had once been enlisted in its service. It was necessary that the
+presumptuous iconoclast should be put down, and taught not to meddle
+with things which were sacred.
+
+--
+* Alexander James Beresford Hope, some time member for the University
+of Cambridge.
+--
+
+From the first The Saturday Review was hostile, but it was not till
+1864 that the campaign became systematic. 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. It would be hard to say that
+one historian should not review the work of another; but we may at
+least expect that he should do so with sympathetic consideration for
+the difficulties which all historians encounter, and should not pass
+sentence until he has all the evidence before him. What were
+Freeman's qualifications for delivering an authoritative judgment on
+the work of Froude? Though not by any means so learned a man as his
+tone of conscious superiority induced people to suppose, he knew his
+own period very well indeed, and his acquaintance with that period,
+perhaps also his veneration for Stubbs, had given him a natural
+prejudice in favour of the Church. For the Church of the middle ages,
+the undivided Church of Christ, was even in its purely mundane aspect
+the salvation of society, the safeguard of law and order, the last
+restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the wretched.
+
+Historically, if not doctrinally, Freeman was a High Churchman, and
+his ecclesiastical leanings were a great advantage to him in dealing
+with the eleventh century. It was far otherwise when he came to write
+of the sixteenth. If the Church of the sixteenth century had been
+like the Church of the eleventh century, or the twelfth, or the
+thirteenth, there would have been no Reformation, and no Froude.
+Freeman lived, and loved, the controversial life. Sharing Gladstone's
+politics both in Church and State, he was in all secular matters a
+strong Liberal, and his hatred of Disraeli struck even Liberals as
+bordering on fanaticism. Yet his hatred of Disraeli was as nothing to
+his hatred of Froude. By nature "so over-violent or over-civil that
+every man with him was God or devil," he had erected Froude into his
+demon incarnate. Other men might be, Froude must be, wrong. He
+detested Froude's opinions. 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. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more
+about Freeman's qualifications for the task which he so lightly and
+eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not
+incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly
+to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for
+his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of
+April, 1857 [1867?], "You have found me out about the sixteenth
+century. I fancy that, from endlessly belabouring Froude, I get
+credit for knowing more of those times than I do. But one can
+belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge, and you are
+quite right when you say that I have 'never thrown the whole force of
+my mind on that portion of history.'"* These words pour a flood of
+light on the temper and knowledge with which Freeman must have
+entered on what he really seemed to consider a crusade. His object
+was to belabour Froude. His own acquaintance with the subject was, as
+he says, "very small," but sufficient for enabling him to dispose
+satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient toil in
+thorough and exhaustive research. On another occasion, also writing
+to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, "I find I have a
+reputation with some people for knowing the sixteenth century, of
+which I am profoundly ignorant."+
+
+--
+* Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman, vol. i. p. 381.
++ ibid. p. 382.
+--
+
+It does not appear to have struck him that he had done his best in
+The Saturday Review to make people think that, as Froude's critic, he
+deserved the reputation which he thus frankly and in private
+disclaims.
+
+Another curious piece of evidence has come to light. After Freeman's
+death his library was transferred to Owens College, Manchester, and
+there, among his other books, is his copy of Froude's History. He
+once said himself, in reference to his criticism of Froude, "In truth
+there is no kind of temper in the case, but a strong sense of
+amusement in bowling down one thing after another." Let us see. Here
+are some extracts from his marginal notes. "A lie, teste Stubbs," as
+if Stubbs were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any
+more than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or original
+documents. Another entry is "Beast," and yet another is "Bah!" "May I
+live to embowel James Anthony Froude" is the pious aspiration with
+which he has adorned another page. "Can Froude understand honesty?"
+asks this anxious inquirer; and again, "Supposing Master Froude were
+set to break stones, feed pigs, or do anything else but write
+paradoxes, would he not curse his day?" Along with such graceful
+compliments as "You've found that out since you wrote a book against
+your own father," "Give him as slave to Thirlwall," there may be seen
+the culminating assertion, "Froude is certainly the vilest brute that
+ever wrote a book." Yet there was "no kind of temper in the case,"
+and "only a strong sense of amusement." I suppose it must have amused
+Freeman to call another historian a vile brute. But it is fortunate
+that there was no temper in the case. For if there had, it would have
+been a very bad temper indeed.
+
+In this judicial frame of mind did Freeman set himself to review
+successive volumes of Froude's Elizabeth. Froude did not always
+correct his proofs with mechanical accuracy, and this gave Freeman an
+advantage of which he was not slow to avail himself. "Mr. Froude," he
+says in The Saturday Review for the 30th of January, 1864, "talks of
+a French attack on Guienne, evidently meaning Guisnes. It is hardly
+possible that this can be a misprint." It was of course a misprint,
+and could hardly have been anything else. Guisnes was a town, and
+could be attacked. Guienne was a province, and would have been
+invaded. Guienne had been a French province since the Hundred Years'
+War, and therefore the French would neither have attacked nor invaded
+it. As if all this were not enough to show the nature and source of
+the error, the word was correctly printed in the marginal heading. In
+the same article, after quoting Froude's denial that a sentence
+described by the Spanish Ambassador de Silva as having been passed
+upon a pirate could have been pronounced in an English court of
+justice, Freeman asked, "Is it possible that Mr. Froude has never
+heard of the peine forte et dure?"  Freeman of course knew it to be
+impossible. He knew also that the peine forte et dure was inflicted
+for refusing to plead, and that this pirate, by de Silva's own
+account, had been found guilty. But he wanted to suggest that Froude
+was an ignoramus, and for the purpose of beating a dog one stick is
+as good as another.
+
+Freeman's trump card, however, was the Bishop of Lexovia, and that
+brilliant victory he never forgot. Froude examined the strange and
+startling allegation, cited by Macaulay in his introductory chapter,
+that during the reign of Henry VIII. seventy-two thousand persons
+perished by the hand of the public executioner. He traced it to the
+Commentaries of Cardan, an astrologer, not a very trustworthy
+authority, who had himself heard it, he said, from "an unknown Bishop
+of Lexovia." "Unknown," observed Freeman, with biting sarcasm, "to no
+one who has studied the history of Julius Caesar or of Henry II."
+Froude had not been aware that Lexovia was the ancient name for the
+modern Lisieux, and for twenty years he was periodically reminded of
+the fact. Had he followed Freeman's methods, he might have asked
+whether his critic really supposed that there were bishops in the
+time of Julius Caesar. Freeman failed to see that the point was not
+the modern name of Lexovia, but the number of persons put to death by
+Henry, on which Froude had shown the worthlessness of popular
+tradition.
+
+Bishop Hooper was burnt at Gloucester in the Cathedral Close. Froude
+describes the scene of the execution as "an open space opposite the
+College." That shows, says Freeman, that Froude did not, like
+Macaulay, visit the scenes of the events he described. Perhaps he did
+not visit Gloucester, or even Guisnes. That  Freeman's general
+conclusion was entirely wide of the mark a single letter from Froude
+to Skelton is enough to show. "I want you some day," he wrote on the
+12th of December, 1863, "to go with me to Loch Leven, and then to
+Stirling, Perth, and Glasgow. Before I go farther I must have a
+personal knowledge of Loch Leven Castle and the grounds at Langside.
+Also I must look at the street at Linlithgow where Murray was shot."*
+Thus Freeman's amiable inference was the exact reverse of the truth.
+
+--
+* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 131.
+--
+
+Some of Freeman's methods, however, were a good deal less scrupulous
+than this. By way of bringing home to Froude "ecclesiastical
+malignity of the most frantic kind," he cited the case of Bishop
+Coxe. "To Hatton," Froude wrote in his text,+ "was given also the
+Naboth's vineyard of his neighbour the Bishop of Ely." In a long note
+he commented upon the Bishop's inclination to resist, and showed how
+the "proud prelate" was "brought to reason by means so instructive on
+Elizabeth's mode of conducting business when she had not Burghley or
+Walsingham to keep her in order that" the whole account is given at
+length in the words of Lord North, whom she employed for the purpose.
+This letter from Lord North is extremely valuable evidence. Froude
+read it and transcribed it from the collection of manuscripts at
+Hatfield. As an idle rumour that Froude spent only one day at
+Hatfield obtained currency after his death, it may be convenient to
+mention here that the work which he did there in copying manuscripts
+alone must have occupied him at least a month. Now let us see what
+use Freeman made of the information thus given him by Froude.
+"Meanwhile," he says in The Saturday Review for the 22nd of January,
+1870, "Mr. Froude is conveniently silent as to the infamous tricks
+played by Elizabeth and her courtiers in order to make estates for
+court favourites out of Episcopal lands. A line or two of text is
+indeed given to the swindling transaction by which Bishop Coxe of Ely
+was driven to surrender his London house to Sir Christopher Hatton.
+But why? Because the story gives Mr. Froude an opportunity of quoting
+at full length a letter from Lord North to the Bishop in which all
+the Bishop's real or pretended enormities are strongly set forth."
+Here follows a short extract from the letter, in which North accused
+Coxe of grasping covetousness. Now it is perfectly obvious to any one
+having the whole letter before him, as Freeman had, that Froude
+quoted it with the precisely opposite aim of denouncing the conduct
+of Elizabeth to the Bishop, whom he compares with Naboth. Freeman
+must have heard of Naboth. He must have known what Froude meant. Yet
+the whole effect of his comments must have been to make the readers
+of The Saturday Review think that Froude was attacking the Church,
+when he was attacking the Crown for its conduct to the Church.
+
+--
++ History of England, vol. xi. p. 321.
+--
+
+Freeman seemed to glory in his own deficiencies, and was almost as
+proud of what he did not know as of what he did. Thus, for instance,
+Froude, a born man of letters, was skilful and accomplished in the
+employment of metaphors. Freeman could no more handle a metaphor than
+he could fish with a dry fly. He therefore, without the smallest
+consciousness of being absurd, condemned Froude for doing what he was
+unable to do himself, and even wrote, in the name of The Saturday
+Review, "We are no judges of metaphors," though there must surely
+have been some one on the staff who knew something about them.
+
+Froude had a mode of treating documents which is open to
+animadversion. He did not, as Mr. Pollard happily puts it in the
+Dictionary of National Biography, "respect the sanctity of inverted
+commas." They ought to imply textual quotation, Froude used them for
+his abridgments, openly proclaiming the fact that he had abridged,
+and therefore deceiving no one. Freeman's comment upon this
+irregularity is extremely characteristic. "Now we will not call this
+dishonest; we do not believe that Mr. Froude is intentionally
+dishonest in this or any other matter; but then it is because he does
+not know what literary honesty and dishonesty are." There is no such
+thing as literary honesty, or scientific honesty, or political
+honesty. There is only one kind of honesty, and an honest man does
+not misrepresent an opponent, as Freeman misrepresented Froude. To
+call a man a liar is an insult. To say that is not a liar because he
+does not know the difference between truth and falsehood is a
+cowardly insult. But Froude was soon avenged. Freeman gave himself
+into his adversary's hands. "Sometimes," he wrote,* "Mr. Froude gives
+us the means of testing him. Let us try a somewhat remarkable
+passage. He tells us "It had been argued in the Admiralty Courts that
+the Prince of Orange, 'having his principality of his title in
+France, might make lawful war against the Duke of Alva,* and that the
+Queen would violate the rules of neutrality if she closed her ports
+against his cruisers." Then follows a Latin passage from which the
+English is paraphrased. "We presume," continues Freeman in fancied
+triumph, "that the words put by Mr. Froude in inverted commas are
+not Lord Burghiey's summary of the Latin extract in the note, but Mr.
+Froude's own, for it is utterly impossible that Burghley could have
+so misconceived a piece of plain Latin, or have so utterly
+misunderstood the position of any contemporary prince." Presumption
+indeed. I have before me a photograph of Burghley's own words in his
+own writing examined by Froude at the Rolls House. They are "Question
+whether the Prince of Orange, being a free prince of the Empire, and
+also having his principality of his title in France, might not make a
+just war against the Duke of Alva." Froude abridged, and wrote
+"lawful" for "just." But the words which Freeman says that Burghley
+could not have used are the words which he did use, and the
+explanation is simple enough. Freeman was Freeman. Burghley was a
+statesman. Burghley of course knew perfectly well that Orange was not
+subject to the King of France, not part of his dominions, which is
+Freeman's objection. He called it in France because it, and the Papal
+possessions of Venaissin adjoining it, were surrounded by French
+territory. He called it "in France," as we should call the Republic
+of San Marino "in Italy" now. Freeman might have ascertained what
+Burghley did write if he had cared to know. He did not care to know.
+He was "belabouring Froude."
+
+--
+* Saturday Review, Nov. 24th, 1866.
+--
+
+Once Froude was weak enough to accept Freeman's correction on a small
+point, only to find that Freeman was entirely in error, and that he
+himself had been right all along. After much vituperative language
+not worth repeating, Freeman wrote in The Saturday Review for the 5th
+of February, 1870, these genial words, "As it is, there is nothing to
+be done but to catch Mr. Froude whenever he comes from his hiding-
+place at Simancas into places in which we can lie in wait for him."
+The sneer at original research is characteristic of Freeman. One can
+almost hear his self-satisfied laugh as he wrote this unlucky
+sentence, "The thing is too grotesque to talk about seriously; but
+can we trust a single uncertified detail from the hands of a man who
+throughout his story of the Armada always calls the Ark Royal the Ark
+Raleigh? ... It is the sort of blunder which so takes away one's
+breath that one thinks for the time that it must be right. We do not
+feel satisfied till we have turned to our Camden and seen 'Ark Regis'
+staring us full in the face." Freeman did not know the meaning of
+historical research as conducted by a real scholar like Froude.
+Froude had not gone to Camden, who in Freeman's eyes represented the
+utmost stretch of Elizabethan learning. If Freeman had had more
+natural shrewdness, it might have occurred to him that the name of a
+great seaman was not an unlikely name for a ship. But he could never
+fall lightly, and heavily indeed did he fall on this occasion. With
+almost incredible fatuity, he wrote, "The puzzle of guessing how
+Mr. Froude got at so grotesque a union of words as 'Ark Raleigh'
+fades before the greater puzzle of guessing what idea he attached to
+the words 'Ark Raleigh' when he had got them together." When Freeman
+was most hopelessly wrong he always began to parody Macaulay.
+Corruptio optimi pessima. "Ark Raleigh" means Raleigh's ship, and
+Froude took the name, "Ark Rawlie" as it was then spelt, from the
+manuscripts at the Rolls House. He was of course right, and Freeman
+was wrong. But that is not all. Freeman could easily have put himself
+right if he had chosen to take the trouble. Edwards's Life of Raleigh
+appeared in 1868, and a copy of it is in Freeman's library at Owens
+College. Edwards gives an account of the Ark Raleigh, which was built
+for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh advancing two hundred pounds.
+Freeman, however, need not have read this book to find out the truth.
+For "the Ark Raleigh" occurs fourteen times in a Calendar of
+Manuscripts from 1581 to 1590, published by Robert Lemon in 1865.
+When Freeman was brought to book, and taxed with this gross blunder,
+he pleaded that he "did a true verdict give according to such
+evidence as came before him." The implied analogy is misleading.
+Jurymen are bound by their oaths, and by their duty, to find a
+verdict one way or the other. Freeman was under no obligation to say
+anything about the Ark Raleigh. Prudence and ignorance might well
+have restrained his pen.
+
+Two blots in Froude's History Freeman may, I think, be acknowledged
+to have hit. One was intellectual; the other was moral. It was pure
+childishness to suggest that Froude had never heard of the peine
+forte et dure, and only invincible prejudice could have dictated such
+a sentence as "That Mr. Froude's law would be queer might be taken as
+a matter of course."*   Still, it is true, and a serious misfortune,
+that Froude took very little interest in legal and constitutional
+questions. For, while they had not the same importance in the
+sixteenth century as they had in the seventeenth, they cannot be
+disregarded to the extent in which Froude disregarded them without
+detracting from the value of his book as a whole. He did not sit
+down, like Hallam, to write a constitutional history, and he could
+not be expected to deal with his subject from that special point of
+view. Freeman's complaint, which is quite just, was that he neglected
+almost entirely the relations of the Crown with the Houses of
+Parliament and with the courts of law. The moral blot accounts for a
+good deal of the indignation which Froude excited in minds far less
+jaundiced than Freeman's. No one hated injustice more than Froude.
+But cruelty as such did not inspire him with any horror. No
+punishment, however atrocious, seemed to him too great for persons
+clearly guilty of enormous crimes. I have already referred to his
+defence of the horrible Boiling Act which disgraced the reign and the
+parliament of Henry VIII. The account of Mary Stuart's old and
+wizened face as it appeared when her false hair and front had been
+removed after her execution may be set down as an error of taste. But
+what is to be said, on the score of humanity, for an historian who in
+the nineteenth century calmly and in cold blood defended the use of
+the rack? Even here Freeman's ingenuity of suggestion did not desert
+him. After quoting part, and part only, of Froude's sinister apology,
+he writes, "To all this the answer is very simple. Every time that
+Elizabeth and her counsellors sent a prisoner to the rack they
+committed a breach of the law of England."+  Any one who read this
+article without reading the History would infer that Froude had
+maintained the legality, as well as the expediency, of torture. That
+is not true. What Froude says is, "A practice which by the law was
+always forbidden could be palliated only by a danger so great that
+the nation had become like an army in the field. It was repudiated on
+the return of calmer times, and the employment of it rests a stain on
+the memory of those by whom it was used. It is none the less certain,
+however, that the danger was real and terrible, and the same causes
+which relieve a commander in active service from the restraints of
+the common law apply to the conduct of statesmen who are dealing with
+organised treason. The law is made for the nation, not the nation for
+the law. Those who transgress it do it at their own risk, but they
+may plead circumstances at the bar of history, and have a right to be
+heard." Thus Froude asserts as strongly and clearly as Freeman
+himself that torture was in 1580, and always had been, contrary to
+the law of England. On the purely legal and technical aspect of the
+question a point might be raised which neither Froude nor Freeman has
+attempted to solve. Would any Court in the reign of Elizabeth have
+convicted a man of a criminal offence for carrying out the express
+commands of the sovereign? If not, in what sense was the racking of
+the Jesuits illegal? But there is a law of God, as well as a law of
+man, and surely Elizabeth broke it. Froude's argument seems to prove
+too much, if it proves anything, for it would justify all the worst
+cruelties ever inflicted by tyrants for political objects, from the
+burning of Christians who refused incense for the Roman Emperor to
+Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel.
+
+--
+* Saturday Review, Jan. 29th, 1870.
++ Saturday Review, Dec. 1st, 1867.
+--
+
+The analogy of a commander in active service is inadequate.
+Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, were not commanders on active
+service; and if they had been, they would have had no right, on any
+Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners. Unless the
+end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack
+was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either
+confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy
+Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for
+the rack. In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus
+describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with
+him in 1586. "They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the
+letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony
+was still unimpaired, and cut in pieces afterwards with due
+precautions for the protraction of the pain. If it was to be taken as
+part of the Catholic creed that to kill a prince in the interests of
+Holy Church was an act of piety and merit, stern English common sense
+caught the readiest means of expressing its opinion on the character
+both of the creed and its professors."
+
+Stern English common sense! To suggest that the English people had
+anything to do with it is a libel on the English nation. Elizabeth
+had the decency to forbid the repetition of such atrocities. That she
+should have tolerated them at all is a stain upon her character, as
+his sophistical plea for them is a stain upon Froude's.
+
+On the 12th of January, 1870, Freeman delivered in The Saturday
+Review his final verdict on Froude's History of England from the Fall
+of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is one of the most
+preposterous judgments that ever found their way into print. In
+knowledge of the subject, and in patient assiduity of research,
+Froude was immeasurably Freeman's superior, and his life had been
+devoted to historic studies. Yet this was the language in which the
+editor of the first literary journal in England permitted Freeman to
+write of the greatest historical work completed since Macaulay died:
+"He has won his place among the popular writers of the day; his name
+has come to be used as a figure of speech, sometimes in strange
+company with his betters .... But an historian he is not; four
+volumes of ingenious paradox, eight volumes of ecclesiastical
+pamphlet, do not become a history, either because of the mere number
+of volumes, or because they contain a narrative which gradually
+shrinks into little more than a narrative of diplomatic intrigues.
+The main objections to Mr. Froude's book, the blemishes which cut it
+off from any title to the name of history, are utter carelessness as
+to facts and utter incapacity to distinguish right from wrong ....
+That  burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and
+small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil
+in the pursuit of truth--the spirit without which history, to be
+worthy of the name, cannot be written--is not in Mr. Froude's nature,
+and it would probably be impossible to make him understand what it is ....
+How far the success of the book is due to its inherent vices,
+how far to its occasional virtues, is a point too knotty for us to
+solve. The general reader and his tastes--why this thing pleases him
+and the other thing displeases him--have ever been to us the proroundest
+of mysteries. It is enough that on Mr. Froude's book, as
+a whole, the verdict of all competent historical scholars has long
+ago been given. Occasional beauties of style and narrative cannot be
+allowed to redeem carelessness of truth, ignorance of law, contempt
+for the first principles of morals, ecclesiastical malignity of the
+most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we
+have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as
+a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No
+merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the
+whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself
+a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant
+phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, 'un livre de bonne
+foy.'"*
+
+--
+* The Duke was not, as Freeman implies that he was, referring to Froude.
+--
+
+By a curious irony of fate or circumstance Freeman has unconsciously
+depicted the frame of mind in which Froude approached historic
+problems. "That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters
+great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time
+and toil in the pursuit of truth--the spirit without which history,
+to be worthy of the name, cannot be written," was the dominant
+principle of Froude's life and work. He had hitherto taken no notice
+of the attacks in The Saturday Review. The errors pointed out in them
+were of the most trivial kind, and mere abuse is not worth a reply.
+But even Gibbon was moved from his philosophic calm when Mr. Somebody
+of Something "presumed to attack not the faith but the fidelity of
+the historian." Froude passed over in contemptuous silence
+impertinent reflections upon his religious belief. His honesty was
+now in set terms impugned, and on the 15th of February, 1870, he
+addressed, through the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Frederick
+Greenwood, a direct challenge to Mr. Philip Harwood, who had become
+editor of The Saturday Review. After a few caustic remarks upon the
+absurdity of the defects imputed to him, such as ignorance that
+Parliament could pass Bills of Attainder, because he had said that
+the House of Lords would not pass one in a particular case, he came
+to close quarters with the imputation of bad faith. "I am," he said,
+"peculiarly situated"--as Freeman of course knew--"towards a charge
+of this kind, for nine-tenths of my documents are in manuscript, and
+a large proportion of those manuscripts are in Spain. To deal as
+fairly as I can with the public, I have all along deposited my
+Spanish transcripts, as soon as I have done with them, in the British
+Museum. The reading of manuscripts, however, is at best laborious.
+The public may be inclined to accept as proved an uncontradicted
+charge, the value of which they cannot readily test. I venture
+therefore to make the following proposal. I do not make it to my
+reviewer. He will be reluctant to exchange communications with me,
+and the disinclination will not be on his side only. I address myself
+to his editor. If the editor will select any part of my volumes, one
+hundred, two hundred, three hundred pages, wherever he pleases, I am
+willing to subject them to a formal examination by two experts, to be
+chosen--if Sir Thomas Hardy will kindly undertake it--by the Deputy
+Keeper of the Public Records. They shall go through my references,
+line for line. They shall examine every document to which I have
+alluded, and shall judge whether I have dealt with it fairly. I lay
+no claim to be free from mistakes. I have worked in all through nine
+hundred volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and
+official, in five languages and in difficult handwritings. I am not
+rash enough to say that I have never misread a word, or overlooked a
+passage of importance. I profess only to have dealt with my materials
+honestly to the best of my ability. I submit myself to a formal
+trial, of which I am willing to bear the entire expense, on one
+condition-that the report, whatever it be, shall be published word
+for word in The Saturday Review."
+
+The proposal was certainly a novel one, and could not in ordinary
+circumstances have been accepted. But it is also novel to charge an
+historian of the highest character and repute with inability to speak
+the truth, or to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman,
+signing himself "Mr. Froude's Saturday Reviewer," replied in The Pall
+Mall Gazette. The challenge he left to the editor of The Saturday,
+who contemptuously refused it, and he admitted that after all Froude
+probably did know what a Bill of Attainder was. The rest of his
+letter is a shuffle. "I have made no charge of bad faith against Mr.
+Froude"--whom he had accused of not knowing what truth meant--"with
+regard to any Spanish manuscripts, or any other manuscripts. All that
+I say is, that as I find gross inaccuracies in Mr. Froude's book,
+which he does not whenever I have the means of testing him which was
+certainly not often--"I think there is a presumption against his
+accuracy in those parts where I have not the means of testing him.
+But this is only a presumption, and not proof. Mr. Froude may have
+been more careful, or more lucky"--meaning less fraudulent, or more
+skilful--"with the hidden wealth of Simancas than he has been with
+regard to materials which are more generally accessible. I trust it
+may prove so." If Freeman thought that he meant that, he must have
+had singular powers of self-deception. "I have been twitted by men of
+thought and learning"--whom he does not name--"for letting Mr. Froude
+off too easily, and I am inclined to plead guilty to the charge. I do
+not suppose that Mr. Froude wilfully misrepresents anything; the
+fault seems to be inherent and incurable; he does not know what
+historical truth is, or how a man should set about looking for it. As
+therefore his book is not written with that regard for truth with
+which a book ought to be written, I hold that I am justified in
+saying that it is not 'un livre de bonne roy.'"
+
+It is difficult to read this disingenuous farrago of insinuation even
+now without a strong sense of moral contempt. But vengeance was
+coming, and before many years were over his head Freeman had occasion
+to remember the Hornfinn tag:
+
+Raro antecedentem scelestum
+Deseruit pede poena claudo.
+
+Froude himself took the matter very lightly. He had boldly offered
+the fullest inquiry, and Freeman had not been clever enough to
+shelter himself behind the plea that copies were not originals; he
+did not know enough about manuscripts to think of it. The blunders he
+had detected were trifling, and Froude summed up the labours of his
+antagonists fairly enough in a letter to Skelton from his beloved
+Derreen.* "I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the whole book-
+twelve volumes--about twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not
+dotted and t's not crossed; and that is all that the utmost malignity
+has discovered. Every one of the rascals has made a dozen blunders of
+his own, too, while detecting one of mine." Skelton's own testimony
+is worth citing, for, though a personal friend, he was a true
+scholar. "We must remember that he was to some extent a pioneer, and
+that he was the first (for instance) to utilise the treasures of
+Simancas. He transcribed, from the Spanish, masses of papers which
+even a Spaniard could have read with difficulty, and I am assured
+that his translations (with rare exceptions) render the original with
+singular exactness."+  And in the preface to his Maitland of
+Lethington the same distinguished author says, "Only the man or woman
+who has had to work upon the mass of Scottish material in the Record
+Office can properly appreciate Mr. Froude's inexhaustible industry
+and substantial accuracy. His point of view is very different from
+mine; but I am bound to say that his acquaintance with the
+intricacies of Scottish politics during the reign of Mary appears to
+me to be almost, if not quite, unrivalled." John Hill Burton, to
+whose learning and judgment Freeman's were as moonlight unto
+sunlight, and as water unto wine, concurred in Skelton's view, and
+no one has ever known Scottish history better than Burton.
+
+--
+* June 21st, 1870.
++ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 143.
+--
+
+Freeman's reckless and unscholarly attacks upon Froude produced no
+effect upon his own master Stubbs, whom he was always covering with
+adulation. From the Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1876 Stubbs
+pronounced Froude's "great book," as he called it, to be "a work of
+great industry, power, and importance." Stubbs was as far as possible
+from agreeing with Froude in opinion. An orthodox Churchman and a
+staunch Tory, he never varied in his opposition to Liberalism, as
+well ecclesiastical as political, and he had no sympathy with the
+reformers. But his simple, manly, pious character was incapable of
+supporting his cause by personal slander. Unlike Freeman, he had a
+rich vein of racy humour, which he indulged in a famous epigram on
+Froude and Kingsley, too familiar for quotation. But he could
+appreciate Froude's learning and industry, for he was a real student
+himself.
+
+The controversy between Froude and Freeman, however, was by no means
+at an end, and I may as well proceed at once to the conclusion of it,
+chronology notwithstanding. In the year 1877, Froude contributed to
+The Nineteenth Century a series of papers on the Life and Times of
+Thomas Becket, since republished in the fourth volume of his Short
+Studies. Full of interesting information, the result of minute pains,
+and excellent in style, they make no pretence to be, as the History
+was, a work of original research. They are indeed founded upon the
+Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, which Canon Robertson had
+edited for the Master of the Rolls in the previous year. They were of
+course read by every one, because they were written by Froude,
+whereas Robertson's learned Introduction would only have been read by
+scholars. Froude's conclusions were much the same as the erudite
+Canon's. He did not pretend to know the twelfth century as he knew
+the sixteenth, and he avowedly made use of another man's knowledge to
+point his favourite moral that emancipation from ecclesiastical
+control was a necessary stage in the development of English freedom.
+He may have been unconsciously affected by his familiarity with the
+quarrel between Wolsey and Henry VIII. in describing the quarrel
+between Becket and Henry II. The Church of the middle ages discharged
+invaluable functions which in later times were more properly
+undertaken by the State. Froude sided with Henry, and showed, as he
+had not much difficulty in showing, that there were a good many spots
+on the robe of Becket's saintliness. The immunity of Churchmen, that
+is, of clergymen, from the jurisdiction of secular tribunals was not
+conducive either to morality or to order.
+
+Froude's essays might have been forgotten, like other brilliant
+articles in other magazines, if Freeman had let them alone. But the
+spectacle of Froude presuming to write upon those earlier periods of
+which The Saturday Review had so often and so dogmatically pronounced
+him to be ignorant, drove Freeman into print. If he had disagreed
+with Froude on the main question, the only question which matters
+now, he would have been justified, and more than justified, in
+setting out the opposite view. A defence of Becket against Henry, of
+the Church against the State, from the pen of a competent writer,
+would have been as interesting and as important a contribution as
+Froude's own papers to the great issue between Sacerdotalism and
+Erastianism. There is a great deal more to be said for Becket than
+for Wolsey; and though Freeman found it difficult to state any case
+with temperance, he could have stated this case with power. But, much
+as he disliked Froude, he agreed with him. "Looking," he wrote, "at
+the dispute between Henry and Thomas by the light of earlier and of
+later ages, we see that the cause of Henry was the right one; that
+is, we see that it was well that the cause of Henry triumphed in the
+long run." Nevertheless he rushed headlong upon his victim, and
+"belaboured" Froude, with all the violence of which he was capable,
+in The Contemporary Review. Hitherto his attacks had been anonymous.
+Now for the first time he came into the open, and delivered his
+assault in his own name. Froude's forbearance, as well as his own
+vanity, had blinded him to the danger he was incurring. The first
+sentence of his first article explains the fury of an invective for
+which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance.
+"Mr. Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will
+hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval
+history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry
+was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have
+cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history
+belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude
+should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of
+Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor
+Brewer, who edited with ability and learning several volumes of the
+Rolls Series. That to warn off Froude would be to warn off the public
+was so much the better for the purposes of an exclusive clique. For
+Froude's style, that accursed style which was gall and wormwood to
+Freeman, "had," as he kindly admitted, "its merits." Page after page
+teems with mere abuse, a sort of pale reflection, or, to vary the
+metaphor, a faint echo from Cicero on Catiline, or Burke on Hastings.
+"On purely moral points there is no need now for me to enlarge; every
+man who knows right from wrong ought to be able to see through the
+web of ingenious sophistry which tries to justify the slaughter of
+More and Fisher"; although the guilt of More and Fisher is a question
+not of morality, but of evidence. "Mr. Froude by his own statement
+has not made history the study of his life," which was exactly what
+he had done, and stated that he had done. "The man who insisted on
+the Statute-book being the text of English history showed that he had
+never heard of peine forte et dure, and had no clear notion of a Bill
+of Attainder."
+
+Freeman could not even be consistent in abuse for half a page.
+Immediately after charging Froude with "fanatical hatred towards the
+English Church, reformed or unreformed"--though he was the great
+champion of the Reformation--"a degree of hatred which must be
+peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it"-
+like Freeman's bosom friend Green--he says that Froude "never reaches
+so high a point as in several passages where he describes various
+scenes and features of monastic life." But this could not absolve him
+from having made a "raid" upon another man's period, from being a
+"marauder," from writing about a personage whom Stubbs might have
+written about, though he had not. Froude had "an inborn and incurable
+twist, which made it impossible for him to make an accurate statement
+about any matter." "By some destiny which it would seem that he
+cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds--at least
+which all other readers find--in his book he invariably substitutes
+another narrative out of his own head." "Very few of us can test
+manuscripts at Simancas; it is not every one who can at a moment's
+notice test references to manuscripts much nearer home." This is a
+strange insinuation from a man who never tested a manuscript, seldom,
+if ever, consulted a manuscript, and had declined Froude's challenge
+to let his copies be compared with his abridgment. One grows tired of
+transcribing a mere succession of innuendoes. Yet it is essential to
+clear this matter up once and for all, that the public may judge
+between Froude and his life-long enemy.
+
+The standard by which Freeman affected to judge Froude's articles in
+The Nineteenth Century was fantastic. "Emperors and Popes, Sicilian
+Kings and Lombard Commonwealths, should be as familiar to him who
+would write The Life and Times of Thomas Becket as the text of the
+Constitutions of Clarendon or the relations between the Sees of
+Canterbury and York." If Froude had written an elaborate History of
+Henry II., as he wrote a History of Henry VIII., he would have
+qualified himself in the manner somewhat bombastically described. But
+even Lord Acton, who seemed to think that he could not write about
+anything until he knew everything, would scarcely have prepared
+himself for an article in The Nineteenth Century by mastering the
+history of the world. And if Froude had done so, it would have
+profited him little. He would have forgotten it, "with that calm
+oblivion of facts which distinguishes him from all other men who have
+taken on themselves to read past events." He would still have written
+"whatever first came into his head, without stopping to see whether a
+single fact bore his statements out or not." "Accurate statement of
+what really happened, even though such accurate statement might serve
+Mr. Froude's purpose, is clearly forbidden by the destiny which
+guides Mr. Froude's literary career." These extracts from The
+Contemporary Review are samples, and only samples, from a mass of
+rhetoric not unworthy of the grammarian who prayed for the damnation
+of an opponent because he did not agree with him in his theory of
+irregular verbs. Freeman, whose self-assertion was perpetual,
+represented himself throughout his libel as fighting for the cause of
+truth. His own reverence for truth he illustrated quaintly enough at
+the close of his last article. "I leave others to protest," said this
+veracious critic, "against Mr. Froude's treatment of the sixteenth
+century. I do not profess to have mastered those times in detail from
+original sources." I leave others to protest! From 1864 to 1870
+Freeman had continuously attacked successive volumes of Froude's
+History in The Saturday Review. Yet he here makes in his own name a
+statement quite irreconcilable with his ever having done anything of
+the kind, and accompanies it with an admission which, if it had been
+made in The Saturday Review, would have robbed his invective of more
+than half its sting.
+
+And now let us see what was the real foundation for this imposing
+fabric. Freeman's boisterous truculence made such a deafening noise,
+and raised such a blinding dust, that it takes some little time and
+trouble to discover the hollowness of the charges. With four-fifths
+of Froude's narrative he does not deal at all, except to borrow from
+it for his own purposes, as he used to borrow from the History in The
+Saturday Review. In the other fifth, the preliminary pages, he
+discovered two misprints of names, one mistake of fact, and three or
+four exaggerations. Not one of these errors is so grave as his own
+statement, picked up from some bad lawyer, that "the preamble of an
+Act of Parliament need not be received as of any binding effect." The
+preamble is part of the Act, and gives the reasons why the Act was
+passed. Of course the rules of grammar show that being explanatory it
+is not an operative part; but it can be quoted in any court of
+justice to explain the meaning of the clauses.
+
+In his Annals of an English Abbey Froude allowed "Robert Fitzwilliam"
+to pass for Robert Fitzwalter in his proofs, and upon this conclusive
+evidence that Froude was unfit to write history Freeman pounced with
+triumphant exultation. He had some skill in the correction of
+misprints, and would have been better employed in revising proof-
+sheets for Froude than in "belabouring" him. Froude said that
+Becket's name "denoted Saxon extraction." An anonymous biographer,
+not always accurate, says that both his parents came from Normandy.
+It is probable, though by no means certain, that in this case the
+biographer was right, and Froude corrected the mistake when, in
+consequence of Freeman's criticisms, he republished the articles.
+Froude, on the authority of Edward Grim, who knew Becket, and wrote
+his Life, referred to the cruelty and ferocity of Becket's
+administration as Chancellor. Freeman declared that "anything more
+monstrous never appeared from the pen of one who professed to be
+narrating facts." Froude not only "professed" to be narrating facts:
+he was narrating them. The only question is whether they happened in
+England, in Toulouse, or in Aquitaine. Freeman exposed his own
+ignorance by alleging that Grim meant the suppression of the free
+lances, which happened before Becket became Chancellor. He did not in
+fact know the subject half so well as Froude, though Froude might
+have more carefully qualified his general words. Froude's account of
+Becket's appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, his
+scruples, and how he overcame them, is described by Freeman as "pure
+fiction." It was taken from William of Canterbury, and, though open
+to doubt upon some points, is quite as likely to be true as the
+narrative preferred by Freeman. The most serious error, indeed the
+only serious error, attributed by Freeman to Froude is the statement
+that Becket's murderers were shielded from punishment by the King.
+Freeman alleges with his usual confidence that they could not be
+tried in a secular court because their victim was a bishop. It is
+doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the
+Constitutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of
+Becket's assassination, abolished clerical privileges altogether.
+Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly
+wrong.
+
+But Freeman was not content with making mountains of mole-hills, with
+speaking of a great historian as if he were a pretentious dunce. He
+stooped to write the words, "Natural kindliness, if no other feeling,
+might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work
+of a long-forgotten brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a
+brother's almost forgotten fame." The meaning of this sentence, so
+far as it has a meaning, was that Hurrell Froude composed a fragment
+on the Life of Becket which the mistaken kindness of friends
+published after his own premature death. If Froude had written
+anonymously against this work, the phrase "stabs in the dark" would
+have been intelligible. As he had written in his own name, and had
+not mentioned his brother's work at all, part at least of the
+accusation was transparently and obviously false.
+
+At last, however, Freeman had gone too far. Froude had borne a great
+deal, he could bear no more; and he took up a weapon which Freeman
+never forgot. I can well recall, as can hundreds of others, the
+appearance in The Nineteenth Century for April, 1879, of "A Few Words
+on Mr. Freeman." They were read with a sense of general pleasure and
+satisfaction, a boyish delight in seeing a big bully well thrashed
+before the whole school. Froude was so calm, so dignified, so self-
+restrained, so consciously superior to his rough antagonist in temper
+and behaviour. Only once did he show any emotion. It was when he
+spoke of the dastardly attempt to strike him through the memory of
+his brother. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole
+the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen
+any person--not one--in whom, as I now think of him, the excellences
+of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure. Of my
+personal feeling towards him I cannot speak. I am ashamed to have
+been compelled, by what I can only describe as an inexcusable insult,
+to say what I have said." It was not difficult to show that Freeman's
+four articles in The Contemporary Review contained worse blunders
+than any he had attributed to Froude, as, for instance, the
+allegation that Henry VIII., who founded bishoprics and organised the
+defence of the country, squandered away all that men before his time
+had agreed to respect. Easy also was it to disprove the charge of
+"hatred towards the English Church at all times and under all
+characters" by the mere mention of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and
+Hooper. The statement that Froude had been a "fanatical votary" of
+the mediaeval Church was almost delicious in the extravagance of its
+absurdity; and it would have been impossible better to retort the
+wild charges of misrepresentation, in which it is hard to suppose
+that even Freeman himself believed, than by the simple words, "It is
+true that I substitute a story in English for a story in Latin, a
+short story for a long one, and a story in a popular form for a story
+in a scholastic one." In short, Froude wrote a style which every
+scholar loves, and every pedant hates. With a light touch, but a
+touch which had a sting, Froude disposed of the nonsense which made
+him translate praedictae rationes "shortened rations" instead of "the
+foregoing accounts," and in a graver tone he reminded the public that
+his offer to test the accuracy of his extracts from unprinted
+authorities had been refused. Graver still, and not without
+indignation, is his reference to Freeman's suggestion that he thought
+the Cathedral Church of St. Albans had been destroyed. Most people,
+when they finished Froude's temperate but crushing refutation, must
+have felt the opportunity for it should ever surprised that have
+arisen.
+
+Froude had done his work at last, and done it thoroughly. Freeman's
+plight was not to be envied. If his offence had been rank, his
+punishment had been tremendous. Even The Spectator, which had
+hitherto upheld him through thick and thin, admonished him that he
+had passed the bounds of decency and infringed the rules of
+behaviour. Dreading a repetition of the penalty if he repeated the
+offence, fearing that silence would imply acquiescence in charges of
+persistent calumny, he blurted out a kind of awkward half-apology. He
+confessed, in The Contemporary Review for May, 1879, that he had
+criticised in The Saturday all the volumes of Froude's Elizabeth.
+This self-constituted champion proceeded to say that he knew nothing
+about Froude's personal character, and that when he accused Froude of
+stabbing his dead brother "in the dark" he only meant that the
+brother was dead. When he says that Froude's article was "plausible,
+and more than plausible," he is quite right. It is more than
+plausible, because it is true. After vainly trying to explain away
+some of the errors brought home to him by Froude, and leaving others
+unnoticed, he complains, with deep and obvious sincerity, that Froude
+had not read his books, nor even his articles in Encyclopaedias. He
+exhibits a striking instance of his own accuracy. In his defence
+against the rather absurd charge of not going, as Macaulay had gone,
+to see the places about which he wrote, Froude pleaded want of means.
+Freeman rejoined that Macaulay was at one time of his life
+"positively poor." He was so for a very short time when his
+Fellowship at Trinity came to an end. Unluckily for Freeman's
+statement the period was before his appointment to be Legal Member of
+Council in India, and long before he had begun to write his History
+of England. The most charitable explanation of an erroneous statement
+is usually the correct one, and it was probably forgetfulness which
+made Freeman say that he did not hear of Froude's having placed
+copies of the Simancas manuscripts in the British Museum till 1878,
+whereas he had himself discussed it in The Pall Mall Gazette eight
+years before. If Froude had made such an astonishing slip, there
+would have been more ground for imputing to him an incapacity to
+distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman's "Last Words on Mr.
+Froude" show no sign of penitence or good feeling, and they end with
+characteristic bluster about the truth, from which he had so
+grievously departed. But Froude was never troubled with him again.
+
+Although a refuted detractor is not formidable in the flesh, the evil
+that he does lives after him. Freeman's view of Froude is not now
+held by any one whose opinion counts; yet still there seems to rise,
+as from a brazen head of Ananias, dismal and monotonous chaunt, "He
+was careless of the truth, he did not make history the business of
+his life." He did make history the business of his life, and he cared
+more for truth than for anything else in the world. Freeman's
+biographer has given no clue to his imperfect sympathy with Froude.
+Green, true historian as he was, made more mistakes than Froude, and
+the mistakes he did make were more serious. He trespassed on the
+preserves of Brewer, who criticised him severely without deviating
+from the standard of a Christian and a gentleman. Even over the
+domain of Stubbs, and the consecrated ground of the Norman Conquest
+itself, Green ranged without being Freemanised as a poacher. But then
+Green was Freeman's personal friend, and in friendship Freeman was
+staunch. They belonged to the same set, and no one was more cliquish
+than Freeman. Liberal as he was in politics, he always professed the
+utmost contempt for the general public, and wondered what guided
+their strange tastes in literature. Dean Stephens has apparently
+suppressed most of the references to Froude in Freeman's private
+letters, and certainly he drops no hint of the controversy about
+Becket. But the following passage from his "Concluding Survey" is
+apparently aimed at Froude.
+Freeman, we are told, "was unable to write or speak politely"--and if
+the Dean had stopped there I should have had nothing to say; but he
+goes on--"of any one who pretended to more knowledge than he really
+had, or who enjoyed a reputation for learning which was undeserved;
+nay, more, he considered it to be a positive duty to expose such
+persons. In doing this he was often no doubt too indifferent to their
+feelings, and employed language of unwarranted severity which
+provoked angry retaliation, and really weakened the effect of his
+criticism, by diverting public sympathy from himself to the object of
+his attack. But it was quite a mistake to suppose, as many did, that
+his fierce utterances were the outcome of ill-temper or of personal
+animosity. He entertained no ill-will whatever towards literary or
+political opponents."
+
+There is more to the same effect, and of course Froude must have been
+in Stephens's mind. But the reputation of a great historian is not to
+be taken away by hints. It may suit Freeman's admirers to seek refuge
+in meaningless generalities. Those who are grateful for Froude's
+services to England, and to literature, have no interest in
+concealment. Froude never "pretended to more knowledge than he really
+had." So far from "enjoying a reputation for learning which was
+undeserved," he disguised his learning rather than displayed it, and
+wore it lightly, a flower. That Freeman should have "considered it to
+be a positive duty to expose" a man whose knowledge was so much wider
+and whose industry was so much greater than his own is strange. That
+he did his best for years, no doubt from the highest motives, to
+damage Froude's reputation, and to injure his good name, is certain.
+With the general reader he failed. The public had too much sense to
+believe Froude was merely, or chiefly, or at all, an ecclesiastical
+pamphleteer. But by dint of noisy assertion, and perpetual
+repetition, Freeman did at last infect academic coteries with the
+idea that Froude was a superficial sciolist. The same thing had been
+said of Macaulay, and believed by the same sort of people. Froude's
+books were certainly much easier to read than Freeman's. Must they
+therefore have been much easier to write? Two-thirds of Froude's
+mistakes would have been avoided, and Freeman would never have had
+his chance, if the former had had a keener eye for slips in his
+proof-sheets, or had engaged competent assistance. When he allowed
+Wilhelmus to be printed instead of Willelmus, Freeman shouted with
+exultant glee that a man so hopelessly ignorant of mediaeval
+nomenclature had no right to express an opinion upon the dispute
+between Becket and the King. Nothing could exceed his transports of
+joy when he found out that Froude did not know the ancient name of
+Lisieux. Freeman thought, like the older Pharisees, that he should be
+heard for his much speaking, and for a time he was. People did not
+realise that so many confident allegations could be made in which
+there was no substance at all. They thought themselves safe in making
+allowance for Freeman's exaggeration, and Freeman simply bored many
+persons into accepting his estimate of Froude. Perhaps he went a
+little too far when he claimed to have found inaccuracies in Froude's
+transcripts from the Simancas manuscripts without knowing a word of
+Spanish. But he was seldom so frank as that. It was not often that he
+forgot his two objects of holding up Froude as the fluent, facile
+ignoramus, and himself as the profound, erudite student.
+
+Just after reading Freeman's furious articles on Becket, I turned to
+Froude's "Index of Papers collected by me October, November, and
+December, 1856." It covers twenty-one pages, very closely written,
+and I will give a few extracts to show what sort of preparation this
+sciolist thought necessary for his ecclesiastical pamphlet. The first
+entry, representing four pages of text, is "Hanson's Description of
+England. Diet, habits, prices of provisions from Parliamentary
+History." Another is "Dress and loose habits of the London clergy in
+1486. From Morton's Injunctions."
+
+"State of the Abbey of St. Albans in 1489 shows that Froude was well
+acquainted with that subject many years before he wrote his Short
+Study on it. "The Bishops of all the Sees in England under Henry,
+date of appointment, etc.," is another of these items, which also
+comprise "Extracts from the so-called Privy Purse Expenses of Henry
+VIII." "Bulla Clementis Papae VII. concessa Regi Henrico de Secundis
+nuptiis. This contains the passage quocunque licito vel illicito
+coitu." "Petition of the Upper House of Convocation for the
+suppression of heretical books." "Royal Letter on the Articles of
+1536 which were written, Henry says, by himself." "Elaborate and
+extremely valuable State Papers on the Duchy of Milan, and the
+dispute between the Emperor and Francis I." "Pole to James, the Fifth
+Letter of Warning."  "Pole to the Pope, May 18th, 1537. N.B.--Very
+remarkable." "Remarkable State Paper drawn by Pole and addressed to
+the Pope at the time of the interview at Paris between Francis and
+the Emperor." "Privy Council to the Duke of Norfolk. Marquis of
+Exeter to Sir A. Brown. Promise of money. Directions to send relief
+to the Duke of Suffolk in Lincolnshire, etc." "Henry VIII. to the
+Duke of Norfolk about November 27th, 1536. Part of it in his own
+hand. High and chivalrous." "Curious account of the ferocity of the
+clergy in Lincolnshire." "Curious questions addressed to Fisher
+Bishop of Rochester on some treasonable foreign correspondence."
+"Learned men to be sent to preach to the disaffected counties.
+Henry's version of the causes of the insurrection---N.B., and the
+cure." "Instructions to the Earl of Sussex for tranquillising the
+North after the Insurrection. Long and curious--noticeable list of
+accusations against the monastic bodies. In Wriothesley's hand." "Sir
+Francis Bigod to Sir Robert Constable. Very remarkable account of his
+unpopularity in the first rebellion from suspicion of heresy, January
+18th, 1537." "Emperor at Paris, 1539. War between France and England.
+Secret causes why the Emperor made a secret peace with France." "Lord
+Lisle to Henry VIII. on his chance of running down the French fleet
+as they lay at anchor, July 21st, 1545." "Losses of the old families
+by the suppression--new foundation by Henry VIII. Bishoprics,
+hospitals, colleges, etc." "The Abbot of Coggeshall hides jewels,
+makes away goods, maintains Rome and consults the devil." "Henry
+VIII. to Justices of the Peace, admonition for neglect of duty.
+Highly in character." "King's Highness having discovered all the
+enormities of the clergy, pardons all that is past, and exhorts them
+to a Christian life in all time to come."
+
+During the three months to which alone this list refers Froude must
+have read and studied more than four hundred pages of important
+documents. If any one wishes to form a correct judgment of Froude as
+an historian, he can scarcely begin better than by reversing every
+statement that Freeman felt it his duty to make. Froude came to write
+about the sixteenth century after careful study of previous times. He
+prepared himself for his task by patient research among letters and
+manuscripts such as Freeman never thought of attempting. He neglected
+no source of information open to him, and he obtained special
+privileges for searching Spanish archives which entailed upon him the
+severest labour. He studied not only at Simancas, where none had been
+before him, but also in Paris, in Brussels, in Vienna. The documents
+he read were in half a dozen languages, sometimes in the vilest
+scrawls. Long afterwards he described his own experience in his own
+graphic way. "Often at the end of a page," he said, "I have felt as
+after descending a precipice, and have wondered how I got down. I had
+to cut my way through a jungle, for no one had opened the road for
+me. I have been turned into rooms piled to the window-sill with
+bundles of dust-covered despatches, and told to make the best of it.
+Often I have found the sand glistening on the ink where it had been
+sprinkled when a page was turned. There the letter had lain, never
+looked at again since it was read and put away." Out of such
+materials Froude wrote a History which any educated person can read
+with undisturbed enjoyment. He was too good an artist to let his own
+difficulties be seen, and they were assumed not to exist. Froude did
+not write, like Stubbs, for professional students alone; he wrote for
+the general public, for those whom Freeman affected to despise. So
+did Macaulay, whom Freeman idolised. So did Gibbon, the greatest
+historian of all time. Froude's History covered the most
+controversial period in the growth of the English Church. Lynx-eyed
+critics, with their powers sharpened by partisanship, searched it
+through and through for errors the most minute. Some of course they
+found. But they did not find one which interfered with the main
+argument, and such evidence as has since been discovered confirms
+Froude's proposition that the cause of Henry was the cause of
+England. Freeman's Norman Conquest has secured for him an honourable
+fame; his attacks upon Froude, until they have been forgotten, will
+always be a reproach to his memory.
+
+It was with just pride, and natural satisfaction, that Froude wrote
+to Lady Derby in May, 1890: "I am revising my English History for a
+final edition. Since I wrote it the libraries and archives of all
+Europe have been searched and sifted. I am fairly astonished to find
+how little I shall have to alter. The book is of course young, but I
+do not know that it is the worse on that account. That fault at any
+rate I shall not try to cure."
+
+The Divorce of Katharine of Aragon, though not published till 1891,
+is a sequel to the History. The twenty years which had intervened
+did not lead Froude to modify any of his main conclusions, and he was
+able to furnish new evidence in support of them. The correspondence
+of Chapuys, Imperial Ambassador at the court of Henry VIII., puts
+Fisher's treason beyond doubt, and proves that the bishop was
+endeavouring to procure an invasion by Spanish troops when the king,
+in Freeman's language, "slaughtered" him. The next year Froude
+brought out, in a volume with other essays, his Spanish Story of the
+Armada, written in his raciest manner, and proving from Spanish
+sources the grotesque incompetence of Medina Sidonia. There are few
+better narratives in the language, and the enthusiastic admiration of
+a great American humourist was as well deserved as it is charmingly
+expressed.
+
+"The other night," wrote Bret Harte, "I took up Longman's Magazine*
+and began to lazily read something about the Spanish Armada. My
+knowledge of that historic event, I ought to say, is rather hazy; I
+remember a vague something about Drake playing bowls while the
+Spanish fleet was off the coast, and of Elizabeth going to Tilbury en
+grande tenue, but there was always a good deal of 'Jingo' shouting
+and Crystal Palace fireworks about it, and it never seemed real. In
+the article I was reading the style caught me first; I became
+tremendously interested; it was a new phase of the old story, and yet
+there was something pleasantly familiar. I turned to the last page
+quickly, and saw your blessed name. I had heard nothing about it
+before. Then I went through it breathlessly to the last word, which
+came all too soon. And now I am as eager for the next instalment as I
+was when a boy for the next chapter of my Dickens or Thackeray. Don't
+laugh, dear old fellow, over my enthusiasm or my illustration, but
+remember that I represent a considerable amount of average human
+nature, and that's what we all write for, and ought to write for, and
+be dashed to the critics who say to the contrary! I thought your
+parallel of Philip and Don Quixote delightful, but the similitude of
+Medina Sidonia and Sancho Panza is irresistible. That letter to
+Philip is Sancho's own hand! Where did you get it? How long have you
+had it up your sleeve? Have you got any more such cards to play? Can
+you not give us a picture of those gentlemen adventurers with their
+exalted beliefs, their actual experiences, their little jealousies,
+and the love-lorn Lope de Vega in their midst? What mankind you have
+come upon, dear Froude! How I envy you! Have you nothing to spare for
+a poor literary man like myself, who has made all he could out of the
+hulk of a poor old Philippine galleon on Pacific seas? Couldn't you
+lend me a Don or a galley-slave out of that delightful crew of solemn
+lunatics? And yet how splendid are those last orders of the Duke!
+With what a swan-like song they sailed away!"
+
+--
+* The successor to Fraser.
+--
+
+The letter from Medina Sidonia to Philip, which reminded both Froude
+and Bret Harte of Sancho Panza, is too delicious not to be given in
+full.
+
+"My health is bad, and from my small experience of the water I know
+that I am always sea-sick. I have no money which I can spare, I owe a
+million ducats, and I have not a real to spend on my outfit. The
+expedition is on such a scale, and the object is of such high
+importance, that the person at the head of it ought to understand
+navigation and sea-fighting, and I know nothing of either. I have not
+one of those essential qualifications. I have no acquaintance among
+the officers who are to serve under me. Santa Cruz had information
+about the state of things in England; I have none. Were I competent
+otherwise, I should have to act in the dark by the opinion of others,
+and I cannot tell to whom I may trust. The Adelantado of Castile
+would do better than I. Our Lord would help him, for he is a good
+Christian, and has fought in several battles. If you send me, depend
+upon it, I shall have a bad account to render of my trust."*
+
+--
+* Spanish Story of the Armada, pp. 19, 20.
+--
+
+"Those last orders of the Duke"--the same Duke, by the way--are
+"splendid" enough of their kind. "From highest to lowest you are to
+understand the object of our expedition, which is to recover countries
+to the Church now oppressed by the enemies of the true faith. I
+therefore beseech you to remember your calling, so that God may be
+with us in what we do. I charge you, one and all, to abstain from
+profane oaths, dishonouring to the names of our Lord, our Lady, and
+the Saints. All personal quarrels are to be suspended while the
+expedition lasts, and for a month after it is completed. Neglect of
+this will be held as treason. Each morning at sunrise the ship-boys,
+according to custom, will sing 'Good Morrow' at the foot of the
+mainmast, and at sunset the 'Ave Maria.' Since bad weather may
+interrupt the communications the watchword is laid down for each day
+in the week: Sunday, Jesus; the days succeeding, the Holy Ghost, the
+Holy Trinity, Santiago, the Angels, All Saints, and Our Lady."*
+
+--
+* Spanish Story of the Armada, pp. 27, 28.
+--
+
+"God and one," it has been said, "make a majority." But in this case
+God was not on the side of the pious and incompetent Medina Sidonia.
+
+It was not till this same year 1892, after Freeman's death, that the
+"Calendar of Letters and State Papers relative to English affairs
+preserved principally in the Archives of Simancas" began to be
+published in England by the Master of the Rolls. Translated by an
+eminent scholar, Mr. Martin Hume, and printed in a book, they could
+have been read by Freeman himself, and can be read by any one who
+cares to undertake the task. They will at least give some idea of the
+enormous labour undergone by Froude in his several sojourns at
+Simancas. I cannot profess to have instituted a systematic
+comparison, but a few specimens selected at random show that Froude
+summarised fairly the documents with which he dealt. That there
+should be some discrepancies was inevitable.
+
+Philip II. wrote a remarkably bad hand, and his Ambassadors were not
+chosen for their penmanship. The most striking fact in the case is
+that Mr. Hume has derived assistance from Froude in the performance
+of his own duties. "I have," he writes in his Introduction, "very
+carefully compared the Spanish text when doubtful with Mr. Froude's
+extracts and copies and with transcripts of many of the letters in
+the British Museum." Nothing could give a better idea than this
+sentence of the difficulties which Froude had to surmount, or of the
+fidelity with which he surmounted them. He had not only achieved his
+own object: he also smoothed the path of future labourers in the same
+field. It was the inaccessibility of the records at Simancas that
+enabled Freeman to accuse Froude of not correctly transcribing or
+abstracting manuscripts. Like other people, he made mistakes; but
+mistakes have to be weighed as well as counted, and even in
+enumerating Froude's we must always remember that he used more
+original matter than any other modern historian.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IRELAND AND AMERICA
+
+Froude had made history the business of his life, and he had no
+sooner completed his History of England than he turned his attention
+to the sister people. The Irish chapters in his great book had been
+picked out by hostile critics as especially good, and in them he had
+strongly condemned the cruel misgovernment of an Englishman otherwise
+so humane as Essex. While he was in Ireland he had examined large
+stores of material in Dublin, which he compared with documents at the
+Record Office in London, and he contemplated early in 1871, if not
+before, a book on Irish history. For this task he was not altogether
+well qualified. The religion of Celtic Ireland was repugnant to him,
+and he never thoroughly understood it. In religious matters Froude
+could not be neutral. Where Catholic and Protestant came into
+conflict, he took instinctively, almost involuntarily, the Protestant
+side. In the England of the sixteenth century the Protestant side was
+the side of England. In Ireland the case was reversed, and the spirit
+of Catholicism was identical with the spirit of nationality. Irish
+Catholics to this day associate Protestantism with the sack of
+Drogheda and Wexford, with the detested memory of Oliver Cromwell. To
+Froude, as to Carlyle, Cromwell was the minister of divine vengeance
+upon murderous and idolatrous Papists. His liking for the Irish,
+though perfectly genuine, was accompanied with an underlying contempt
+which is more offensive to the objects of it than the hatred of an
+open foe. He regarded them as a race unfit for self-government, who
+had proved their unworthiness of freedom by not winning it with the
+sword. If they had not quarrelled among themselves, and betrayed one
+another, they would have established their right to independence; or,
+if there had been still an Act of Union, they could have come in, as
+the Scots came, on their own terms. For an Englishman to write the
+history of Ireland without prejudice he must be either a cosmopolitan
+philosopher, or a passionless recluse. Froude was an ardent patriot,
+and his early studies in hagiology had led him to the conclusion, not
+now accepted, that St. Patrick never existed at all. His scepticism
+about St. Patrick might have been forgiven to a man who had probably
+not much belief in St. George. But Froude could not help running amok
+at all the popular heroes of Ireland. In the first of his two papers
+describing a fortnight in Kerry he went out of his way to depreciate
+the fame of Daniel O'Connell. "Ireland," he wrote, "has ceased to
+care for him. His fame blazed like a straw bonfire, and has left
+behind it scarce a shovelful of ashes. Never any public man had it in
+his power to do so much good for his country, nor was there ever one
+who accomplished so little."*
+
+--
+* Short Studies, vol. ii. p. 241.
+--
+
+That O'Connell wasted much time in clamouring for Repeal is perfectly
+true. But he was as much the author of Catholic Emancipation as
+Cobden was the author of Free Trade, and that fact alone should have
+debarred Froude from the use of this extravagant language. For though
+an article in Fraser's Magazine is a very different thing from a
+serious history, print imposes some obligations, and even two or
+three casual sentences may show the bent of a man's mind. Whatever
+Froude wrote on Ireland, or on anything else, was sure to be widely
+read, and to affect, for good or for evil, the opinion of the British
+public. It was therefore peculiarly incumbent on him not to flatter
+English pride by wounding Irish self-respect.
+
+While Froude was writing his English in Ireland he received an
+invitation to give a series of lectures in the United States. "The
+Yankees," he says to Skelton,+ "have written to me about going over
+to lecture to them. I am strongly tempted; but I could not tell the
+truth about Ireland without reflecting in a good many ways on my own
+country. I don't fancy doing that, however justly, to amuse Jonathan."
+These words certainly do not show implacable bitterness
+against Ireland. Brought face to face with responsibility, Froude
+always felt the weight of it, and he was never consciously unfair. He
+was under a strong sense of obligation, which he felt bound to
+fulfil. It is impossible not to admire the chivalrous and intrepid
+spirit with which he undertook singlehanded to justify the conduct of
+his countrymen before the American people, and to persuade them that
+England had provocation for her treatment of Ireland. Once convinced
+that his cause was righteous, he never flinched. He believed that
+false views of the Irish question prevailed in America, and that he
+could set them right. He did not altogether underrate the magnitude
+of the enterprise. "I go like an Arab of the desert," he wrote to
+Skelton a little later: "my hand will be against every man, and
+therefore every man's hand will be against me."* A belief in
+Ireland's wrongs was part of the American creed, like the
+faithlessness of Charles II. and the tyranny of George III. Irish
+Americans had enormous influence at elections, in Congress, and in
+the newspapers. Released Fenians, O'Donovan Rossa among them, had
+been spreading what they called the light, and their own countrymen
+at all events believed what they said. The American people as a whole
+were not unfriendly to England. The Alabama Arbitration and the Geneva
+Award had destroyed the ill feeling that remained after the
+fall of Richmond. But it was not worth the while of any American
+politician to alienate the Irish vote, and most Americans honestly
+thought, not without reason, that the policy of England in Ireland
+had been abominable. To let sleeping dogs lie might be wise. Once
+they were unchained, no American hand would help to chain them up
+again. Froude, however, conceived that circumstances were unusually
+favourable. The Irish Church had been disestablished, and the Fenian
+prisoners had been set free. The Irish Land Act of 1870 had
+recognised the Irish tenant's right to a partnership in the soil.
+Although Froude had no sympathy, ecclesiastical or political, with
+Gladstone, he did think that the Land Act was a just and beneficent
+measure from which good would come. In the firm belief that he could
+vindicate the statesmanship of his own country before American
+audiences without sacrificing the paramount claims of truth and
+justice, he accepted the invitation.
+
+--
++ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 149.
+* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 151.
+--
+
+After a summer cruise in a big schooner with his friend Lord Ducie,
+whose hospitality at sea he often in coming years enjoyed, Froude
+sailed from Liverpool in the Russia at the end of September, 1872,
+with the distinguished physicist John Tyndall. He was a good sailor,
+and loved a voyage. In his first letter to his wife from American
+soil he describes a storm with the delight of a schoolboy.
+"On Saturday morning it blew so hard that it was scarcely possible to
+stand on deck. The wind and waves dead ahead, and the whole power of
+the engines only just able to move the ship against it. It was the
+grandest sight I ever witnessed--the splendid Russia, steady as if
+she were on a railway, holding her straight course without yielding
+one point to the sea--up the long hill-sides of the waves and down
+into the troughs--the crests of the sea all round as far as the eye
+could reach in one wild whirl of foam and spray. It was worth coming
+into the Atlantic to see--with the sense all the time of perfect
+security."
+
+Froude's visit was in one respect well timed. President Grant had
+just been assured of his second term, and even politicians had
+leisure to think of their famous guest. He was at once invited to a
+great banquet in New York, and found himself lodged with sumptuous
+hospitality in a luxurious hotel at the expense of the Bureau which
+had organised the lectures. One newspaper quaintly described him as
+"looking like a Scotch farmer, with an open frank face and calm mild
+eyes." His History was well known, for the Scribners had sold a
+hundred and fifty thousand copies. His opinions were of course freely
+invited, and he did not hesitate to give them. "I talk much Toryism
+to them all, and ridicule the idea of England's decay, or of our
+being in any danger of revolution; and with Colonies and India and
+Commerce, etc., I insist that we are just as big as they are, and
+have just as large a future before us." Both Froude and his hosts
+might have remembered with advantage Disraeli's fine saying that
+great nations are those which produce great men. But the sensual
+idolatry of mere size is almost equally common on both sides of the
+Atlantic.
+
+The banquet was given by Froude's American publishers, the Scribners,
+and his old acquaintance Emerson was one of the company. Another was
+a popular clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, and a third was the present
+Ambassador of the United States in London, Mr. Whitelaw Reid. In his
+speech Froude referred to the object of his visit. He had heard at
+home that "one of the most prominent Fenian leaders," O'Donovan
+Rossa, "was making a tour in the United States, dilating upon English
+tyranny and the wrongs of Ireland." That Froude should cross the seas
+to confute O'Donovan Rossa must have struck the audience as scarcely
+credible, until he explained his mission, for as such he regarded it,
+by asserting that "the judgment of America has more weight in Ireland
+than twenty batteries of English cannon." When the Irish had the
+management of their own affairs, he continued, the result was
+universal misery. They could not govern themselves in the sixteenth
+century; therefore they could not govern themselves in the
+nineteenth. If American opinion would only tell the Irish that they
+had no longer any grievances which legislation could redress, the
+Irish would believe it, and all would be well.
+
+Though courteously treated as a representative Englishman, Froude had
+of course no official position, and he hoped that as a private
+individual his voice might be heard. But, while there were thousands
+of native Americans who had no love for their Irish fellow-citizens,
+there were very few indeed who cared to take up England's case
+against Ireland. The Democratic party were inclined to sympathise
+with Home Rule as being a mild form of Secession, and the Republican
+party did not see why Ireland should be refused the qualified
+independence enjoyed by every State of the Union. In these
+unfavourable circumstances Froude delivered his first lecture. He
+made a good point when he described the Irish peasant in Munster or
+Connaught looking to America as his natural protector. "There is not
+a lad," he exclaimed, "in an Irish national school who does not pore
+over the maps of the States which hang on the walls, gaze on them
+with admiration and hope, and count the years till he too shall set
+his foot in those famous cities which float before his imagination
+like the gardens of Aladdin." Nevertheless he asked his hearers and
+readers to take it from him that Ireland had no longer any good
+ground of complaint against the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
+Independence she could not have, and that not because the interests
+of Great Britain forbade it, which would have been an intelligible
+argument, but because she was unfit for it herself.
+
+"If I were to sum up in one sentence the secret of Ireland's
+misfortunes, I should say it lay in this: that while from the first
+she has resisted England, complained of England, appealed to heaven
+and earth against the wrongs which England has inflicted on her, she
+has ever invited others to help her, and has never herself made an
+effective fight for her own rights .... A majority of hustings votes
+might be found for a separation. The majority would be less
+considerable if instead of a voting-paper they were called to handle
+a rifle."
+
+To tell Irishmen that they could obtain liberty by fighting for it,
+and would never get it in any other way, was not likely to conciliate
+them, or to promote the cause of peace. Froude's appeal to American
+opinion, however, was more practical.
+
+"The Irishman requires to be ruled, but ruled as all men ought to be,
+by the laws of right and wrong, laws which shall defend the weak from
+the strong and the poor from the rich. When the poor peasant is
+secured the reward of his own labour, and is no longer driven to the
+blunderbuss to save himself and his family from legalised robbery, if
+he prove incorrigible then, I will give him up. But the experiment
+remains to be made."
+
+An example had been set by Gladstone in the Land Act, and that was
+the path which further legislation ought to follow. So far there
+would not be much disagreement between Froude and most Irish
+Americans. Rack-renting upon the tenants' improvements was the bane
+of Irish agriculture, and the Act of 1870 was precisely what Froude
+described it, a partial antidote. Then the lecturer reverted to
+ancient history, to the Annals of the Four Masters, and the Danish
+invasion. The audience found it rather long, and rather dull, even
+though Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick were all built
+by the Danes. But a foundation had to be laid, and Froude felt bound
+also to make it clear that he did not take the old Whig view of
+Government as a necessary evil, or swear by the "dismal science" of
+Adam Smith.
+
+He concluded his first lecture in words which at once defined his
+position and challenged the whole Irish race. "It was not tyranny,"
+he cried, "but negligence; it was not the intrusion of English
+authority, but the absence of all authority; it was that very leaving
+Ireland to herself which she demands so passionately that was the
+cause of her wretchedness." After that it was hopeless to expect that
+he would have an impartial hearing. Every Irishman understood that
+the lecturer was an enemy, and was prepared not to read for
+instruction, but to look out for mistakes. An article in The New York
+Tribune, which spoke of Froude with admiration and esteem, told him
+plainly enough how it would be. "We have had historical lecturers
+before, but never any who essayed with such industry, learning, and
+eloquence to convince a nation that its sympathies for half a century
+at least have have been misplaced .... The thesis which he only
+partly set out for the night--that the misfortunes of Ireland are
+rather due to the congenital qualities of the race than to wrongs
+inflicted by their conquerors--will excite earnest and perhaps bitter
+controversy." This prediction was abundantly fulfilled, and the
+controversy spoiled the tour. A friendly and sympathetic journalist
+questioned Froude's "wisdom in coming before our people with this
+course of lectures on Irish history ... We do not care for the
+domestic troubles of other nations, and it is a piece of impertinence
+to thrust them upon our attention. Mr. Froude knows perfectly well
+that England would resent, and rightfully, the least interference on
+our part with her Irish policy or her Irish subjects."
+
+In this criticism there is a large amount of common sense, and
+Froude would have done well to think of it before. He was not,
+however, a man to be put down by clamour; he was sustained by the
+fervour of his convictions, and it was too late for remonstrance.
+His lectures had all been carefully prepared, and he went steadily
+on with them. The unusual charge of dullness, which had been made
+against some passages in his opening discourse, was never made
+again. The lectures became a leading topic of conversation, and a
+subject of fierce attack. Without fear, and in defiance of his
+critics, he dashed into the reign of Henry VIII., "the English Blue
+Beard, whom I have been accused of attempting to whitewash."  "I
+have no particular veneration for kings," he said. "The English
+Liturgy speaks of them officially as most religious and gracious.
+They have been, I suppose, as religious and gracious as other men,
+neither more nor less. The chief difference is that we know more of
+kings than we know of other men." Henry had a short way with
+absentees. He took away their Irish estates, "and gave them to
+others who would reside and attend to their work. It would have been
+confiscation doubtless," beyond the power of American Congress,
+though not of a British Parliament. "If in later times there had
+been more such confiscations, Ireland would not have been the worse
+for it." Here, then, Froude was on the side of the Irish. Here, as
+always, he was under the influence of Carlyle. His ideal form of
+government was an enlightened despotism, with a ruler drawn after
+the pattern of children's story-books, who would punish the wicked
+and reward the good. Froude never consciously defended injustice, or
+tampered with the truth. His faults were of the opposite kind. He
+could not help speaking out the whole truth as it appeared to him,
+without regard for time, place, or expediency. If he could have
+defended England without attacking Ireland, all would have been
+well, but he could not do it. For his defence of England, stated
+simply, was that Ireland had always been, and still remained,
+incapable of managing her own affairs. "Free nations, gentlemen, are
+not made by playing at insurrection. If Ireland desires to be a
+nation, she must learn not merely to shout for liberty, but to fight
+for it" against a bigger nation with a standing army in which many
+Irishmen were enlisted. The Irish are a sensitive as well as a
+generous race; and they feel taunts as much as more substantial
+wrongs. When the first British statesman of his time, not a Roman
+Catholic, nor, as the Irish would have said, a Catholic at all, had
+denounced the upas, or poison, tree of Protestant ascendency, and
+had cut off its two principal branches, Froude wasted his breath in
+telling the American Irish, or the American people, that Gladstone
+did not know what he was talking about. The Irish Church Act, the
+Irish Land Act, the release of the Fenians, appealed to them as
+honest measures of justice and conciliation. There was nothing
+conciliatory in Froude's language, and they did not think it just.
+From the purely historical point of view he had much to say for
+himself, as, for instance:
+
+"The Papal cause in Europe in the sixteenth century, take it for all
+in all, was the cause of stake and gibbet, inquisition, dungeons,
+and political tyranny. It did not lose its character because in
+Ireland it assumed the accidental form of the defence of the freedom
+of opinion."
+
+Perhaps not. Ireland, for good or for evil, was connected with
+England, and when England was at war with the Pope she was at war
+with him in Ireland as elsewhere. The argument, however, is double-
+edged. The Papal cause being no longer, for various reasons, the
+cause of stake and gibbet, how could there be the same ground for
+restricting freedom of opinion in Ireland, for passing Coercion
+Acts, for refusing Home Rule? As Froude himself said, "Popery now
+has its teeth drawn. It can bark, but it can no longer bite." "The
+Irish generally," he went on, "were rather superstitious than
+religious." These. are delicate distinctions. "The Bishop of
+Peterborough must understand," said John Bright on a famous
+occasion, "that I believe in holy earth as little as he believes in
+holy water." Elizabeth's Irish policy was to take advantage of local
+factions, and to maintain English supremacy by setting them against
+each other. "The result was hideous. The forty-five glorious years
+of Elizabeth were to Ireland years of unremitting wretchedness."
+Nobody could complain that Froude spared the English Government. If
+he had been writing history, or rather when he was writing it, the
+mutual treachery of the Irish could not be passed over. "Alas and
+shame for Ireland," said Froude in New York. "Not then only, but
+many times before and after, the same plan [offer of pardon to
+murderous traitors] was tried, and was never known to fail. Brother
+brought in the dripping head of brother, son of father, comrade of
+comrade. I pardon none, said an English commander, until they have
+imbued their hands in blood." The revival of such horrors on a
+public platform could serve no useful purpose. They could not be
+pleaded as an apology for England, and they inflamed, instead of
+soothing, the animosities which Froude professed himself anxious to
+allay. Yet he never lost sight of justice. On Elizabeth he had no
+mercy. He made her responsible for the slaughter of men, women, and
+children by her officers, for first neglecting her duties as ruler,
+and then putting down rebellion by assassination. The plantation of
+Ulster by 'James I., and the accompanying forfeiture of Catholic
+estates, he defended on the ground that only the idle rich were
+dispossessed. This is of course socialism pure and simple. James
+I.'s own excuse was that Tyrone and Tyrconnell, who owned the
+greater part of Ulster between them, had been implicated in the
+Gunpowder Plot. If they were, the loss of their lands was a very
+mild penalty indeed.
+
+On the rebellion of 1641, which led to Cromwell's terrible
+retribution, Froude touched lightly. Although the number of
+Protestants who perished in the massacre has been exaggerated, the
+attempts of Catholic historians to deny it, or explain it away, are
+futile. Sir William Petty's figure of 38,000 is as well
+authenticated as any. Froude of course justifies Cromwell for
+putting, eight years afterwards, the garrisons of Drogheda and
+Wexford to the sword. His characteristic intrepidity was never more
+fully shown than in these appeals to American opinion against the
+Irish race and creed. Unfortunately the practical result of them was
+the reverse of what he intended. He preached the gospel of force.
+Thus he expressed it in reply to Cromwell's critics: "I say frankly,
+that I believe the control of human things in this world is given to
+the strong, and those who cannot hold their own ground with all
+advantage on their side must bear the Consequences of their
+weakness." The Holy Inquisition, might have used this language in
+Italy or in Spain. Any tyrant might use it at any time. It was
+denied in anticipation by an older and higher authority than Carlyle
+in the words "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to
+the strong." There is a better morality, if indeed there be a worse,
+than reverence for big battalions.
+
+Sceptre and crown
+Must topple down,
+And in the earth be equal made
+With the poor crooked scythe and spade;
+
+Only the actions of the just
+Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.
+
+Froude seldom did things by halves, and his apology for Cromwell is
+not half-hearted. He applauds the celebrated pronouncement, "I
+meddle with no man's conscience; but if you mean by liberty of
+conscience, liberty to have the mass, that will not be suffered
+where the Parliament of England has power." A great deal has
+happened since Cromwell's time, and the mass is no longer the symbol
+of intolerance, if only because the Church of Rome has no power to
+persecute. Cromwell would have had a short shrift if he had fallen
+into the hands of mass-goers. To tolerate intolerance is a Christian
+duty, and therefore possible for an individual. Whether it was
+possible for the Lord General in 1650 is a question hardly suited
+for popular treatment on a public platform. All that he did was
+right in Froude's eyes, including the prescription of "Hell or
+Connaught" for "the men whose trade was fighting, who had called
+themselves lords of the soil," and the abolition of the Irish
+Parliament. "I as an Englishman," said Froude, "honour Cromwell and
+glory in him as the greatest statesman and soldier our race has
+produced. In the matter we have now in hand I consider him to have
+been the best friend, in the best sense, to all that was good in
+Ireland." This is of course an opinion which can honestly be held.
+But to the Irish race all over the world such language is an
+irritating defiance, and they simply would not listen to any man who
+used it.
+
+The expulsion of Presbyterians under Charles II. was foolish as well
+as cruel, for it deprived the English Government in Ireland of their
+best friends, and supplied the American colonies with some of their
+staunchest soldiers in the War of Independence. Enough were left,
+however, to immortalise the siege of Derry, while the native Irish
+failed to distinguish themselves, or, in plain English, ran away, at
+the Battle of the Boyne, and the defeat of James II. was recognised
+by the Treaty of Limerick. An exclusively Protestant, Parliament was
+accompanied by such toleration as the Catholics had enjoyed under
+Charles II. The infamous law against the Irish trade in wool and the
+episcopal persecution of Nonconformists, were condemned in just and
+forcible terms by Froude. Episcopal shortcomings seldom escaped his
+vigilant eye. "I believe," he said, "Bishops have produced more
+mischief in this world than any class of officials that have ever
+been invented." The petition of the Irish Parliament for union with
+England in 1703 was refused, madly refused, Froude thought;
+Protestant Dissenters were treated as harshly as Catholics, and the
+commercial regulations of the eighteenth century were such that
+smuggling thrived better than any other trade. The country was
+pillaged by absent  landlords, and "the mere hint of an absentee tax
+was sufficient to throw the younger Pitt into convulsions." The
+Irish Protestant Bishops provoked the savage satire of Swift, who
+doubted not that excellent men had been appointed, and only deplored
+that they should be personated by scoundrels who had murdered them
+on Hounslow Heath.
+
+These lectures stung the Irish to the quick, and gave much
+embarrassment to Froude's American friends. The Irish found a
+powerful champion in Father Burke, the Dominican friar, who had been
+a popular preacher at Rome, and with an audience of his own Catholic
+countrymen was irresistible. Burke was not a well informed man, and
+his knowledge of history was derived from Catholic handbooks. But
+the occasion did not call for dry facts. Froude had not been
+passionless, and what the Irish wanted in reply was the rhetorical
+eloquence which to the Father was second nature. Burke, however, had
+the good taste and good sense to acknowledge that Froude suffered
+from nothing worse than the invincible prejudice which all Catholics
+attribute to all Protestants. As a Protestant and an Englishman,
+Froude could not be expected to give such a history of Ireland as
+would be agreeable to Irishmen. "Yet to the honour of this learned
+gentleman be it said that he frankly avows the injuries which have
+been done, and that he comes nearer than any man whom I have ever
+heard to the real root of the remedy to be applied to these evils."
+When his handling of documentary evidence was criticised, Froude
+repeated his challenge to the editor of The Saturday Review, which
+had never been taken up, and on that point the American sense of
+fair play gave judgment in his favour. But how was public opinion to
+pronounce upon such a subject as the alleged Bull of Adrian II.,
+granting Ireland to Henry II of England? The Bull was not in
+existence, and Burke boldly denied that it had ever existed at all.
+Froude maintained that its existence and its nature were proved by
+later Bulls of succeeding Popes. The matter had no interest for
+Protestants, and the American press regarded it as a bore. Burke had
+more success with the rebellion of 1641, and the Cromwellian massacres
+of Such 1649. Such topics cannot be exhaustively treated in part of a
+single lecture, and Burke could not be expected to put the slaughter
+of true believers on a level with irregular justice roughly wreaked
+upon heretics. The combat was not so much unequal as impossible. There
+was no common groud. Froude could be fair to an eminent especially if
+he were a Protestant. His panegyric on Grattan deserves to be quoted
+alike for its eloquence and its justice. "In those singular labyrinths
+of intrigue and treachery," meaning the secret correspondence at the
+Castle, "I  have found Irishmen whose names stand fair enough in
+patriotic history concerned in transactions that show them knaves and
+scoundrels; but I never found stain nor shadow of stain on the
+reputation of Henry Grattan. I say nothing of the temptations to which
+he was exposed. There were no honours with which England would not
+have decorated him; there was no price so high that England would not
+have paid to have silenced or subsidised him. He was one of those
+perfectly disinterested men who do not feel temptations of this kind.
+They passed by him and over him without giving him even the pains to
+turn his back on them. In every step of his life he was governed
+simply and fairly by what he conceived to be the interest of his
+country." Grattan's Parliament, as we all know, nearly perished in a
+dispute about the Regency, and finally disappeared after the rebellion
+of 1798. It gave the Catholics votes in 1793, though no Catholic ever
+sat within its walls. Grattan, according to Froude, was led astray by
+the "delirium of nationality," and the true Irish statesman of his
+time was Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, whose name is only less
+abhorred by Irish Nationalists than Cromwell's own. Americans did not
+think nationality a delirium, and their ideal of statesmanship was not
+represented by Lord Clare.
+
+The fifth and last of Froude's American lectures was reprinted in
+Short Studies with the title of "Ireland since the Union."* It has a
+closer bearing upon current politics than the others, and it runs
+counter to American as well as to Irish sentiment. "Suppose in any
+community two-thirds who are cowards vote one way, and the remaining
+third will not only vote, but fight the other way." The argument has
+often been used against woman's suffrage. One obvious answer is that
+women, like men, would vote on different sides. In a community where
+two-thirds of the adult male population were cowards problems of
+government would doubtless assume a secondary importance, and that
+there are limits to the power of majorities no sane Constitutionalist
+denies.
+
+--
+* Vol. ii. pp, 515-598.
+--
+
+Short of making Carlyle Dictator of the Universe, Froude suggested
+no alternative to the ballot-box of civilised life. This last
+lecture, however, is chiefly remarkable for the rare tribute which
+it pays to the services of the Catholic priesthood. Father Burke
+himself must have been melted when he read, "Ireland is one of the
+poorest countries in Europe. There is less theft, less cheating,
+less house-breaking, less robbery of all sorts, than in any country
+of the same size in the world. In the wild district where I lived we
+slept with unlocked door and open windows, with as much security as
+if we had been--I will not say in London or New York, I should be
+sorry to try the experiment in either place: I will say as if we had
+been among the saints in Paradise. In the sixteenth century the
+Irish were notoriously regardless of what is technically morality.
+For the last hundred years at least impurity has been almost unknown
+in Ireland. And this absence of vulgar crime, and this exceptional
+delicacy and modesty of character, are due alike, to their ever-
+lasting honour, to the influence of the Catholic clergy." That is
+the testimony of an opponent, and it is emphatic testimony indeed.
+To O'Connell Froude is again conspicuously unjust, and his remark
+that "a few attacks on handfuls of the police, or the blowing in of
+the walls of an English prison . . . will not overturn an Empire" is
+open to the observation that they disestablished a Church. When
+Froude came to practical politics, he always seemed to be "moving
+about in worlds not realised." His statement that national education
+in Ireland was the best that existed in any part of the Empire
+almost takes one's breath away, and the idea that no Irish
+legislature would have passed the Land Act is a strange fantasy
+indeed. Whether an Irish Parliament could be trusted to deal fairly
+by the landlords is an open question. That it would fail to consider
+the interests of the tenants is unthinkable. Froude was on much
+firmer ground when he employed the case of Protestant Ulster, the
+Ulster of the Plantation, as an argument against Home Rule. Those
+Protestants would, he said, fight rather than submit to a Catholic
+majority, and England could not assent to shooting them down. There
+is only one real answer to this objection, and that is that
+Protestant Ulster would do nothing of the kind. A logical method of
+reconciling contradictory prophecies has never been found. In 1872
+Home Rule had no support in England, and even in Ireland the
+electors were pretty equally divided. Froude did not lay hold of the
+American mind, as he might have done, by showing the inapplicability
+of the Federal System which suits the United States to the
+circumstances of the United Kingdom.
+
+The impression made by Froude upon his audiences in New York is
+graphically described by an American reporter.
+
+"Mr. Froude improved very much in delivery and manner during this
+course of lectures .... In his earlier lectures his ways were
+awkward, his speech was too rapid, and he did not know what in world
+to do with his hands. It was quite to see him run them under his
+coat tails, spread them across his shirt front, stick them in his
+breeches pockets, twirl them in the arm-holes his vest, or hold them
+behind his back. He has now found out how to dispose of them in a
+more or less natural way. His delivery is less rapid, his voice
+better modulated, and his enunciation more distinct .... One of his
+most effective peculiarities, in inviting the attention of his
+hearers, is the exceeding earnestness of the manner of his address.
+This earnestness is not like that of rant. It is the result of his
+own strong conviction and his desire to impress others." That is a
+fair and unprejudiced estimate of Froude as he appeared to a trained
+observer who took neither side in the dispute. Many Irishmen shook
+hands with him, and thanked him for his plain speaking. Bret Harte
+told him that even those who dissented most widely from his opinions
+admired his "grit." But politicians had to think of the Irish vote,
+and the proprietors of newspapers could not ignore their Catholic
+subscribers. The priests worked against him with such effect that
+Mr. Peabody's servants in Boston, who were Irish Catholics,
+threatened to leave their places if Froude remained as a guest in
+their master's house. Father Burke, who had begun politely enough,
+became obstreperous and abusive. Froude's life was in danger, and he
+was put under the special protection of the police. The English
+newspapers, except The Pall Mall Gazette, gave him no support, and
+The Times treated his enterprise as Quixotic. A preposterous rumour
+that he received payment from the British Ministry obtained
+circulation among respectable persons in New York. He had intended
+to visit the Western States, but the project was abandoned in
+consequence of growing Irish hostility which made him feel that
+further effort would be useless. It was not that he thought his
+arguments refuted, or capable of refutation. He had considered them
+too long, and too carefully, for that. But the well had been
+poisoned. The malicious imputation of bribery was caught up by the
+more credulous Irish, and their priests warned them that they would
+do wrong in listening to a heretic. As for the American people, they
+had no mind to take up the quarrel. It was no business of theirs.
+
+Some extracts from Froude's letters to his wife will show how much
+he enjoyed American hospitality, and how far he appreciated American
+character. "I was received on Saturday," he wrote from New York on
+the 4th of October, 1872, "as a member of the Lotus Club--the wits
+and journalists of New York. It was the strangest scene I ever was
+present at. They were very clever--very witty at each other's
+expense, very complimentary to me; and, believe me, they worked the
+publishers who were present for the profit they were making out of
+me." He was agreeably surprised by the merchant princes of New York.
+"There is absolutely no vulgarity about them. They are immensely
+rich, but simple, and rather elaborately 'religious' in the forms of
+their lives. A very long grace is always said before dinner. In this
+and many ways they are totally unlike what I expected." Again, after
+a description of Cornell's University, he says, "There is Mr.
+Cornell, who has made all this, living in a little poky house in a
+street with a couple of maids, his wife and daughters dressed in the
+homeliest manner. His name will be remembered for centuries as
+having spent his wealth in the very best institutions on which a
+country's prosperity depends. Our people spend their fortunes in
+buying great landed estates to found and perpetuate their own
+family. I wonder which name will last the longest, Mr. Cornell's or
+Lord Overstone's." "There is no such thing," he says elsewhere, "as
+founding a family, and those who save good fortunes have to give
+them to the public when they die for want of a better use to put
+them to."
+
+With sincerely religious people, especially if they were
+Evangelicals, Froude felt deep sympathy. Patronage of religion he
+detested, most of all the form of it which prescribes religion for
+other people. An American philosopher called, and told him that,
+having failed to find a new creed, he thought the old superstitions
+had better be kept up, Popery for choice. "This," remarks Froude,
+"is what I call want of faith. If you can believe that what you are
+convinced is a lie may nevertheless exert a wholesome moral
+influence on people, and that, whether true or not, or rather though
+certainly not true, it is good to be preserved and taken up with,
+you are to all practical purposes an atheist."
+
+While he was at Boston Froude saw a great fire, and his description
+of it is hardly inferior to the best things in his best books. He
+was staying with George Peabody, equally well known in England and
+the United States as a philanthropist, "one of the sweetest and
+gentlest of beings." "As we were sitting after dinner, the children
+said there was a fire somewhere. They heard the alarm bell, and saw
+a red light in the sky. Presently we saw flames. Mr. Peabody was
+uneasy, and I walked out with him to see. Between the house here and
+the town lies the Common or City Park. As we crossed this, the signs
+became more ominous. We made our way into the principal street
+through the crowd, and then, looking down a cross street full of
+enormous warehouses, saw both sides of it in flames. The streets
+were full of steam fire-engines, all roaring and playing,  but the
+houses were so high and large, and the volumes of fire so
+prodigious, that their water-jets looked like so many squirts. As we
+stood, we saw the fire grow. Block caught after block. I myself saw
+one magnificent store catch at the lower windows. In a few seconds
+the flame ran up storey after storey, spouting out at the different
+landings as it rose. It reached the roof with a spring, and the
+place was gone. There was nothing to stop it. Our people were sure
+that it would be another Chicago. The night was fine and frosty,
+with a light north-easterly breeze against which the fire was
+advancing. We stayed an hour or two. There seemed no danger for Mr.
+Peabody's bank. He was evidently, however, extremely harassed and
+anxious, as he held the bonds of innumerable merchants whose
+property was being destroyed. I thought I was in his way, and left
+him, and came home to tell the family what was going on. After I
+left the fire travelled faster than ever. Huge rolls of smoke
+swelled up fold after fold. The under folds crimson and glowing
+yellow from the flames below, sparks flying up like rocket stars. A
+petroleum store caught, and the flames ran about in rivers, and
+above all the steel blue moon shone through the rents of the rolling
+vapour, and the stars with an intensity of brilliant calm such as we
+never see in  England. It was a night to be eternally remembered."
+
+A great many Irish families were made homeless by this fire, and
+Froude subscribed seven hundred dollars for their relief, thereby
+encouraging the rumour that he was in the pay of the British
+Minister whom he disliked and distrusted most.  Froude's final view
+of America and Americans was in some respects less favourable than
+his first impressions. He was struck by the difference between their
+public and private treatment of himself, between their conversation
+and the articles in their press. "From what I see of the Eastern
+States I do not anticipate any very great things as likely to come
+out of the Americans. Their physical frames seem hung together
+rather than organically grown .... They are generous with their
+money, have much tenderness and quiet good feeling; but the Anglo-
+Saxon power is running to seed, and I don't think will revive.
+Puritanism is dead, and the collected sternness of temperament which
+belonged to it is dead also."
+
+This language seems strange, written as it was only seven years
+after the great war. Froude, however, considered that there was much
+hysterical passion in the policy of the North, and he shared
+Carlyle's dislike of democratic institutions. Moreover, he was
+disappointed with the result of his mission. The case seemed so
+clear to him that he could not understand why it should seem less
+clear to others. He believed that if the priests could have been
+driven out of Ireland by William of Orange, the more fanatical
+Catholics would have followed them, and Ireland would have become
+prosperous, contented, and loyal. To an American Republican such
+ideas were as repugnant as they were to an Irish Catholic. An
+American could understand the argument that Home Rule was
+impracticable, because a Federal Constitution did not apply to the
+circumstances of the United Kingdom. He would not readily believe
+that the Irish were by nature incapable of self-government, or that
+Englishmen must know better what was good for them than they knew
+themselves. For Cromwell he could make allowance. The Protector had
+to deal with a Catholicism which would have made an end of him and
+restored Charles II. But times had changed. Catholics had abandoned
+persecution, and ought not to be punished the sins of their fathers.
+The Irish did not claim, as the Southern States had claimed, the
+right to secede, but to exercise the powers inherent in every State
+of the American Union.
+
+Carlyle warmly approved of Froude's undertaking, and persisted in
+believing that it had done good by forcing the American public to
+see that there were two sides to the historic question, an English
+side as well as an Irish one. He was so far right, and with that
+qualified success Froude had to be content. His champion, whose
+opinion was more to him than any other, than any number of others,
+wrote to Mrs. Froude on the 5th of December, 1872: "The rest of the
+affair, all that loud whirlwind of Bully Burke, Saturday Review and
+Co., both at home and abroad, I take to be, in essence, absolutely
+nothing; and to deserve from him no more regard than the barking of
+dogs, or the braying of asses. He may depend on it, what he is
+saying about Ireland is the genuine truth, or the nearest to it that
+has ever been said by any person whatever; and I hope he knows long
+ere this (if he likes to consider it) that the truth alone is
+anything, and all the circumambient balderdash and whirlwinds of
+nonsense tumbling round it are, and eternally remain, nothing. Tell
+him I have read his book, and know others that have read it with
+attention; and that their and my clear opinion is as above. To
+myself there is a ring in it as of clear steel; and my prophecy is
+that all the roaring blockheads of the world cannot prevent its
+natural effect on human souls. Sooner or later all persons will have
+to believe it." Carlyle seldom qualified his approval, and his
+earnest advocacy was to Froude a recompense beyond all price.
+
+The first volume of Froude's English in Ireland in the Eighteenth
+Century, to which Carlyle refers, had been published at home while
+the author was lecturing on the Irish question to the people of the
+United States. Like the lectures, on a more thorough and
+comprehensive scale, it is a bold indictment of the Irish nation.
+Froude could not write without a purpose, nor forget that he was an
+Englishman and a Protestant. Before he had finished a single chapter
+of his new book he had stated in uncompromising language his opinion
+of the Irish race. "Passionate in everything--passionate in their
+patriotism, passionate in their religion, passionately courageous,
+passionately loyal and affectionate--they are without the manliness
+which would give strength and solidity to the sentimental part of
+their dispositions; while the surface and show is so seductive and
+winning that only experience of its instability can resist its
+charm."* Such summary judgments are seldom accurate. Every one must
+be acquainted with individual Irishmen who do not correspond with
+Froude's general description. Nor does Froude always take into
+account the shrewdness, the humour, the genius for politics, which
+have distinguished Irishmen throughout the world. Impressed with
+this view of the Irish character, he held that forbearance in
+dealing with Irish rebellions was misplaced, that Irishmen respected
+only an authority with which they durst not trifle, and that
+universal confiscation should have followed the defeat of Shan
+O'Neill.
+
+--
+* Vol. i, pp. 21, 22,
+--
+
+These, however, were preliminary matters. When he came to the
+eighteenth century Froude had to consider details, and here his
+prejudice against Catholicism led him astray. In the reign of George
+II. acts of lawless violence were not uncommon on this side of the
+Channel, and Richardson's Clarissa was read with a credulity which
+showed that abduction could be committed without being followed by
+punishment. In parts of Ireland it was not an infrequent offence,
+and Froude collected some abominable cases, which he described in
+his picturesque way.* As examples of disregard for humanity, and
+contempt for law, he was fully justified in citing them. But he
+endeavoured to throw responsibility for these outrages on the Roman
+Catholic Church. "Young gentlemen," he says, "of the Catholic
+persuasion were in the habit of recovering equivalents for the lands
+of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of
+recovering souls at the same time by carrying off young Protestant
+girls of fortune to the mountains, ravishing them with the most
+exquisite brutality, and then compelling them to go through a form
+of marriage, which a priest was always in attendance ready to
+celebrate."+ This is a very serious charge, perhaps as serious a
+charge as could well be made against a religious communion. It was
+an accusation improbable on the face of it; for while the Church of
+Rome in the course of her strange, eventful history has tampered
+with the sixth commandment, as Protestants call it, she has never
+underrated the virtue of chastity, and has always proclaimed a high
+standard of sexual morals. In his zeal to justify the penal laws
+against Catholics Froude accepted without sufficient inquiry
+evidence which could only have satisfied one willing to believe the
+worst.
+
+--
+* English in Ireland, vol. i. pp. 417-434.
++ Ibid., p. 417.
+--
+
+Several years afterwards, in 1878, the subject was fully discussed,
+and Froude's conclusions were shown to be unsound, by another
+historian, William Edward Hartpole Lecky. Lecky was a much more
+formidable critic than Freeman. Calm in temperament and moderate in
+language, he could take part in an historical controversy without
+getting into a rage. Freeman, after pages of mere abuse, would
+pounce with triumphant ejaculations upon a misprint. Lecky did not
+waste his time either on scolding or on trifles. The faults he found
+were grave, and his censure was not the less severe for being
+decorous. An Anglicised Irishman, living in England, though a
+graduate of Dublin University, Lecky became known when he was a very
+young man for a brilliant little book on Leaders of Irish Opinion.
+He had since published mature and valuable histories of rationalism,
+and of morals. His History of England in the Eighteenth Century is
+likely to remain a standard book, being written with fairness,
+lucidity, and candour. It is true that in his Irish chapters, with
+which alone I am concerned, Lecky, like Froude, wrote with a
+purpose. He was an Irish patriot, and bent on making out the best
+possible case for his own country.
+
+At the same time he was, for an Irishman, singularly impartial
+between Catholic and Protestant, leaning, if at all, to the
+Protestant side. Yet he repudiated with indignant vehemence Froude's
+attempt to connect the Catholic Church with these atrocious crimes.
+I am bound to say that I think he disproves the charge of
+ecclesiastical complicity. The evidence upon which Froude relied,
+the only evidence accessible, is the collection of presentments by
+Grand Juries, with the accompanying depositions, in Dublin Castle.
+In the first sixty years of the eighteenth century there were
+twenty-eight cases of abduction thus recorded. In only four of them
+can it be shown that the perpetrator was a Catholic and the victim a
+Protestant. In only one, which Froude has described at much length,
+did the criminal try to make a Protestant girl attend mass. For one
+of the cases, which according to Froude went unpunished, two men
+were hanged. "The truth is," says Lecky, "that the crime was merely
+the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism."*
+These offences have so completely disappeared from Ireland that even
+the memory of them has perished, and yet Ireland remains as Catholic
+as ever. Arthur Young, who denounces them as scandalous to a
+civilised community, does not hint that they had anything to do with
+religion, nor were they ever cited in defence of the penal code.
+Froude was led astray by religious prejudice, and forgot for once
+the historian in the advocate. The penal codes were rather the cause
+than the effect of crime and outrage in Ireland. By setting
+authority on one side, and popular religion on the other, they made
+a breach of the law a pious and meritorious act. The bane of English
+rule in Ireland at that time was the treatment of Catholics as
+enemies, and the, Charter Schools which Froude praises were employed
+for the purpose of alienating children from the faith of their
+parents. This mean and paltry persecution strengthened instead of
+weakening the Roman Catholic Church.
+
+--
+* England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 365.
+--
+
+Meanwhile Froude continued his History, and by the beginning of the
+year 1874 had brought it down to the Union, with which it concludes.
+No more unsparing indictment of a nation has ever been drawn. Except Lord
+Clare, and the Orange Lodges, formed after the Battle of the Diamond,
+scarcely an Irishman or an Irish institution spared. Grattan's Parliament,
+though it did contain a single Catholic, is condemned because it
+gave the Catholics votes in 1793. The recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, an
+Englishman and a Protestant, in 1795, is justified because he was in
+favour of emancipation. Flood and Curran are treated with disdain.
+Burke, though he was no more a Catholic than Froude himself, is told
+that he was not a true Protestant, and did not understand his own
+countrymen. Sir Ralph Abercrombie was possessed with an "evil
+spirit," because he urged that rebels should not be punished by
+soldiers without the sanction of the civil magistrate. His
+successor, General Lake, who was responsible for pitch-caps,
+receives a gentle, a very gentle, reprimand.
+
+"The United Irishmen had affected the fashion of short hair. The
+loyalists called them Croppies, and if a Croppy prisoner stood
+silent when it was certain [without a trial] that he could confess
+with effect, paper or linen caps smeared with pitch were forced upon
+his head to bring him to his senses. Such things ought not to have
+been, and such things would not have been had General Lake been
+supplied with English troops, but assassins and their accomplices
+will not always be delicately handled by those whose lives they have
+threatened occasionally. Not a few men suffered who were innocent,
+so far as no definite guilt could be proved against them. At such
+times, however, those who are not actively loyal lie in the
+borderland of just suspicion."* That all Irish Catholics were guilty
+unless they could prove themselves to be innocent is a proposition
+which cannot be openly maintained, and vitiates history if it be
+tacitly assumed. Froude honestly and sincerely believed that the
+Irish people were unfit for representative government. He compares the
+Irish rebellion of 1798 with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and suggests
+that Ireland should have been treated like Oude. Lord Moira, known
+afterwards as Lord Hastings, and Governor-General of India, is called
+a traitor because he sympathised with the aspirations of his
+countrymen. Lord Cornwallis is severely censured for endeavouring to
+infuse a spirit of moderation into the Executive after the rebellion
+had been put down. What Cornwallis thought of the means by which the
+Union was carried is well known. "I long," he said in 1799 "to kick
+those whom my public duty obliges me to court. My occupation is to
+negociate and job with the most corrupt people under heaven. I despise
+and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am
+supported only by the reflection that without a Union the British
+Empire must be dissolved." That is the real case for the Union, which
+could not be better stated than Cornwallis has stated it. Carried by
+corrupt means as it was, it might have met with gradual acquiescence
+if only it had been accompanied, as Pitt meant to accompany it, by
+Catholic emancipation. On this point Froude goes all lengths with
+George III., whose hatred of Catholicism was not greater than his own.
+In the development of his theory, he was courageous and consistent. He
+struck at great names, denouncing "the persevering disloyalty of the
+Liberal party, in both Houses of the English Legislature," including
+Fox, Sheridan, Tierney, Holland, the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk, who
+dared to propose a policy of conciliation with Ireland, as Burke had
+proposed it with the American colonies. Even Pitt does not come up to
+Froude's standard, for Pitt removed Lord Camden, and sent out Lord
+Cornwallis.
+
+--
+* English in Ireland, iii. 336.
+--
+
+It is no disqualification for an historian to hold definite views,
+which, if he holds them, it must surely be his duty to express. The
+fault of The English in Ireland is to overstate the case, to make it
+appear that there was no ground for rebellion in 1798, and no
+objection to union in 1800. The whole book is written on the
+supposition that the Irish are an inferior race and Catholicism an
+inferior religion. So far as religion was concerned, Lecky did not
+disagree with Froude. But either because he was an Irishman, or
+because he had a judicial mind, he could see the necessity of
+understanding what Irish Catholics aimed at before passing judgment
+upon them. Froude could never get out of his mind the approval of
+treason and assassination to which in the sixteenth century the
+Vatican was committed. It may be fascinating polemics to taunt the
+Church of Rome with being "always the same." But as a matter of fact
+the Church is not the same. It improves with the general march of
+the progress that it condemns. Froude fairly and honourably quotes a
+crucial instance. Pitt "sought the opinion of the Universities of
+France and Spain on the charge generally alleged against Catholics
+that their allegiance to their sovereign was subordinate to their
+allegiance to the Pope; that they held that heretics might lawfully
+be put to death, and that no faith was to be kept with them. The
+Universities had unanimously disavowed doctrines which they declared
+at once inhuman and unchristian, and on the strength of the
+disavowal the British Parliament repealed the Penal Acts of William
+for England and Scotland, restored to the Catholics the free use of
+their chapels, and readmitted them to the magistracy." Toleration
+was extended to Ireland by giving the franchise to Catholics, and
+complete emancipation might have followed but for the interference
+of the king, which involved the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.
+
+To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund
+Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere.
+In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules
+Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own
+death, he said that "Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially
+independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters
+of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a
+word, with her to live and to die." "At bottom," he added, "Ireland
+has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice." To a
+Parliamentary Union accompanied by emancipation Burke might have
+been brought by the rebellion. Protestant ascendency as understood
+in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it
+furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than
+anything else in the world. He even denied that there was such a
+thing as the Protestant religion. The difference between
+Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a
+negative no religion could be made. To persecute people for
+believing too much was even more preposterous than to persecute them
+for believing too little. Protestant ascendency was social
+ascendency, and had no motive so respectable as bigotry behind it.
+Burke never conceived the possibility of disestablishing the Irish
+Church, or even of curtailing its emoluments. He would have been
+satisfied with a Parliament from which Catholics were not excluded.
+Froude brushed almost contemptuously aside the theories of an
+illustrious Irishman, the first political writer of his age, and an
+almost fanatical enemy of revolution.
+
+Genius apart, Burke was peculiarly well qualified to form an
+opinion. He knew England as well as Ireland; and imperial as his
+conceptions were, they never extinguished his love for the land of
+his birth. He was himself a member of the Established Church, and a
+firm supporter of her connection with the State. But his wife was a
+Roman Catholic, and for the old faith he had a sympathetic respect.
+For the French Directory, with which Wolfe Tone was associated, he
+felt a passionate hatred of which he has left a monument more
+durable than brass in the Reflections on the French Revolution, and
+the Letters on a Regicide Peace. He worshipped the British
+Constitution with the unquestioning fervour of a devotee, and he had
+been attacked by the new Whigs in Parliament as the recipient of a
+pension from the king. The old Whigs, his Whigs, had coalesced with
+Pitt, and the chief fault he found with the Government was that it
+did not carry on the French war with sufficient vigour. That Burke
+should have retained his calmness of mind in writing of Ireland when he
+lost it in writing of all other subjects is a curious circumstance, But it
+is a circumstance which entitles him to peculiar attention from the
+Irish historian. Burke was no oracle of Irish revolutionists. Their
+hero was his critic, Tom Paine. Yet Froude says that when Burke
+"took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain
+which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference
+became infinitely mischievous."* As a matter of fact, his
+interference after 1789 had no result at all. So far as the French
+Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than
+ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was
+to deter them from Revolutionary methods.
+
+--
+* English in Ireland, ii. 214, 215.
+--
+
+But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be
+trusted. If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the
+name of Protestant, Froude's eyes would have been opened, and he
+would have seen Burke's incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a
+just interpreter of events. Froude looked at the rebellion and the
+Union from an Orange Lodge, and his book is really an Orange
+manifesto. Such works have their purpose, and Froude's is an
+unusually eloquent specimen of its class; but they are not history,
+any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of
+Wolfe Tone. Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what
+the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant. Speaker Foster said
+that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union.
+Foster was the last Speaker in the Irish House of Commons. He had
+been elected in 1790 against the "patriot" Ponsonby, and was opposed
+to the Catholic franchise in 1793. He was a man of unblemished
+character, and in a position where he could not afford to talk
+nonsense. Yet, if Froude were right, nonsense he must have talked.
+Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis is
+disregarded. "All that was best and noblest in Ireland" was gathered
+into the Orange Association, which has been the plague of every
+Irish Government since the Union. Froude's model sovereign of
+Ireland, as of England, was George III., who ordered that in a
+Catholic country "a sharp eye should be kept on Papists," and would
+doubtless have joined an Orange Lodge himself if he had been an
+Irishman and a subject. The English in Ireland is reported to have
+been Parnell's favourite book. It made him, he said, a Home Ruler
+because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government. This
+was not Froude's principal object, but the testimony to his
+truthfulness is all the more striking on that account. Gladstone,
+who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land
+Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the "truth and honour"
+of the writer.
+
+If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the
+Catholic faith is a degrading superstition, and that Ireland is only
+saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude's book
+deserves little but praise. Although he did not study for it as he
+studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number
+of State Papers, with a great mass of official correspondence.
+Freeman would have been appalled at the idea of such research as
+Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London. But the
+scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed
+themselves in his mind before he began. He was to vindicate the
+Protestant cause in Ireland, and to his own satisfaction he
+vindicated it. If I may apply a phrase coined many years afterwards,
+Froude assumed that Irish Catholics had taken a double dose of
+original sin. He always found in them enough vice to account for any
+persecution of which they might be the victims. Just as he could not
+write of Kerry without imputing failure and instability to
+O'Connell, so he could not write about Ireland without traducing the
+leaders of Irish opinion. They might be Protestants themselves; but
+they had Catholics for their followers, and that was enough. It was
+enough for Carlyle also, and to attack Froude's historical
+reputation is to attack Carlyle's. "I have read," Carlyle wrote on
+the 20th of June, 1874, "all your book carefully over again, and
+continue to think of it not less but rather more favourably than
+ever: a few little phrases and touches you might perhaps alter with
+advantage; and the want of a copious, carefully weighed concluding
+chapter is more sensible to me than ever; but the substance of the
+book is genuine truth, and the utterance of it is clear, sharp,
+smiting, and decisive, like a shining Damascus sabre; I never
+doubted or doubt but its effect will be great and lasting. No
+criticism have I seen since you went away that was worth notice.
+Poor Lecky is weak as water--bilge-water with a drop of formic acid
+in it: unfortunate Lecky, he is wedded to his Irish idols; let him
+alone." The reference to Lecky, as unfair as it is amusing, was
+provoked by a review of Froude in Macmillan's Magazine. There are
+worse idols than Burke, or even Grattan, and Lecky was an Irishman
+after all.
+
+A very different critic from Carlyle expressed an equally favourable
+opinion.
+
+"I have an interesting letter," Froude wrote to his friend Lady
+Derby, formerly Lady Salisbury, "from Bancroft the historian
+(American minister at Berlin) on the Irish book. He, I am happy to
+say, accepts the view which I wished to impress on the Americans,
+and he has sent me some curious correspondence from the French
+Foreign Office illustrating and confirming one of my points. One
+evening last summer I met Lady Salisbury,* and told her my opinion
+of Lord Clare. She dissented with characteristic emphasis--and she
+is not a lady who can easily be moved from her judgments. Still, if
+she finds time to read the book I should like to hear that she can
+recognise the merits as well as the demerits of a statesman who, in
+the former at least, so nearly resembled her husband."
+
+--
+* The wife of the late Prime Minister.
+--
+
+In another letter he says:
+
+"The meaning of the book as a whole is to show to what comes of forcing
+ uncongenial institutions on a country to which they are unsuited.
+If we had governed Ireland as we govern India, there would have been
+no confiscation, no persecution of religion, and consequently none
+of the reasons for disloyalty. Having chosen to set Parliament and
+an Established Church, and to the lands of the old owners, we left
+nothing undone to spoil the chances of success with the experiment."
+
+Froude went to the United States with no very exalted opinion of the
+Irish; he returned with the lowest possible. "Like all Irish
+patriots," including Grattan, Wolfe Tone "would have accepted
+greedily any tolerable appointment from the Government which he had
+been execrating." The subsequent history of Ireland has scarcely
+justified this sweeping invective. "There are persons who believe
+that if the king had not interfered with Lord Fitzwilliam, the Irish
+Catholics would have accepted gratefully the religious equality
+which he was prepared to offer them, and would have remained
+thenceforward for all time contented citizens of the British
+Empire." So reasonable a theory requires more convincing refutation
+than a simple statement that it is "incredible." Incredible, no
+doubt, if the Catholics of Ireland were wild beasts, cringing under
+the whip, ferocious when released from restraint. Very credible
+indeed if Irish Catholics in 1795 were like other people, asking for
+justice, and not expecting an impossible ascendency. Interesting as
+Froude's narrative is, it becomes, when read together with Lecky's,
+more interesting still. Though indignant with Froude's aspersions
+upon the Irish race, Lecky did not allow himself to be hurried. He
+was writing a history of England as well as of Ireland, and the
+Irish chapters had to wait their turn. In Froude's book there are
+signs of haste; in Lecky's there are none. Without the brilliancy
+and the eloquence which distinguished Froude, Lecky had a power of
+marshalling facts that gave to each of them its proper value. No
+human being is without prejudice. But Lecky was curiously unlike the
+typical Irishman of Froude's imagination. He has written what is by
+general acknowledgment the fairest account of the Irish rebellion,
+and of the Union to which it led. Of the eight volumes which compose
+his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, two, the seventh
+and eighth, are devoted exclusively to Ireland.
+
+After the publication of his first two volumes he made no direct
+reference to Froude, and contented himself with his own independent
+narrative. He vindicated the conduct of Lord Fitzwilliam, and traced
+to his recall in 1795 the desperate courses adopted by Irish
+Catholics. He showed that Froude had been unjust to the Whigs who
+gave evidence for Arthur O'Connor at Maidstone in 1798, and
+especially to Grattan. That O'Connor was engaged in treasonable
+correspondence with France there can be no doubt now. But he did not
+tell his secrets to his Whig friends, and what Grattan said of his
+never having heard O'Connor talk about a French invasion was
+undoubtedly true.* Froude's hatred of the English Whigs almost
+equalled his contempt for the Irish Catholics, and the two feelings
+prevented him from writing anything like an narrative either of the
+rebellion or of the Union. No other book of his shows such evident
+traces of having been written under the influence of Carlyle.
+Carlyle's horror of democracy, worship of force, his belief that
+martial law was the law of Almighty God, and that cruelty might
+always be perpetrated on the right side, are conspicuously displayed.
+If Froude spoke of the Roman Catholic Church, he always seemed to
+fancy himself back in the sixteenth century, when the murder of
+Protestants was regarded at the Vatican as justifiable. The Irish
+rebellion of 1798 was led by Protestants, like Lord Edward Fitzgerald,
+and free thinkers, like Wolfe Tone. But for the recall of Lord
+Fitzwilliam, the Catholics would have taken no part in it, and it
+would not have been more dangerous than the rebellion of 1848. Such
+at least was Lecky's opinion, supported by weighty arguments, and by
+facts which cannot be denied. If Froude's reputation as an historian
+depended upon his English in Ireland, it certainly would not stand
+high. Of course he had as much right to put the English case as
+Father Burke had to put the Irish one. But his responsibility was far
+greater, and his splendid talents might have been better employed
+than in reviving the mutual animosities of religion or of race.
+
+--
+* See Froude's English in Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 320, 321;
+Lecky's History of England, vol. viii. p. 52.
+--
+
+When Lecky reviewed, with much critical asperity, the last two
+volumes of Froude's English in Ireland for Macmillan's Magazine* he
+referred to Home Rule as a moderate and constitutional movement. His
+own History was not completed till 1890. But when Gladstone
+introduced his first Home Rule Bill, in 1886, Lecky opposed it as
+strongly as Froude himself. Lecky was quite logical, for the
+question whether the Union had been wisely or legitimately carried
+had very little to do with the expedience of repealing it. Fieri non
+debuit, factum valet, may be common sense as well as good law. But
+Froude was not unnaturally triumphant to find his old antagonist in
+Irish matters on his side, especially as Freeman was a Home Ruler.
+Froude's attitude was never for a moment doubtful. He had always
+held that the Irish people were quite unfitted for self-government,
+and of all English statesmen Gladstone was the one he trusted least.
+He had a theory that great orators were always wrong, even when,
+like Pitt and Fox, they were on opposite sides. Gladstone he doubly
+repudiated as a High Churchman and a Democrat. Yet, with more
+candour than consistency, he always declared that Gladstone was the
+English statesman who best understood the Irish Land Question, and
+so he plainly told the Liberal Unionists, speaking as one of
+themselves. He had praised Henry VIII for confiscating the Irish
+estates of absentees, and taunted Pitt with his unreasoning horror
+of an absentee tax. He would have given the Irish people almost
+everything rather than allow them to do anything for themselves. In
+1880 he brought out another edition of his Irish book, with a new
+chapter on the crisis. The intervening years had made no difference
+in his estimate of Ireland, or of Irishmen. O'Connell, who had
+nothing to do with the politics of the eighteenth century, was "not
+sincere about repeal," although he "forced the Whigs to give him
+whatever he might please to ask for,"+ and he certainly asked for
+that.
+
+--
+* June, 1874.
++ English in Ireland, 1881, vol. iii. p. 568.
+--
+
+That Catholic emancipation was useless and mischievous, Froude never
+ceased to declare. He would have dragooned the Irish into
+Protestantism and made the three Catholic provinces into a Crown
+colony. The Irish establishment he regretted as a badge of
+Protestant ascendency. But he was a dangerous ally for Unionists.
+That the government of Ireland by what he called a Protestant
+Parliament sitting at Westminister, meaning the Parliament of the
+United Kingdom, had failed, he not merely admitted, but loudly
+proclaimed. It had failed "more signally, and more disgracefully,"
+than any other system, because Gladstone admitted that Fenian
+outrages precipitated legislative reforms. The alternative was to
+rule Ireland, or let her be free, and altogether separate from Great
+Britain. Neither branch of the supposed alternative was within the
+range of practical politics. But on one point Froude unconsciously
+anticipated the immediate future. "The remedy" for the agrarian
+troubles of Ireland was, he said, "the establishment of courts to
+which the tenant might appeal." The ink of this sentence was
+scarcely dry when the Irish Land Bill of 1881 appeared with that
+very provision. Froude was always ready and willing to promote the
+material benefit of Ireland. Irishmen, except the Protestant
+population of Ulster, were children to be treated with firmness and
+kindness, the truest kindness being never to let them have their own
+way.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SOUTH AFRICA
+
+Before Froude had written the last chapter of The English in Ireland
+he was visited by the greatest sorrow of his life. Mrs. Froude died
+suddenly in February, 1874. It had been a perfect marriage, and he
+never enjoyed the same happiness afterwards. Carlyle and his
+faithful friend Fitzjames Stephen were the only persons he could see
+at first, though he manfully completed the book on which he was
+engaged. It was long before he rallied from the shock, and he felt
+as if he could never write again. He dreaded "the length of years
+which might yet lie ahead of him before he could have his discharge
+from service." He took a melancholy pride in noting that none of the
+reviewers discovered any special defects in those final pages of his
+book which had been written under such terrible conditions. Mrs.
+Froude had thoroughly understood all her husband's moods, and her
+quiet humour always cheered him in those hours of gloom from which a
+man of his sensitive nature could not escape. She could use a gentle
+mockery which was always effective, along with her common sense, in
+bringing out the true proportions of things. Conscious as she was of
+his social brilliancy and success, she would often tell the children
+that they lost nothing by not going out with him, because their
+father talked better at home than he talked anywhere else. Her deep
+personal religion was the form of belief with which he had most
+sympathy, and which he best understood, regarding it as the
+foundation of virtue and conduct and honour and truth. He attended
+with her the services of the Church, which satisfied him whenever
+they were performed with the reverent simplicity familiar to his
+boyhood. Happily he was not left alone. He had two young children to
+love, and his eldest daughter was able to take her stepmother's
+place as mistress of his house. With the children he left London as
+soon as he could, and tried to occupy his mind by reading to them
+from Don Quixote, or, on a Sunday, from The Pilgrim's Progress. To
+the end of his life he felt his loss; and when he was offered,
+fifteen years later, the chance of going back to his beloved
+Derreen, he shrank from the associations it would have recalled.
+
+He took a house for his family in Wales, which he described in the
+following letter to Lady Derby:
+
+"CROGAN HOUSE, Corwen, June 3rd, 1874.
+
+"I do not know if I told you upon what a curious and interesting old
+place we have fallen for our retirement. The walls of the room in which
+I am writing are five feet thick. The old part of the house
+must have been an Abbey Grange; the cellars run into a British
+tumulus, the oaks in the grounds must many of them be as old as the
+Conquest, and the site of the parish church was a place of
+pilgrimage probably before Christianity. Stone coffins are turned
+over on the hillsides in making modern improvements. Denfil Gadenis'
+(the mediaeval Welsh saint's) wooden horn still stands in the church
+porch, and the sense of strangeness and antiquity is the more
+palpable because hardly a creature in the valley, except the cows
+and the birds, speak in a language familiar to me. It was Owen
+Glendower's country. Owen himself doubtless has many times ridden
+down the avenue. We are in the very heart of Welsh nationality,
+which was always a respectable thing--far more so than the Celticism
+of the Gaels and Irish. We are apt to forget that the Tudors were
+Welsh." Fortunately a plan suggested itself which gave him variety
+of occupation and change of scene. Disraeli's Government had just
+come into office, and with the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon,
+Froude was on intimate terms. Froude had always been interested in
+the Colonies, and was an advocate of Federation long before it had
+become a popular scheme. As early as 1870 he wrote to Skelton:
+
+"Gladstone and Co. deliberately intend to shake off the Colonies.
+They are privately using their command of the situation to make the
+separation inevitable."* I do not know what this means. Lord
+Dufferin has left it on record that after his appointment to Canada
+in 1872 Lowe came up to him at the club, and said, "Now, you ought
+to make it your business to get rid of the Dominion." But Lowe was
+in the habit of saying paradoxical things, and it was Disraeli, not
+Gladstone, who spoke of the Colonies as millstones round our necks.
+Cardwell, the Secretary for War, withdrew British troops from Canada
+and New Zealand, holding that the self-governing Colonies should be
+responsible for their own defence. That wise policy fostered union
+rather than separation, by providing that the working classes at
+home should not be taxed for the benefit of their colonial fellow-
+subjects. Lord Carnarvon himself had passed in 1867 the Bill which
+federated Canada and which his Liberal predecessor had drawn. He was
+now anxious to carry out a similar scheme in South Africa, and
+Froude offered to find out for him how the land lay. His visit was
+not to be in any sense official. He would be ostensibly travelling
+for his health, which was always set up by a voyage. He was
+interested in extending to South Africa Miss Rye's benevolent plans
+of emigration to Canada; in the treatment of a Kaffir chief called
+Langalibalele; and in the disputes which had arisen from the
+annexation of the Diamond Fields. Thus there were reasons for his
+trip enough and to spare. He would, it was thought, be more likely
+to obtain accurate information if the principal purpose of his visit
+were kept in the background.
+
+--
+*Table Talk of Shirley, p. 142.
+--
+
+There was one great and fundamental difference between the case of
+Canada and the case of South Africa. Canada had itself asked for
+federation, and Parliament simply gave effect to the wish of the
+Canadians. Opinion in South Africa was notoriously divided, and the
+centre of opposition was at Cape Town. Natal had not yet obtained a
+full measure of self-government, and the lieutenant-Governor, Sir
+Benjamin Pine, had excited indignation among all friends of the
+natives by arbitrary imprisonment, after a mock trial, of a Kaffir
+chief. Lord Carnarvon had carefully to consider this case, and also
+to decide whether the mixed Constitution of Natal, which would not
+work, should be reformed or annulled. A still more serious
+difficulty was connected with the Diamond Fields, officially known
+as Griqualand West. The ownership of this district had been disputed
+between the Orange Free State and a native chief called Nicholas
+Waterboer. In 1872 Lord Kimberley, as Secretary of State for the
+Colonies, had purchased it from Waterboer at a price ludicrously
+small in proportion to its value, and it had since been annexed to
+the British dominions by the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly. Waterboer,
+who knew nothing about the value of money, was satisfied. The Orange
+State vehemently protested, and President Brand denounced the annexation
+as a breach of faith. Not only, he said, were the Diamond
+Fields within the limits of his Republic; the agreement between
+Waterboer and the Secretary of State was itself a breach of the
+Orange River Convention, by which Great Britain undertook not to
+negotiate with any native chief north of the River Vaal. Lord
+Kimberley paid no heed to Brand's remonstrances. He denied
+altogether the validity of the Dutch claim, and he would not hear of
+arbitration. By the time that Lord Carnarvon came into office
+thousands of British settlers were digging for diamonds in
+Griqualand West, and its abandonment was impossible. Brand himself
+did not wish to take the responsibility of governing it. But he
+continued to press the case for compensation, and the British
+Government, which had forced independence upon the Boers, appeared
+in the invidious light of shirking responsibility while grasping at
+mineral wealth. If it had not been for this untoward incident, the
+Dutch Republics would have been more favourable to Lord Carnarvon's
+policy than Cape Colony was. The Transvaal was imperfectly protected
+against the formidable power of the Zulus, and a general rising of
+blacks against whites was the real danger which threatened South
+Africa.
+
+That peril, however, was felt more acutely in Natal than in Cape
+Colony. The Cape had for two years enjoyed responsible government,
+and its first Prime Minister was John Charles Molteno.
+
+Molteno was not in any other respect a remarkable man. He had come
+to the post by adroit management of a miscellaneous community,
+comprising British, Dutch, and Kaffirs. He was personally
+incorruptible, and he played the game according to the rules. He
+would have called himself, and so far as his opportunities admitted,
+he was, a constitutional statesman, justly proud of the position to
+which his own qualities had raised him, and extremely jealous of
+interference Downing Street. He had no responsibility, he was never
+tired of explaining, for the acquisition of the Diamond Fields, and
+he left the Colonial Office to settle that matter with President
+Brand. Local politics were his business. He did not look beyond the
+House of Assembly at Cape Town, which it was his duty to lead, and
+the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly, with whom he was on excellent terms.
+His own origin, which was partly English and partly Italian, made it
+easy for him to be impartial between the two white races in South
+Africa. For the Kaffirs he had no great tenderness. They had votes,
+and if they chose to sell them for brandy that was their own affair.
+Of what would now be called Imperialism Molteno had no trace. He
+would support Federation when in his opinion it suited the interests
+of Cape Colony, and not an hour before.
+
+Froude left Dartmouth in the Walmer Castle on the 23rd of August,
+1874. He occupied himself during the voyage partly in discussing the
+affairs of the Cape with his fellow-passengers, and partly in
+reading Greek. The "Leaves from a South African Journal," which
+close the third volume of Short Studies, describe his journey in his
+most agreeably colloquial style. A piece of literary criticism
+adorns the entry for September 4th. "I have been feeding hitherto on
+Greek plays: this morning I took Homer instead, and the change is
+from a hot-house to the open air. The Greek dramatists, even
+Aeschylus himself, are burdened with a painful consciousness of the
+problems of human life, with perplexed theories of Fate and
+Providence. Homer is fresh, free, and salt as the ocean."
+
+No sooner had Froude landed at Cape Town than he began tracing all
+its evils to responsible government. The solidity of the houses
+reminded him that they were built under an absolute system. "What is
+it which has sent our Colonies into so sudden a frenzy for what they
+call political liberty?" A movement which has been in steady
+progress for thirty years can scarcely be called sudden, even though
+it be regarded as a frenzy, and so far back as 1776 there were
+British colonists beyond the seas who attached some practical value
+to freedom. A drive across the peninsula of Table Mountain suggested
+equally positive reflections of another kind. "Were England wise in
+her generation, a line of forts from Table Bay to False Bay would be
+the northern limit of her Imperial responsibilities."
+
+This had been the cherished policy of Lord Grey at the Colonial
+Office, and the Whigs generally inclined to the same view. But it
+was already obsolete. Lord Kimberley had proceeded on exactly the
+opposite principle, and Lord Carnarvon's object in Federation was
+certainly not to diminish the area of the British Empire.
+
+If Froude talked in South Africa as he wrote in his journal, his
+conversation must have been more interesting than discreet. "Every
+one," he wrote from Port Elizabeth, on the 27th of September, 1874,
+"approves of the action of the Natal Government in the Langalibalele
+affair. I am told that if Natal is irritated it may petition to
+relinquish the British connection, and to be allowed to join the
+Free States. I cannot but think that it would have been a wise
+policy, when the Free States were thrown off, to have attached Natal
+to them." Lord Carnarvon disapproved of the Natal Government's
+action, released Langalibalele, and  recalled the Lieutenant-
+Governor. His policy was as wise as it was courageous, and no
+proposal to relinquish the British connection followed. Froude was a
+firm believer in the Dutch method of dealing with Kaffirs, and he
+had no more prejudice against slavery than Carlyle himself. But his
+sense of justice was offended by the treatment of Langalibalele, and
+if he had been Secretary of State he would have done as Lord
+Carnarvon did. With the Boers Froude had a good deal of sympathy.
+Their religion, a purer Calvinism than existed even in Scotland,
+appealed to his deepest sentiments, and he admired the austere
+simplicity of their lives. No one could accuse a Cape Dutchman of
+complicity in such horrors as progress and the march of intellect.
+On his way from Cape Town to Durban Froude was told a characteristic
+story of a Dutch farmer. "His estate adjoined the Diamond Fields.
+Had he remained where he was, he could have made a large fortune.
+Milk, butter, poultry, eggs, vegetables, fruit, went up to fabulous
+prices. The market was his own to demand what he pleased. But he was
+disgusted at the intrusion upon his solitude. The diggers worried
+him from morning to night, demanding to buy, while he required his
+farm produce for his own family. He sold his land, in his
+ impatience, for a tenth of what he might have got had he cared to
+wait and bargain, mounted his wife and children into his waggon, and
+moved off into the wilderness." Froude's sarcastic comment is not
+less characteristic than the story. "Which was the wisest man, the
+Dutch farmer or the Yankee who was laughing at him? The only book
+that the Dutchman had ever read was the Bible, and he knew no
+better."*
+
+--
+* Short Studies, iii. 497.
+--
+
+The state of Natal, which was then perplexing the Colonial Office,
+puzzled Froude still more. Four courses seemed to him possible.
+Natal might be annexed to Cape Colony, made a province of a South
+African Federation, governed despotically by a soldier, or left to
+join the Dutch Republics. The fifth course, which was actually
+taken, of giving it responsible government by stages, did not come
+within the scope of his ideas. The difficulty of Federation lay, as
+it seemed to him, in the native problem.
+
+"If we can make up our minds to allow the colonists to manage the
+natives their own way, we may safely confederate the whole country.
+The Dutch will be in the majority, and the Dutch method of
+management will more or less prevail. They will be left wholly to
+themselves for self-defence, and prudence will prevent them from
+trying really harsh or aggressive measures. In other respects the
+Dutch are politically conservative, and will give us little
+trouble." If, on the other hand, native policy was to be directed
+from home, or, in other words, if adequate precautions were to be
+taken against slavery, a federal system would be useless, and South
+Africa must be governed like an Indian province.
+
+Pretoria Froude found full of English, loudly demanding annexation.
+He told them, speaking of course only for himself, that it was
+impossible, because the Cape was a self-governing Colony, and the
+Dutch majority "would take any violence offered to their kinsmen in
+the Republics as an injury to themselves." To annexation without
+violence, by consent of the Boers, the great obstacle, so Froude
+found, was the seizure, the fraudulent seizure, as they thought it,
+of the Diamond Fields. He visited Kimberley, called after the
+Colonial Secretary who acquired it, "like a squalid Wimbledon Camp
+set down in an arid desert." The method of digging for diamonds was
+then primitive.
+
+"Each owner works by himself or with his own servants. He has his
+own wire rope, and his own basket, by which he sends his stuff to
+the surface to be washed. The rim of the pit is fringed with
+windlasses. The descending wire ropes stretch from them thick as
+gossamers on an autumn meadow. The system is as demoralising as it
+is ruinous. The owner cannot be ubiquitous: if he is with his
+working cradle, his servants in the pit steal his most valuable
+stones and secrete them. Forty per cent of the diamonds discovered
+are supposed to be lost in this way."* The proportion of profit
+between employer and employed seems to have been fairer than usual,
+though it might, no doubt, have been more regularly arranged.
+
+At Bloemfontein Froude called on President Brand, "a resolute,
+stubborn-looking man, with a frank, but not over-conciliatory,
+expression of face." Brand was in no conciliatory mood. He held that
+his country had been robbed of land which the British Government
+renounced in 1854, and only resumed now because diamonds had been
+discovered on it. The interview, however, was neither unimportant
+nor unsatisfactory. It was followed by an invitation to dinner, and
+frank discussion of the whole subject. So firmly convinced was
+Froude of the President's good faith and of the injustice done him
+that he pleaded the cause of the Free State with the Colonial
+Office, and Lord Carnarvon settled the dispute in a friendly manner
+by the payment of a reasonable sum.+ But that was not till 1876,
+after Brand had visited London, and seen Lord Carnarvon himself.
+
+--
+* Short Studies, vol. iii. p. 537.
++ 90,000 lbs.
+--
+
+At the end of 1874 Froude returned to England, and reported to Lord
+Carnarvon what he had observed. The Colonial Secretary, just, but
+punctilious, was unwilling to reverse Lord Kimberley's policy, and
+Froude discovered that party politics, to which he traced all our
+woes, had much less to do with administration than he imagined.
+Under the influence of Bishop Colenso, an intrepid friend of the
+natives, Lord Carnarvon had already interfered on behalf of
+Langalibalele, but that only involved overruling the Government of
+Natal. After mature consideration he wrote a despatch to Sir Henry
+Barkly in which stress was laid upon the importance of arranging all
+differences with the Orange State. Then he proceeded to the subject
+of Federation, which was always in his mind and at his heart. Here
+he unfortunately failed to make allowance for the sensitive pride of
+Colonial statesmen. He proposed the assemblage of a Federal
+Conference at Cape Town, at which Froude would represent the Colonial
+Office. For Cape Colony he suggested the names of the Prime
+Minister, Molteno, and of Paterson, who led the Opposition.
+
+In June, 1875, Froude went back to South Africa, this time as an
+acknowledged emissary of the Government, but by ill luck his
+arrival coincided with the receipt of the despatch. The effect of
+this document was prodigious. Molteno considered that he had been
+personally insulted. The Legislative Assembly was defiant, and
+greeted the recital of Carnarvon's words with ironical laughter. A
+Ministerial Minute, signed by Molteno and his colleagues, protested
+ against the Colonial Secretary's intrusion, and especially against
+his rather ill advised reference to a proposed separation of the
+eastern from the western provinces of the Cape. It was a fact that
+Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, where there were very few Dutch,
+considered that they paid proportionately too much towards the
+colonial revenues, and desired separate treatment. But the people of
+Cape Town strongly objected, and it was unwise for the Secretary of
+State to take a side in local politics. Froude found his position by
+no means agreeable. Molteno, though never discourteous, received him
+coldly, and objected to his making speeches. The Governor, who liked
+to be good friends with his Ministers, gave him no encouragement.
+The House of Assembly, after proposing to censure Carnarvon in their
+haste, censured Froude at their leisure. That did him no harm. But
+he disliked the new position in which he found himself, and in his
+private journal he expressed his sentiments freely.
+
+He had not been long in Cape Town when he wrote, on the 9th of July,
+1875, to his eldest daughter a full and vivid account of the
+political situation. "I am glad," he said, "that no one is with me
+who cares for me. No really good thing can be carried out without
+disturbing various interests. The Governor and Parliament have set
+themselves against Lord Carnarvon. The whole country has declared
+itself enthusiastically for him. The consequence is that the
+opposition, who are mortified and enraged, now daily pour every sort
+of calumny on my unfortunate head. I don't read more of it than I
+can help, but some things I am forced to look at in order to answer;
+and the more successful my mission promises to be, the more violent
+and unscrupulous become those whose pockets are threatened by it. I
+wait in Cape Town till the next English steamer arrives, and then I
+mean to start for a short tour in the neighbourhood. I shall make my
+way by land to Mossel Bay, and then go on by sea to Port Elizabeth
+and Natal, where I shall wait for orders from home. Sir Garnet* has
+written me a very affectionate letter, inviting me to stay with him.
+Here the authorities begin to be more respectful than they were.
+Last night there was a State Dinner at Government House, when I took
+in Lady Barkly. Miss Barkly would hardly speak to me. I don't
+wonder. She is devoted to her father; I would do exactly the same in
+her place. I sent you a paper with an account of the dinner, and my
+speech, but you must not think that the dinner represented Cape Town
+society generally. Cape Town society, up to the reception at
+Government House, has regarded me as some portentous object come
+here to set the country on fire, and to be regarded with tremors by
+all respectable people. Outside Cape Town, on the contrary, in every
+town in the country, Dutch or English, I should be carried through
+the streets on the people's shoulders if I would only allow it, so
+you see I am in an 'unexampled situation.'+ The Governor's dinner
+cards had on them 'to meet Mr. Froude.' I am told that no less than
+eight people who were invited refused in mere terror of me ....
+Things are in a wild state here, and grow daily wilder. I am
+responsible for having lighted the straw; and if Lord Carnarvon has
+been frightened at the first bad news, there will be danger of real
+disturbance. The despatch has created a real enthusiasm, and excited
+hopes which must not now be disappointed." "Never," he wrote a few
+weeks afterwards, "never did a man of letters volunteer into a more
+extraordinary position than that in which I find myself." Sir Garnet
+Wolseley stood by him through thick and thin. After Sir Garnet's
+departure he had no English  friend. His local supporters were "all
+looking out for themselves," and there was not one among them in whom
+he could feel any real confidence."
+
+--
+* The present Lord Wolseley.
++ A favourite expression with Mrs. Carlyle.
+--
+
+Of Molteno he made no personal complaint, and he always considered
+him the fittest man for his post in South Africa. But Colonial
+politicians as a whole were "not gentlemen with whom it was
+agreeable to be forced into contact." To give the Colony responsible
+government has been "an act of deliberate insanity" on the part of
+Lord Kimberley and the Liberal Cabinet. Froude endeavoured loyally
+and faithfully to carry out the policy of the Colonial Office, and
+his relations with Lord Carnarvon were relations of unbroken
+confidence. His objects were purely unselfish and patriotic. It was
+his misfortune rather than his fault to become involved in local
+politics, from which it was essential for the success of his mission
+that he should keep entirely aloof. Circumstances brought him into
+much greater favour with the Dutch than with his own countrymen, for
+it was thought, not without reason, that he had brought Carnarvon
+round to see the truth about the Diamond Fields and the Free State.
+He made them speeches, and they received him with enthusiasm. With
+Molteno, on the other hand, he found it impossible to act, and the
+Governor supported Molteno. Barkly was not unfavourable to
+Federation. But he perceived that it could not be forced upon a
+self-governing Colony, and that he himself would be powerless unless
+he acted in harmony with his constitutional advisers. He, as well as
+Molteno, refused to attend the dinner at which Froude on his arrival
+was entertained in Cape Town. Molteno advised Froude not to go, or
+if he went, not to speak. Froude, however, both went and spoke,
+claiming as an Englishman the right of free speech in a British
+Colony. The right was of course incontestable. The expediency was a
+very different matter. Froude was not accustomed to public speaking,
+and only long experience can teach that most difficult part of the
+process, the instinctive avoidance of what should not be said. His
+brilliant lectures were all read from manuscript, and he had never
+been in the habit of thinking on his legs. In 1874 he could at least
+say that he spoke only for himself. In 1875 he committed the
+Colonial Office, and even the Cabinet, to his own personal opinions,
+which were not in favour of Parliamentary Government as understood
+either by Englishmen or by Africanders. He was accused of getting up
+a popular agitation on behalf of the Imperial authorities against
+the Governor of the Colony, his Ministers, and the Legislative
+Assembly of the Cape. He did in fact, under a strong sense of duty,
+urge Carnarvon to recall Barkly, and to substitute for him Sir
+Garnet Wolseley, who had temporarily taken over the administration
+of Natal.
+
+Sir Garnet, however, had no such ambition. Soldiering was the business
+of his life, and he had had quite enough of constitutionalism in
+Natal. Barkly was for the present maintained, and Froude regarded his
+maintenance as fatal to Federation. But Sir Bartle Frere, who
+succeeded him, was not more fortunate, and the real mistake was
+interference from home. To Froude his experience of South Africa came
+as a disagreeable shock. A passionate believer in Greater Britain, in
+the expansion of England, in the energy, resources, and prospects of
+the Queen's dominions beyond the seas, the parochialism of Cape Colony
+astonished and perplexed him. While he was dreaming of a Federated
+Empire, and Paterson were counting heads in the Cape Assembly, and
+considering what would be the political result if the eastern
+provinces set up for themselves. If South Africa were federated, would
+Cape Town remain the seat of government? To Froude such a question was
+paltry and trivial. To a Cape Town shopkeeper it loomed as large as
+Table Mountain. The attitude of Molteno's Ministry, on the other hand,
+seemed as ominous to him as it seemed obvious to the Colonists. He
+thought it fatal to the unity of the Empire, and amounting to absolute
+independence. He did not understand the people with whom he had to
+deal. Most of them were as loyal subjects as himself, and never
+contemplated for a moment secession from the Empire. All they claimed
+was complete freedom to manage their own affairs, to federate or not
+to federate, as they pleased and when they pleased. They had only just
+acquired full constitutional rights; and if they sometimes exaggerated
+the effect of them, the error was venial. If Carnarvon, instead of
+writing for publication an elaborate and official despatch, had
+explained his policy to the Governor in private letters, and directed
+him to sound Molteno in confidence, the Cape Ministers might
+themselves have proposed a scheme; and if they had proposed it, it
+would have been carried. Had Froude said nothing at dinners, or on
+platforms, he might have exercised far more influence behind the
+scenes. But he was an enthusiast for Federation by means of a South
+African Conference, and he made a proselytising tour through the
+Colony. The Dutch welcomed him because he acknowledged their rights.
+At Grahamstown too, and at Port Elizabeth, he was hailed as the
+champion of separation for the eastern provinces. The Legislative
+Assembly at Cape Town, however, was hostile, and the proposed
+conference fell through. Lord Carnarvon did not see the full
+significance of the fact that the Confederation of Canada had been
+first mooted within the Dominion itself.
+
+An interesting account of Froude at this time has been given by Sir
+George Colley, the brilliant and accomplished soldier whose career
+was cut short six years afterwards at Majuba:
+
+"I came home from the Cape, and almost lived on the way with Mr.
+Froude .... It was rather a sad mind, sometimes grand, sometimes
+pathetic and tender, usually cynical, but often relating with the
+highest appreciation, and with wonderful beauty of language, some
+gallant deed of some of his heroes of the fifteenth or sixteenth
+centuries. He seemed to have gone through every phase of thought,
+and come to the end 'All is vanity.' He himself used to say the
+interest of life to a thinking man was exhausted at thirty, or
+thirty-five. After that there remained nothing but disappointment of
+earlier visions and hopes. Sometimes there was something almost
+fearful in the gloom, and utter disbelief, and defiance of his
+mind."*
+
+--
+* Butler's Life of Colley, p. 145.
+--
+
+The picture is a sombre one. But it must be remembered that the
+death of his wife was still weighing heavily upon Froude.
+
+A few days after his return to London Froude wrote a long and
+interesting Report to the Secretary of State, which was laid before
+Parliament in due course. Few documents more thoroughly unofficial
+have ever appeared in a Blue Book. The excellence of the paper as a
+literary essay is conspicuous. But its chief value lies in the
+impression produced by South African politics upon a penetrating and
+observant mind trained under wholly different conditions. Froude
+would not have been a true disciple of Carlyle if he had felt or
+expressed much sympathy with the native race. He wanted them to be
+comfortable. For freedom he did not consider them fit. It was the
+Boers who really attracted him, and the man he admired the most in
+South Africa was President Brand. The sketch of the two Dutch
+Republics in his Report is drawn with a very friendly hand. He
+thought, not without reason, that they had been badly treated. Their
+independence, which they did not then desire, had been forced upon
+them by Lord Grey and the Duke of Newcastle. The Sand River
+Convention of 1852, and the Orange River Convention of 1854,
+resulted from British desire to avoid future responsibility outside
+Cape Colony and Natal. As for the Dutch treatment of the Kaffirs, it
+had never in Froude's opinion been half so bad as Pine's treatment
+of Langalibalele. By the second article of the Orange River
+Convention, renewed and ratified at Aliwal after the Basuto war in
+1869, Her Majesty's Government promised not to make any agreement
+with native chiefs north of the Vaal River. Yet, when diamonds were
+discovered north of the Vaal in Griqualand West, the territory was
+purchased by Lord Kimberley from Nicholas Waterboer, without the
+consent, and notwithstanding the protests, of the Orange Free State.
+But although Lord Kimberley assented to the annexation of Griqualand
+West in 1871, he only did so on the distinct understanding that Cape
+Colony would undertake to administer the Diamond Fields, and this
+the Cape Ministers refused to do, lest they should offend their
+Dutch constituents.
+
+It was not till 1878, when all differences with the Free State had
+been settled, and the Transvaal was a British possession, that
+Griqualand West became an integral part of Cape Colony. In January,
+1876, Brand was still asking for arbitration, and Carnarvon was
+still refusing it.
+
+When he explained the Colonial Secretary's policy to the Colonial
+Secretary himself Froude came very near explaining it away. The
+Conference, he said, was only intended to deal with the native
+question and the question of Griqualand. Was Confederation then a
+dream? Froude himself, in a private letter to Molteno, dated April
+29th, 1875, wrote, "Lord Carnarvon's earnest desire since he came
+into office has been if possible to form South Africa into a
+confederate dominion, with complete internal self-government."* That
+was the whole object of the Conference, which but for that would
+never have been proposed. That, as Froude truly says in his Report,
+was one of Molteno's reasons for resisting it. The Cape Premier
+thought that South Africa was not ripe for Confederation. If Froude
+had had more practice in drawing up official documents, he would
+probably have left out this deprecatory argument, which does not
+agree with the rest of his case. He attributes, for instance, to
+local politicians a dread that the supremacy of Cape Town would be
+endangered. But no possible treatment of the natives, or of
+Griqualand West, would have endangered the supremacy of Cape Town.
+The Confederation of which Froude and Carnarvon were champions would
+have avoided tremendous calamities if it could have been carried
+out. The chief difficulties in its way were Colonial jealousy of
+interference from Downing Street and Dutch exasperation at the
+seizure of the Diamond Fields. "You have trampled on those poor
+States, sir," said a member of the Cape Legislature to Froude, "till
+the country cries shame upon you, and you come now to us to assist
+you in your tyranny; we will not do it, sir. We are astonished that
+you should dare to ask us." Such language was singularly
+inappropriate to Froude himself, for the Boers never had a warmer
+advocate than they had in him. But the circumstances in which
+Griqualand West were annexed will excuse a good deal of strong
+language. At Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown Froude was welcomed as
+an advocate of their local independence, which was what they most
+desired. When, with unusual prudence, he declined to take part in a
+separatist campaign, their zeal for Confederation soon cooled. On
+the other hand, the Dutch papers all supported the Conference,
+although Brand refused to lay his case before it, or to treat with
+any authority except the British Government at home.
+
+--
+* Life of Molteno, vol. i. p. 337.
+--
+
+Neither Froude nor Carnarvon made sufficient allowance for Colonial
+independence and the susceptibilities of Colonial Ministers. Many of
+Froude's expressions in public were imprudent, and he himself in his
+Report apologised for his unguarded language at Grahamstown, where
+he said that Molteno's reply to Carnarvon's despatch would have
+meant war if it had come from a foreign state. Yet in the main their
+policy was a wise one, and they saw farther ahead than the men who
+worked the political machine at Cape Town. Froude was too sanguine
+when he wrote, "A Confederate South African Dominion, embracing all
+the States, both English and Dutch, under a common flag, may be expected
+as likely to follow, and perhaps at no very distant period." But he
+added that it would have to come by the deliberate action of the
+South African communities themselves. That was not the only
+discovery he had made in South Africa. He had found that the
+Transavll, reputed then and long afterwards in England to be
+worthless, was rich in minerals, including gold. He warned the
+Colonial Office that Cetewayo, with forty thousand armed men, was a
+serious danger to Natal. He saw clearly, and said plainly that
+unless South Africa was to be despotically governed, it must be
+administered with the consent and approval of the Dutch. He dwelt
+strongly upon the danger of allowing and encouraging natives to
+procure arms in Griqualand West as an enticement to work for the
+diamond owners. The secret designs of Sir Theophilus Shepstone he
+did not penetrate, and therefore he was unprepared for the next
+development in the South African drama. The South African Conference
+in London, which he attended during August, 1876, led to no useful
+result because Molteno, though he had come to London, and was
+discussing the affairs of Griqualand with Lord Carnarvon, refused to
+attend it. This was the end of South African Confederation, and the
+permissive Act of 1877, passed after the Transvaal had been annexed,
+remained a dead letter on the Statute Book.
+
+Although the immediate purpose of Froude's visits to South Africa
+was not attained, it would be a mistake to infer that they had no
+results at all. Early in 1877 the annexation of the Transvaal, to
+which Froude was strongly opposed, changed the whole aspect of
+affairs, and from that time the strongest opponents of Federalism
+were the Dutch. But the credit of settling with the Orange Free
+State a dispute which might have led to infinite mischief is as much
+Froude's as Carnarvon's, and as a consequence of their wise conduct
+President Brand became for the rest of his life a steady friend to
+the British power in South Africa. Ninety thousand pounds was a
+small price to pay for the double achievement of reconciling a model
+State and wiping out a stain upon England's honour.
+
+More than four years after his second return from South Africa, in
+January, 1880, Froude delivered two lectures to the Philosophical
+Society of Edinburgh, in which his view of South African policy is
+with perfect clearness set forth. He condemns the annexation of the
+Transvaal, and the Zulu war. He expresses a wish that Lord
+Carnarvon, who had resigned two years before, could be permanent
+Secretary for the Colonies. "I would give back the Transvaal to the
+Dutch," he said. Again, in even more emphatic language, "The
+Transvaal, in spite of prejudices about the British flag, I still
+hope that we shall return to its lawful owners."* What is more
+surprising, he recommended that Zululand should be restored to
+Cetewayo, or Cetewayo to Zululand. He had predicted in 1875 that
+Cetewayo would prove a troublesome person, and few men had less of
+the sentiment which used to be associated with Exeter Hall. The
+restoration of Cetewayo, when it came was disastrous both to himself
+and to others. Frere understood the Zulus better than Froude or
+Colenso. The surrender of the Transvaal, which was a good deal
+nearer than Froude thought, was at least successful for a time, a
+longer time than Froude's own life. He did not share Gladstone's
+ignorance of its value; he knew it to be rich in minerals,
+especially in gold. But he knew also that Carnarvon had been
+deceived about the willingness of the inhabitants to become British
+subjects, and he sympathised with their independence. It illustrates
+his own fairness and detachment of mind that he should have taken so
+strong and so unpopular a line when the Boers were generally
+supposed in England to have acquiesced in the loss of their liberties,
+and when his hero Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he dedicated his English
+in Ireland, had declared that the Vaal would run back to the Drakensberg
+before the British flag ceased to wave over Pretoria.
+
+--
+* Two Lectures on South Africa, pp. 80, 81, 85.
+--
+
+Froude's South African policy was to work with the Dutch, and keep
+the natives in their places. He had no personal interest in the
+question. It was through Lord Carnarvon that he came in contact with
+South Africa at all, and there were few statesmen with whom he more
+thoroughly agreed. When Disraeli came for the second time into
+office, and for the first time into power, Froude was well pleased.
+
+
+In 1875, after his legal disqualification had been removed, he was
+again invited to become a candidate for Parliament. But he did not
+really know to which party he belonged.
+
+"Four weeks ago," he wrote to Lady Derby on the 3rd of April, "the
+Liberal Whip (Mr. Adam) asked me to stand for the Glasgow and
+Aberdeen Universities on very easy terms to myself. I declined,
+because I should have had to commit myself to the Liberal party,
+which I did not choose to do. Lord Carnarvon afterwards spoke to me
+with regret at my resolution. He had a conversation with Mr.
+D'Israeli, and it was agreed that if possible I should be brought in
+by a compromise without a contest. But it appeared doubtful
+afterwards whether the Liberals would consent to this without fuller
+pledges than I could consent to give. I was asked if I would stand
+anyhow  (contest or not), or whether I would allow myself to be
+nominated in their interest for any other place when a vacancy
+should occur. I said, No. (I would stand a contest on the
+Conservative side, if on any.) I was neither Conservative nor
+Liberal per se, but would not oppose Mr. D'Israeli. So there this
+matter lies, unless your people have as good an opinion of me as the
+others, and want a candidate of my lax description. But indeed I
+have no wish to go into Parliament. I am too old to begin a
+Parliamentary life, and infinitely prefer making myself of use to
+the Conservative side in some other way .... I am at Lord
+Carnarvon's service if he wishes me to go on with his Colonial
+affairs. I came home from the Cape to be of use to him."
+
+The Colonial policy of the Liberals Froude had always regarded with
+suspicion. Even Lord Kimberley's grant of a constitution to the Cape
+he interpreted as showing a centrifugal tendency, and Cardwell's
+withdrawal of troops from Canada was all of a piece. Disraeli, on
+the other hand, who never did anything for the Colonies, had been
+making a speech about them at Manchester, wherein all manner of
+Colonial possibilities were suggested. They did not go, if they were
+ever intended to go, beyond suggestion, and in 1876 the sudden
+crisis in Eastern affairs superseded all other topics of political
+interest.
+
+When the Eastern Question was first raised, Froude had taken the
+side of the Government.
+
+"I like Lord Derby's speech," he wrote to Lady Derby on the 19th of
+September, 1876, "to the Working Men's Association. So I think the
+country will when it recovers from its present intoxication. Violent
+passions which rise suddenly generally sink as fast if there is no
+real reason for them. It is impossible that the people can fail to
+recollect in a little while that the reticence of which they
+complain is under the circumstances inevitable.
+
+"Gladstone and his satellites are using their opportunities,
+however, with thorough unscrupulousness. It is possible that they
+may force an Autumn Session, and even force the Ministry to resign-
+but woe to themselves if they do. They will promise what cannot be
+carried out, and will perhaps, in fine retribution for the Crimean
+War, bring the Russians to Constantinople. It will not be a bad
+thing in itself, but there will be an end of the English Minister
+who brings it about."
+
+Again, three days later, to the same correspondent:
+
+"I admire the Premier's speech. It is what I expected of him. The
+Liberal leaders are behaving scandalously, with the exception
+perhaps of Lord Hartington. The Cabinet I trust will now decide on
+an Autumn Session to remove so critical a matter out of the hands of
+irresponsible mobs. I was surprised to hear the war in Servia
+attributed to the secret societies. Cluseret I know has intended to
+ask for service with Turkey, with a view to a war, against Russia,
+and has been withheld only by some differences with General Klapha,
+the Turco-Hungarian, from doing so. I had a long letter from him to-
+day, in which he expresses his restlessness characteristically, J'ai
+la nostalgic de la poudre."
+
+Afterwards Froude followed Carlyle, and went with Russia against
+Turkey. The "unspeakable Turk" was to be "struck out of the question
+and Bismarck invited to arbitrate. Such was the oracular deliverance
+from Cheyne Row, and Froude obeyed the oracle. He attended the
+Conference at St. James's Hall in December at which Gladstone spoke,
+and Carlyle's letter was read, sitting for the only time in his life
+on the same platform with Freeman. Next May, when war between Russia
+and Turkey had actually begun, when Gladstone was about to move his
+famous resolutions in the House of Commons, there appeared in The
+Times* another remarkable letter from the same hand. This time,
+however, it was no mere question of style, though "our miraculous
+Premier" was a phrase which stuck. Carlyle evidently had information
+of some design for giving Turkey the support of the British fleet in
+the neighbourhood of Constantinople, and was not very discreet in
+the use he made of it. The Cabinet were supposed to be divided on the
+question of helping Turkey by material means, which of course
+meant war with Russia, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, was
+known to be in favour of peace. A year later Lord Carnarvon and Lord
+Derby had both left the Cabinet rather than be responsible for a
+vote of credit which meant preparation for war, and for calling out
+the Reserves.
+
+--
+* May 5, 1877.
+--
+
+Froude was in complete sympathy with the retiring ministers, and he
+regarded it as a profound mistake for England to quarrel with Russia
+on behalf of a Power which had no business in Europe at all. From
+his point of view the presence at the Colonial Office of so
+sympathetic a Minister as Carnarvon was far more important than the
+difference between the Treaty of San Stefano and the Treaty of
+Berlin. Of the Afghan War in 1878 he strongly disapproved.
+
+The following extracts from letters to Lady Derby show the phases of
+thought on the Eastern Question through which Froude passed, and are
+interesting also because they represent him in an unfamiliar light
+as the champion of parliamentary Government against the secret
+diplomacy of Lord Beaconsfield. Arbitrary rule might be very good
+for Irishmen. As applied to Englishmen Froude disliked it no less
+than Gladstone or Bright.
+
+"February 16th, 1877.--The Opposition have no hope of making a
+successful attack on the present Parliament--but they are resolute.
+They know their own minds, and Gladstone (I know) has said that he
+has but to hold up his finger to force a dissolution and return as
+Prime Minister. I too think you are deceived by the London Press.
+Another massacre and all would be over. The Golden Bridge you speak
+of I conclude is for Russia; but if it was possible for the Cabinet,
+without changing its attitude, to make such a bridge, there would be
+no need of one. England has been, and I fear still is, the one
+obstacle to measures which would have long ago brought the Turk to
+his senses. I cannot but feel assured that you have thrown away an
+opportunity for securing to the Conservative party the gratitude of
+Europe and the possession of office for a generation. If more
+mischief happens in Turkey it will be on you that public displeasure
+will fall, and you may need a bridge for yourselves and not find
+one. I croak like a raven. Perhaps you may set it down to an almost
+totally sleepless night."
+
+"April 30th, 1877.--You destroy the last hope to which I had clung,
+that Lord Derby, though opposed to Russian policy, would not consent
+to go to war with her. I remain of my old opinion that England
+(foolishly excited as it always when fighting is going on) will in
+the long run resent the absurdity and punish the criminality of
+taking arms in a worthless cause. I am sick of heart at the thought
+of what is coming, here as well as on the Continent. I have begged
+Carlyle to write a last appeal to The Times. We must agitate in the
+great towns, we must protest against what we may be unable to
+prevent. The Crimean War was innocent compared to what is now
+threatened, yet three years ago there was scarcely a person in
+England who did not admit that it was a mistake. I do not know what
+may be the verdict of the public about a repetition of it at the
+present moment. I know but too well what will be the verdict five
+years hence, and the fate which will overtake those who, with
+however good a motive, are courting the ruin of their party."
+
+"December 22nd, 1877.---The passion for interference in defence of
+the Turks seems limited (as I was always convinced that it was) to
+the idle educated classes. The public meetings which have been, or
+are to be, go the other way, or at least are against our taking a
+part on the Turkish side. The demonstrations which Lord B. expected
+to follow on the first Russian success have not followed. The
+Telegraph and Morning Post have used their whips on the dead Crimean
+horse, but it will not stir for them. It will not stir even for the
+third volume of the Prince Consort's Life. But I am very sorry about
+it all, for the damage to the Conservative party from the lost
+opportunity of playing a great and honourable part is, I fear,
+irretrievable."
+
+"December 27th, 1877.--The accounts from Bulgaria and Armenia turn
+me sick. These sheep, what have they done? Diplomalists quarrel, and
+the people suffer. The management of human affairs will be much
+improved when the people tell their respective Cabinets that if
+there is fighting to be done the Cabinets must fight themselves, and
+that the result shall be accepted as final. Nine out of ten great
+wars might have been settled that way with equal advantage so far as
+the consequences were concerned, and to the infinite relief of poor
+humanity."
+
+"March 10th, 1878.--I met Lord D. at the club the other night. He
+looked As Prometheus might have looked when he was 'Unbound.' He was
+in excellent spirits and talked brilliantly. Not one allusion to the
+East, but I guessed that he had a mind at ease."
+
+"April 8th, 1878.--I wish I knew whether the Cabinet has determined
+on forcing war upon Russia at all events, or if Russia consents to
+go into the Conference on the English terms; the Cabinet will then
+bona fide endeavour after an equitable and honourable settlement.
+Lord B.'s antecedents all point to a determination to make any
+settlement impossible. He has succeeded so far without provoking the
+other Powers, but such a game is surely dangerous, backed though he
+by every fool and knave in England."
+
+"July 15th, 1878.--I gather that the Opposition is too disorganised
+to resist; and if Parliament endure to be set aside, and allow the
+destinies of their country to be affected so enormously by the sole
+action of the Crown and the Cabinet, a change is passing over us the
+results of which it is impossible to estimate. We do, in fact, take
+charge of the Turkish Empire as completely as we took the Empire of
+the Moguls. In a little while we shall have to administer on the
+Continent as well as in Cyprus, and then will arise a new Asiatic
+army. This will bring wars with it before long, and a proportionate
+increase of the power of the Executive Government. If Parliament
+abdicates its authority now, what may we not anticipate? I have long
+felt that the House of Commons could not long continue to govern the
+great concerns of the British Empire as it has done. I certainly did
+not expect that it would yield without a struggle--nor will it.
+Sooner or later we shall see a fight against the tendency which is
+giving so startling an evidence of its existence--and what is to
+happen then?"
+
+"July 21st, 1878.--Lord Derby's speech was as good as it could
+possibly be. What he says now all the world will say two years
+hence. How deeply it cut appeared plainly enough in the scenes which
+followed. It must be peculiarly distressing to you--distressing in
+many ways, for I feel as certain as ever that the end of it all will
+be irreparable damage to the Conservative party. One would like to
+know Prince Bismarck's private opinion of the Premier and private
+opinion also of the nation which has taken him for their chosen
+leader. Of course he will dissolve while the glamour is fresh; and
+before the effects of the bad champagne with which he has dosed the
+country begin to appear--first headache and penitence, and then
+exasperation at the provider of the entertainment."
+
+"November 24th, 1878.--The evil shadow of the Premier extends over
+the most innocent of our pleasures. I had been looking forward to a
+few days at Knowsley as the most enjoyable which I should have had
+during the whole year. Yet I knew how it would be. Daring as he is,
+he could not venture on an entire defiance of public opinion.
+Parliament of course would have to meet, and equally of course you
+and Lord D. would have to come up. I conclude the object to be to
+get up a Russian war after all. The stress laid by Lord Cranbrook on
+the reception of the Russian Embassy as the point of the injury will
+make it very difficult for the Russians to be neutral. If this is
+what the Ministry really intend, they may have their majority in
+Parliament docile, but I doubt whether they will have the country
+with them. I am sure they will not if Hartington and Granville
+support Lord Lawrence.
+
+"I interpret it all as meaning that the Premier knows that his
+policy has thoroughly broken down in Europe, and at all risks he
+means to have another try in the East."
+
+It was Froude's opinion, right or wrong, that Lord Beaconsfield
+might have settled the Irish question if he had left the Eastern
+question alone. He understood it, as some of his early speeches
+show, and he might have "established a just Land Court with the
+support of all the best land-owners in Ireland."* Why the Land Court
+established by Gladstone in 1881 was unjust Froude did not explain.
+Some of the best landlords, if not all, supported it, and it
+relieved an intolerable situation.
+
+--
+* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 180.
+--
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+FROUDE AND CARLYLE
+
+When James Spedding introduced Froude to Carlyle he made
+unconsciously an epoch in English literature. For though Froude was
+incapable of merging himself in another man, as Spedding merged
+himself in Bacon, he did more for the author of Sartor Resartus than
+Spedding did for the author of the Novum Organum. Spedding's Bacon
+is an impossible hero of unhistorical perfection. Froude's Carlyle,
+like Boswell's Johnson, is a great man painted as he was. When the
+original head master of Uppingham described his school as Eton
+without its faults, there were those who felt for the first time
+that there was something to be said for the faults of Eton. Carlyle
+without his paradoxes and prejudices, his impetuous temper and his
+unbridled tongue would be only half himself. If he were known only
+through his books, the world would have missed acquaintance with
+letters of singular beauty, and with the most humourous talker of
+his age. He was one of two men, Newman being the other, whose
+influence Froude felt through life, and the influence of Newman was
+chiefly upon his style. Of Newman indeed he saw very little after he
+left Oxford, though his admiration and reverence for him never
+abated. It was not until he came to live in London after the death
+of his first wife that he grew really intimate with Carlyle. Up to
+that time he was no more than an occasional visitor in Cheyne Row
+with a profound belief in the philosophy of that incomparable poem
+in prose, The French Revolution. Carlyle helped him with his own
+history, the earlier volumes of which show clear traces of the
+master, and encouraged him in his literary work.
+
+Mrs. Carlyle was scarcely less remarkable than her husband. Although
+she never wrote a line for publication, her private letters are
+among the best in the language, and all who knew her agree that she
+talked as well as she wrote. Froude thought her the most brilliant
+and interesting woman he had ever met. The attraction was purely
+intellectual. Mrs. Carlyle was no longer young, and Froude's
+temperament was not inflammable. But she liked clever men, and
+clever men liked her. She was an unhappy woman, without children,
+without religion, without any regular occupation except keeping
+house. Her husband she regarded as the greatest genius of his time,
+and his affection for her was the deepest feeling of his heart. He
+was at bottom a sincerely kind man, and his servants were devoted to
+him. But he was troublesome in small matters; irritable, nervous,
+and dyspeptic. His books harassed him like illnesses, and he groaned
+under the infliction. If he were disturbed when he was working, he
+lost all self-control, and his wife felt, she said, as if she were
+keeping a private mad-house. It was not quite so private as it might
+have been, for Mrs. Carlyle found in her grievances abundant food
+for her sarcastic tongue. Whatever she talked about she made
+interesting, and her relations with her husband became a common
+subject of gossip. It was said that the marriage had never been a
+real one, that they were only companions, and so forth. Froude was
+content to enjoy the society of the most gifted couple in London
+without troubling himself to solve mysteries which did not concern
+him.
+
+Thrifty as she was, Mrs. Carlyle was not fitted by physical strength
+and early training to be the wife of a poor man. She was too anxious
+a housekeeper, and worried herself nervously about trifles. Her
+father had been a country doctor, not rich, but able to keep the
+necessary servants. In Carlyle's home there were no servants at all.
+His father was a mason, and the work of the house was done by the
+family. Why should his wife be in a different position from his
+mother's? There was no reason, in the nature of things. But custom
+is very strong, and the early years of Mrs. Carlyle's married life
+were a hard struggle against grinding poverty. Carlyle was grandly
+indifferent to material things. He wanted no luxuries, except
+tobacco and a horse. He would not have altered his message to
+mankind, or his mode of delivering it, for the wealth of the Indies.
+What he had to say he said, and men might take it or leave it as
+they thought proper. He never swerved from the path of integrity. He
+did not know his way to the house of Rimmon. The mere practical
+ability required to produce such a book as Frederick the Great might
+have realised a fortune in business. Carlyle just made enough money
+to live in decent and wholesome comfort.
+
+From the first Carlyle's conversation attracted Froude, and dazzled
+him. But he felt, as others felt, that submission rather than
+intimacy was the attitude which it suggested or compelled. There was
+no republic of letters in Carlyle's house. It was a dictatorship,
+pure and simple. What the dictator condemned was heresy. What he did
+not know was not knowledge. Mill was a poor feckless driveller.
+Darwin was a pretentious sciolist. Newman had the intellect of a
+rabbit. Herbert Spencer was "the most unending ass in Christendom."
+"Scribbling Sands and Eliots" were unfit to tie Mrs. Carlyle's
+shoe-strings. Editing Keats was "currying dead dog." Ruskin could only
+point out the correggiosity of Correggio. Political economy was the
+dismal science, or the gospel according to McCrowdie.* Carlyle's
+eloquent and humourous diatribes were wonderful, laughter-moving,
+awe-compelling. They did not put his hearers at their ease, and
+Froude felt more admiration than sympathy.
+
+--
+* McCulloch, the editor of Adam Smith, was meant
+--
+
+In 1861, when Froude had been settled in London about a year, he
+received a visit from the great author himself. Carlyle did not take
+to many people, but he took to Froude. Perhaps he was touched by the
+younger man's devotion. Perhaps he saw that Froude was no ordinary
+disciple, and would be able to carry on the torch when he
+relinquished it himself. At all events he expressed a wish to see
+him oftener in his walks, in his rides, in his home. Nothing could
+be more flattering than such an invitation from such a man. Froude
+responded cordially, and became an habitual visitor. Like all really
+good talkers, Carlyle was at his best with a single companion, and
+there could be no more sympathetic companion than Froude. But there
+was another object of interest at Cheyne Row, and Froude felt for
+Mrs. Carlyle sincere compassion. She was often left to herself while
+her husband wrote upstairs, and she suffered tortures from
+neuralgia. It seemed to Froude that Carlyle, who never had a day's
+serious illness, felt more for his own dyspepsia and hypochondria
+than for his wife's far graver ailments. In this he was very likely
+unjust, for Carlyle was tenderly attached to his "Jeanie," and would
+have done anything for her if he had thought of it. But he was
+absorbed in Friederich, whose battles he would fight over again with
+the tired invalid on sofa. If woman be the name of frailty, the name
+of vanity is man. Carlyle was fond of his wife, but he was thinking
+of himself. His "Niagaras of scorn and vituperation" were a vent for
+his own feelings, a sort of moral gout. The apostle of silence
+recked not his own rede, nor did he think of the impression which
+his purely destructive preaching might make upon other people. He
+himself found in the eternities and immensities some kind of
+substitute for the Calvinistic Presbyterianism of his childhood. To
+her it was idle rhetoric and verbiage. He had taken away her
+dogmatic beliefs, and had nothing to put in their place. Her "pale,
+drawn, suffering face" haunted Froude in his dreams. In 1862 Mrs.
+Carlyle's health broke down, and for a year her case seemed
+desperate. Her doctor sent her away to St. Leonard's, and in no long
+time she apparently recovered. After that her husband took more care
+of her, and provided her with a carriage. But her constitution had
+been shattered, and she died suddenly as she drove through Hyde Park
+on the 21st of April, 1866, while Carlyle was at Dumfries, resting
+after the delivery of his Rectorial Address to the University of
+Edinburgh.
+
+Carlyle's bereavement drove him into more complete dependence upon
+Froude's sympathy and support. The lonely old man brooded over his
+loss, and over his own short-comings. He shut himself up in the
+house to read his wife's diaries and papers. He found that without
+meaning it he had often made her miserable. In her journal for the
+21st of June, 1856, he read, "The chief interest of to-day expressed
+in blue marks on my wrists!"*  He realised that he had almost driven
+her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation.
+"For the next few years," says Froude, "I never walked with him
+without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his
+mind." Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated. His letters, and his
+wife's, show that he was a most affectionate husband when nothing
+had occurred to deprive him of his self-command. But he had at times
+been cruelly inconsiderate, and he wished to do penance for his
+misdeeds. A practical Christian would have asked God to pardon him,
+and made amends by active kindness to his surviving fellow-
+creatures. Carlyle took another course. In 1871, five years after
+his wife's death, he suddenly brought Froude a large bundle of
+papers, containing a memoir of Mrs. Carlyle by himself, a number of
+her letters, and some other biographical fragments. Froude was to
+read them, to keep them, and to publish them or not, as he pleased,
+after Carlyle was dead.+
+
+--
+* This passage was suppressed by Froude when he published Mrs. Carlyle's
+Diary and Letters. But he kept the copy made by Carlyle's niece under
+his superintendence, which still exists; and as an incorrect version
+has appeared since his death, I give the correct one now.
++ "I long much, with a tremulous, deep, and almost painful feeling,
+about that other Manuscript which you were kind enough to read at the
+very first. Be prepared to tell me, with all your candour, the pros and
+contras there."--Carlyle to Froude, 26th of September, 1871. From
+The Hill, Dumfries.
+--
+
+Well would it have been for Froude's peace of mind if he had handed
+ the parcel back again, and refused to look at it. The tree of the
+knowledge of good and evil scarcely yielded more fatal fruit. He
+read the papers, however, and "for the first time realised what a
+tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been." That he exaggerated the
+purport of what he read is likely enough. When there are quarrels
+between husband and wife, a man naturally inclines to take the
+woman's side. Froude, as he says himself, was haunted by Mrs.
+Carlyle's look of suffering, physical rather than mental, and it
+would necessarily colour his judgment of the facts. At all events
+his conclusion was that Carlyle had just ground for remorse, and
+that in collecting the letters he had partially expiated his
+offence. When Mrs. Carlyle's Correspondence came to be published it
+was seen that there were two sides to the question, and that, if he
+had leisure to think of what he was doing, Carlyle could be the most
+considerate of husbands. Irritable and selfish he might be.
+Deliberately cruel he never was. Froude, with his accustomed
+frankness, told Carlyle at once what he thought. Mrs. Carlyle's
+letters should be published, not alone, but with the memoir composed
+by himself.
+
+Carlyle had originally intended that this memoir, or sketch, as it
+rather is, should be preserved, but not printed. Afterwards,
+however, he gave it to Froude, and added an express permission to do
+as he liked with it. Froude was not content with his own opinion. He
+consulted John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith and of Dickens,
+a common friend of Carlyle and himself. Forster read the documents,
+and promised that he would speak to Carlyle about them, giving no
+opinion to Froude, but intimating that he should impress upon
+Carlyle the need for making things clear in his will. This most
+sensible advice was duly taken, and Carlyle's will, signed on the
+6th of February, 1873, which nominated Forster and his own brother
+John as executors, contained the following passage:
+
+"My manuscript entitled 'Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh
+Carlyle' is to me in my now bereaved state, of endless value, though
+of what value to others I cannot in the least clearly judge; and
+indeed for the last four years am imperatively forbidden to write
+farther on it, or even to look farther into it. Of that manuscript
+my kind, considerate, and ever faithful friend, James Anthony Froude
+(as he has lovingly promised me) takes precious charge in my stead.
+To him therefore I give it with whatever other fartherances and
+elucidations may be possible, and I solemnly request of him to do
+his best and wisest in the matter, as I feel assured he will. There
+is incidentally a quantity of autobiographic record in my notes to
+this manuscript; but except as subsidiary and elucidative of the
+text I put no value on such. Express biography of me I had really
+rather that there should be none. James Anthony Froude, John
+Forster, and my brother John, will make earnest survey of the
+manuscript and its subsidiaries there or elsewhere in respect to
+this as well as to its other bearings; their united utmost candour
+and impartiality, taking always James Anthony Froude's practicality
+along with it, will evidently furnish a better judgment than mine
+can be. The manuscript is by no means ready for publication; nay,
+the questions how, when (after what delay, seven, ten years) it, or
+any portion of it, should be published are still dark to me; but on
+all such points James Anthony Froude's practical summing up and
+decision is to be taken as mine." No expression of confidence could
+well be stronger, no discretion could well be more absolute. So far
+as one man can substitute another for himself, Carlyle substituted
+Froude.
+
+Froude was under the impression that Carlyle had given him the
+letters because he wanted them to be published, and did not want to
+publish them. Embarrassing as the position was, he accepted it in
+tranquil ignorance of what was to come. Two years after the receipt
+of the memoirs and letters there arrived at his house a box of more
+letters, more memoirs, dimes, odds and ends, put together without
+much arrangement in the course of a long life. He was told that they
+were the materials for Carlyle's biography, and was begged to
+undertake it forthwith. So far as his own interests were concerned,
+he had much better have declined the task. His History of England had
+given him a name throughout Europe, and whatever he wrote was
+sure to be well received.  His English in Ireland was approaching
+completion, and he had in his mind a scheme for throwing fresh light
+on the age of Charles V. Principal Robertson's standard book was in
+many respects obsolete. The subject was singularly attractive, and
+would have furnished an excellent opportunity for bringing out the
+best side of the Roman Catholic Church, which in Charles's son,
+Philip, so familiar in Froude's History of England, was seen at its
+worst or weakest. Charles was to him an embodiment of the
+Conservative principle, which he regarded as the strongest part of
+Catholicism, and as needed to counteract the social upheaval of the
+Reformation. Such a book he could write in his own way, independent
+of every one. The biographer of Carlyle, on the other hand, would be
+involved in numerous difficulties, could hardly avoid giving
+offence, and must sacrifice years of his life to employment more
+onerous, as well as less lucrative, than writing a History of his
+own. Carlyle, however, was persistent, and Froude yielded. After
+Mrs. Carlyle's death they had met constantly, and the older man
+relied upon the younger as upon a son.
+
+Froude sat down before the mass of documents in the spirit which had
+encountered the manuscripts of Simancas. No help was accorded him.
+He had to spell out the narrative for himself. On one point he did
+venture to consult Carlyle, but Carlyle shrank from the topic with
+evident pain, and the conversation was not renewed. It appeared from
+Mrs. Carlyle's letters and journals that she had been jealous of
+Lady Ashburton, formerly Lady Harriet Baring, and by birth a
+Sandwich Montagu. "Lady Ashburton," says Charles Greville, writing
+on the occasion of her death in 1857, "was perhaps, on the whole,
+the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She
+was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity
+in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and
+social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had
+improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had
+acquired no small reputation for ability and wit .... She was, or
+affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose literary
+celebrity or talents constituted their only attraction, and, while
+they were gratified by the attentions of the great lady, her vanity
+was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the
+principal. It is only justice to her to say that she treated her
+literary friends with constant kindness and the most unselfish
+attentions. They and their wives and children (when they had any)
+were received at her house in the country, and entertained there for
+weeks without any airs of patronage, and with a spirit of genuine
+benevolence as well as hospitality."*
+
+--
+* The Greville Memoirs, vol. iii. pp. 109, 110.
+--
+
+But Lady Ashburton and Mrs. Carlyle did not get on. As Carlyle's
+wife the latter would doubtless have been welcome enough at the
+Grange. Being much cleverer than Lady Ashburton, she seemed to
+dispute a supremacy which had not hitherto been challenged, and the
+relations of the two women were strained. Carlyle, on the other
+hand, had become, so Froude discovered from his wife's journal,
+romantically, though quite innocently, attached to Lady Ashburton,
+and this was one cause of dissension at Cheyne Row. There was
+nothing very dreadful in the disclosure. Carlyle was a much safer
+acquaintance for the other sex than Robert Burns, whose conversation
+carried the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and Mrs. Carlyle's
+jealousy was not of the ordinary kind. Still, the incident was not
+one of those which lighten a biographer's responsibility. Froude has
+himself explained, in a paper not intended for publication, the
+light in which it appeared to him. "Intellectual and spiritual
+affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally
+looked on these at least as exclusively her own. She had once been
+his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage
+which had been once hers was given to another." Froude's posthumous
+championship of Mrs. Carlyle may have led him to magnify unduly the
+importance of domestic disagreements. But however that may be, the
+opinions which he formed, and which Carlyle gave him the means of
+forming, did not increase the attractions of the duty he had
+undertaken to discharge.
+
+Froude's own admiration of Carlyle was, it must always be
+remembered, not in the least diminished by what he read. He still
+thought him the greatest man of his age, and believed that his good
+influence would expand with time. That there should be spots on the
+sun did not disturb him, especially as moral perfection was the last
+thing he had ever attributed to Carlyle. Meanwhile his position was
+altered, and altered, as it seems, without his knowledge. Carlyle's
+original executors were his brother, Dr. Carlyle, and John Forster.
+Forster died in 1876, and by a codicil dated the 8th of November,
+1878, Froude's name was put in the place of his, Sir James Stephen,
+the eminent jurist, afterwards a judge of the High Court, being
+added as a third. At that time Froude was engaged, to Carlyle's
+knowledge, upon the first volume of the Life. At Carlyle's request
+he had given up the editorship of Fraser's Magazine, which brought
+him in a comfortable income of four hundred a year, and he had
+wholly devoted himself to the service of his master. Carlyle
+expected that he would soon follow his wife. He survived her fifteen
+years, during which he wrote little, for his right hand was partly
+paralysed, and continually meditated upon the future destiny of the
+memorials entrusted to Froude.
+
+In 1879 Dr. Carlyle died, leaving Froude and Stephen the sole
+executors under the will. Late in the autumn of that year Carlyle
+suddenly said to Froude, "When you have done with those papers of
+mine, give them to Mary." Mary was his niece Mary Aitken, Mrs.
+Alexander Carlyle, who had lived in Cheyne Row to take care of her
+uncle since her aunt's death, and was married to her cousin. Carlyle
+speaks of her with great affection in his will, "for the loving care
+and unwearied patience and helpfulness she has shown to me in these
+my last solitary and infirm years." It was natural that he should
+think of her, and should contemplate leaving her more than the five
+hundred pounds specified in his original will. But this particular
+request was so startling that Froude ought to have made further
+inquiries. The papers had been given to him, and he might have
+destroyed them. They had been, without his knowledge, left in the
+will to John Carlyle, who was then dead. Carlyle's mind was not
+clear about the fate of his manuscripts. Froude, however,
+acquiesced, and did not even ask that Carlyle should put his
+intentions on paper. At this time, while he was writing the first
+volume of the Life, Froude made up his mind to keep back Mrs.
+Carlyle's letters, with her husband's sketch of her, to suppress the
+fact that there had been any disagreement between them, but to
+publish in a single volume Carlyle's reminiscences of his father, of
+Edward Irving, of Francis Jeffrey, and of Robert Southey. To this
+separate publication Carlyle at once assented. But in November,
+1880, when he was eighty-five, and Mrs. Carlyle had been fourteen
+years in her grave, he asked what Froude really meant to do with the
+letters and the memoir. Forced to make up his mind at once, and
+believing that publication was Carlyle's own wish, he replied that
+he meant to publish them. The old man seemed to be satisfied, and no
+more was said. Froude drew the inference that most people would, in
+the circumstances, have drawn. He concluded that Carlyle wished to
+relieve himself of responsibility, to get the matter off his mind,
+to have no disclosure in his lifetime, but to die with the assurance
+that after his death the whole story of his wife's heroism would be
+told.
+
+On the 4th of February, 1881, Carlyle died. Froude, Tyndall, and
+Lecky attended his quiet funeral in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan,
+where he lies with his father and mother. Dean Stanley had offered
+Westminster Abbey, but the family had refused. Carlyle was buried
+among his own people, who best understood him, and whom he best
+understood. The two volumes of reminiscences at once appeared,
+including sketches of Irving and Jeffrey, with the memoir of Mrs.
+Carlyle. But even before the publication of these volumes, which
+came out early in March, a question, which was ominous of future
+trouble, arose out of copyright and title to profits. A fortnight
+after Carlyle's death Froude's co-executor, Mr. Justice Stephen, had
+a personal interview with Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, in the presence of
+her husband, and of Mr. Ouvry, who was acting as solicitor for all
+parties. On this occasion Mrs. Carlyle said that Froude had
+promised her the whole profits of the Reminiscences, that her uncle
+had approved of this arrangement, and that she would not take less.
+Thus the first difference between Froude and the Carlyle family
+related to money. Mrs. Carlyle did not know that the memoirs of her
+aunt would be among the reminiscences, and the sum which had
+promised her was the speculative value of an American edition, which
+was never in fact realised.
+
+In lieu of this he offered half the English profits, and brought out
+the Reminiscences, "Jane Welsh Carlyle" being among them. They were
+eagerly read, not merely by all lovers of good literature, but by
+all lovers of gossip, good or bad. Carlyle's pen, like Dante's, "bit
+into the live man's flesh for parchment." He had a Tacitean power of
+drawing a portrait with a phrase which haunted the memory. James
+Carlyle, the Annandale mason, was as vivid as Jonathan Oldbuck
+himself. But it was upon Mrs. Carlyle that public interest fastened.
+The delineation of her was most beautiful, and most pathetic. There
+were few expressions of actual remorse, and Carlyle was not the
+first man to feel that the value of a blessing is enhanced by loss.
+But there was an undertone of something more than regret, a
+suspicion or suggestion of penitence, which set people talking. It
+is always pleasant to discover that a preacher of righteousness has
+not been a good example himself, and "poor Mrs. Carlyle" received
+much posthumous sympathy, as cheap as it was useless. Whether Froude
+should have published the memoir is a question which may be
+discussed till the end of time. He conceived himself to be under a
+pledge. He had given his word to a dead man, who could not release
+him. It seems, however, clear that he should have taken the course
+least injurious to Carlyle's memory, and in such a very delicate
+matter he might well have asked advice. From the purely literary
+point of view there could be no doubt at all. Not even Frederick the
+Great, that storehouse of "jewels five words long," contains more
+sparkling gems than these two precious little volumes. Froude speaks
+in his preface of having made "requisite omissions." A few more
+omissions might have been made with advantage, especially a brutal
+passage about Charles Lamb and his sister, which Elia's countless
+admirers find it hard to forgive. Mrs. Procter, widow of Barry
+Cornwall, the poet, and herself a most remarkable woman, was so much
+annoyed by the description of her mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, and
+her step-father, the editor of Bacon,* that she published some early
+and rather obsequious letters written to them by Carlyle himself.
+But the chief outcry was raised by the revelation of Carlyle's most
+intimate feelings about his wife, and about his own behaviour to
+her. There was nothing very bad. He was driven to accuse himself of
+the crime that, when he was writing Frederick and she lay ill on the
+sofa, he used to talk to her about the battle of Mollwitz. Froude
+was naturally astonished at the effect produced, but then Froude
+knew Carlyle, and the public did not.
+
+--
+* Carlyle's Miscellanies, i. 223-230.
+--
+
+Trouble, however, awaited him of a very different kind. After the
+publication of the Reminiscences, on the 3rd of May, 1881, he
+returned to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle the manuscript note-book which
+contained the memoir of her aunt, as Carlyle had requested him to
+do. At the end of it, on separate and wafered paper, following
+rather vague surmise that, though he meant to burn the book, it
+would probably survive him and be read by his friends, were these
+words:
+
+"In which event, I solemnly forbid them, each and all, to publish
+this Bit of Writing as it stands here; and warn them that without
+fit editing no part of it should be printed (nor so far as I can
+order, shall ever be); and that the 'fit editing' of perhaps nine-
+tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become impossible.
+
+"T. C. (Saturday, July 28th, 1866)."
+
+Mary Carlyle at once wrote to The Times, and accused Froude of
+having violated her uncle's express directions. It would have been
+better if Froude had himself quoted this passage, and explained the
+subsequent events which made it obsolete. But he never suspected any
+one, and believed at the time of publication in the entire
+friendliness of the Carlyle family. His answer to the charge of
+betraying a trust was simple and satisfactory. Carlyle had changed
+his mind. This is clear from the fact that he gave Froude the memoir
+in 1871, five years after it was written, to do as he pleased with;
+and still clearer from the conversation in 1880, when Froude told
+him that he meant to publish, and Carlyle said "Very well."
+Moreover, the will, a formal and legal document, expressly gave
+Froude entire discretion in the matter. Froude replied at first with
+temper and judgment. But when Mrs. Carlyle persisted in her
+insinuations, and implied a doubt of his veracity, he gave way to a
+very natural resentment, and made a rash offer. He had, he said,
+brought out the memoir by Carlyle's own desire. He should do the
+same with Mrs. Carlyle's letters, for the same reason. "The
+remaining letters," he went on to say, "which I was directed to
+return to Mrs. Carlyle so soon as I had done with them, I will
+restore at once to any responsible person whom she will empower to
+receive them from me. I have reason to complain of the position in
+which I have been placed with respect to these MSS. They were sent
+to me at intervals without inventory or even a memorial list. I was
+told that the more I burnt of them the better, and they were for
+several years in my possession before I was aware that they were not
+my own. Happily I have destroyed none of them, and Mrs. Carlyle may
+have them all when she pleases." Froude can hardly have reflected
+upon the full significance of what he was saying. He had at this
+time been long engaged upon the biography of Carlyle, and a
+considerable part of it was finished. If he had then given back his
+materials, his labour would have been wasted, and Carlyle's own
+personal injunction would have been disobeyed. Carlyle's memory
+would also have suffered parable injury. It is said, and it squares
+with the facts, that Mary Carlyle and her friends, whose literary
+judgment was not quite equal to Carlyle's own, desired to substitute
+as his biographer some learned professor in Scotland.* If that were
+their object, they are to be congratulated upon their failure. For
+the offer was not carried out. As a bare promise without
+consideration it was not of course valid in law, and since no one
+had acted upon it, its withdrawal did no one any harm. There were
+also legal difficulties which made its fulfilment impossible.
+According to counsel's opinion, dated the 13th of May, 1881,
+Carlyle's request that the papers should be restored was "an
+attempted verbal testamentary disposition, which had no legal
+authority." The documents belonged not to Froude personally, but to
+himself and Fitz-james Stephen, as joint executors, and Stephen has
+left it on record that he would not have consented to their return
+until Froude's task was accomplished.
+
+--
+* David Masson, the editor of Milton, I have been told, but I do not know.
+--
+
+Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's view was not shared by other and older
+members of her uncle's family. During the summer of 1881 Froude
+received from Carlyle's surviving brother, James, and his surviving
+sister, Mrs. Austin, a letter dated the 8th of August, and written
+from Ecclefechan, in which he was implored not to give up his task
+of writing the Life, and assured of their perfect reliance upon him.
+This assurance is the more significant because it was given after
+the publication of the Reminiscences. It was renewed on James
+Carlyle' s part through his son after the appearance of Mrs.
+Carlyle's letters in 1883, and by Mrs. Austin through her daughter
+upon receiving the final volumes of the biography in 1884. Miss
+Austin wrote at her mother's request on the 25th of October, 1884,
+"My uncle at all times placed implicit confidence in you, and that
+confidence has not, I am sure, in any way been abused. He always
+spoke of you as his best and truest friend." Time has amply
+vindicated Carlyle's opinion, and his discretion in the choice of a
+biographer.
+
+As Mrs. Alexander Carlyle considered the publication of the memoir,
+which is by far the most interesting part of the Reminiscences, to
+be an impropriety, and a breach of faith, it might have been
+supposed that she would repudiate the idea of deriving any profit
+from the book. On the contrary, she attempted to secure the whole,
+and refused to take a part, declaring that Froude had promised to
+give her all. Froude's recollection was that, thinking Carlyle's
+provision for his niece insufficient,* he had promised her the
+American income, which he had been told would be large, though it
+turned out to be very small indeed, in acknowledgment of her
+services as a copyist. Ultimately he made her the generous offer of
+fifteen hundred pounds, retaining only three for himself. She
+accepted the money, though she denied that it was a gift. In the
+opinion of Mr. Justice Stephen, which is worth rather more than
+hers, it was legally a gift, though there may have been in the
+circumstances a moral obligation. But Mary Carlyle put forward
+another clam, of which the executors heard for the first time in
+June, 1881. She then said that in 1875, six years before his death,
+her uncle had orally given her all his papers, and handed her the
+keys of the receptacles which contained them.
+
+--
+* The provision for Mary Carlyle in the will of 1873 was, however,
+materially increase by the codicil of 1878, under which she received
+the house in Cheyne Row after the death of her uncle John, who died
+before her uncle Thomas.
+--
+
+Her recollection, however, must have been erroneous. For the bulk of
+the papers had been in Froude's possession since the end of 1873, or
+at latest the beginning of 1874, and were not in the drawers or
+boxes which the keys would have opened. On the strength of her own
+statement, which was never tested in a court of law and was
+inconsistent with the clause in Carlyle's will leaving his
+manuscripts to his brother John, Mrs. Carlyle demanded that Froude
+should surrender the materials for his biography, and not complete
+it. He put himself into the hands of his co-executor, who
+successfully resisted the demand, and Froude, in accordance with
+Carlyle's clearly expressed desire, kept the papers until he had
+done with them. In a long and able letter to Froude himself, printed
+for private circulation in 1886, Mr. Justice Stephen says, with
+natural pride, "It was my whole object throughout to prevent a law-
+suit for the determination of what I felt was a merely speculative
+question, and to defeat the attempt made to prevent you from writing
+Mr. Carlyle's life, and I am happy to say I succeeded." The public
+will always be grateful to the Judge, for there was no one living
+except Froude who had both the knowledge and the eloquence that
+could have produced such a book as his. Of the Reminiscences Froude
+wrote to Skelton, "To me in no one of his writings does he appear in
+a more beautiful aspect; and so, I am still convinced, will all
+mankind eventually think."
+
+His own frame of mind at this period is vividly  expressed in a
+letter to Max Muller, dated the 8th of December, 1881. After some
+references to Goethe's letters, and German copyright, he continues:
+
+"So much ill will has been shown me in the case of other letters
+that I walk as if on hot ashes, and often curse the day when I
+undertook the business. I had intended, when I finished my English
+history, to set myself quietly down to Charles the Fifth, and spend
+the rest of my life on him. I might have been half through by this
+time, and the world all in good humour with me. My ill star was
+uppermost when I laid this aside. There are objections to every
+course which I can follow. The arguments for and against were so
+many and so strong that Carlyle himself could not decide what was to
+be done, and left it to me. He could see all sides of the question.
+Other people will see one, or one more strongly than another,
+whatever it may be; and therefore, do what I will, a large body of
+people will blame me. Nay, if I threw it up, a great many would
+blame me. What have I done that I should be in such a strait? But I
+am sixty-four years old, and I shall soon be beyond it all."
+
+The first two volumes of the biography, covering the earlier half of
+Carlyle's life, when his home was in Scotland, from 1795 to 1835,
+appeared in 1882 and added to the hubbub. The public had got on a
+false scent, and gossip had found a congenial theme. Carlyle was in
+truth one of the noblest men that ever lived. His faults were all on
+the surface. His virtues were those which lie at the foundation of
+our being. For the common objects of vulgar ambition he had a scorn
+too deep for words. He never sought, and he did not greatly value,
+the praise of men. He had a message to deliver, in which he
+profoundly believed, and he could no more go beyond it, or fall short
+of it, than Balaam when he was tempted by Balak. Contemporaries
+without a hundredth part of his talent, even for practical business,
+attained high positions, or positions which the world thought high.
+Carlyle did not envy them, was not dazzled by them, but held to his
+own steadfast purpose of preaching truth and denouncing shams. His
+generosity to his own family was boundless, and he never expected
+thanks. He was tender-hearted, forgiving, kind, in all great matters,
+whenever he had time to think. Courage and truth made him indifferent
+to fashion and popularity. Popularity was not his aim. His aim was to
+tell people what was for their good, whether they would hear or
+whether they would forbear. Froude had so much confidence in the
+essential greatness of the man that he did not hesitate to show him
+as he was, not a prodigy of impossible perfection, but a sterling
+character and a lofty genius. Therefore his portrait lives, and will
+live, when biographies written for flattery or for edification have
+been consigned to boxes or to lumber-rooms.
+
+Froude was only following the principles laid down by Carlyle
+himself. In reviewing Lockhart's Life of Scott, Carlyle emptied the
+vials of his scorn, which were ample and capacious, upon "English
+biography, bless its mealy mouth." The censure of Lockhart for
+"personalities, indiscretion," violating the "sanctities of private
+life," was, he said, better than a good many praises. A biographer
+should speak the truth, having the fear of God before his eyes, and
+no other fear whatever. That Lockhart had done, and in the eyes
+Carlyle, who admired him as he admired few it was a supreme merit.
+For the hypothesis Lockhart "at heart had a dislike to Scott, had
+done his best in an underhand, treacherous manner to dis-hero him,"
+he expressed, as he well might, unbounded contempt. It seems
+incredible now that such a theory should ever, in or out of Bedlam,
+have been held. Perhaps it will be equally incredible some day that
+a similar view should have been taken of the relations between
+Froude and Carlyle.
+
+It is no disparagement of Lockhart's great book to say that in this
+respect of telling the truth he had an easy task. For Scott was as
+faultless as a human creature can be. Every one who knew him loved
+him, and he loved all men, even Whigs. His early life, prosperous
+and successful, was as different as possible from Carlyle's. It was
+not until the years were closing in upon him that misfortune came,
+and called out that serene, heroic fortitude which his diary has
+made an everlasting possession for mankind. Carlyle once said in a
+splenetic mood that the lives of men of letters were the most
+miserable records in literature, except the Newgate Calendar. There
+could be no more striking examples to the contrary than Scott's life
+and his own. Perhaps Froude went too far in the direction indicated
+by Carlyle himself; abounded, as the French say, too much in
+Carlyle's sense. In his zeal to paint his hero, as his hero's hero
+wished to be painted, with the warts, he may have made those
+disfiguring marks too prominent. That a great man often has many
+small faults is a truism which does not need perpetual insistence.
+Froude is rather too fond, like Carlyle himself, of taking up and
+repeating a single phrase. When, for example, Carlyle's mother said,
+half in fun, that he was "gey ill to deal wi'," she was not stating
+a general proposition, but referring to a particular, and not very
+important, case of diet. When Miss Welsh, who was in love with
+Edward Irving, told Carlyle in 1823 that she could only love him as
+a brother, and could not marry him, it is a too summary judgment,
+and not compatible with Froude's own language elsewhere, to say that
+had they left matters thus it would have been better for both of
+them. If she said at the end of her life, "I married for ambition,
+Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him-
+and I am miserable,"* she said also, many times over, that he was
+the tenderest of husbands, and that no mother could have watched her
+health with more solicitude. He gave what he had to give. He could
+not give what he had not. "Of all the men whom I have ever seen,"
+said Froude, "Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of
+humanity." The fact is that his natural eloquence was irrepressible.
+If Miss Edgeworth's King Corny had the gout, nature said "Howl," and
+he howled. If Carlyle had indigestion, he broke into picturesque
+rhetoric about the hag which was riding him no-whither. A far
+characteristic passage than his mother's "gey to deal wi'" is his
+own simple confession to his father, "When I shout murder, I am not
+always being killed."+
+
+--
+* Life, i. 302.
++ Life, i. 209.
+--
+
+That Froude's ideas of a biographer's duty were the same as his own
+Carlyle had good reason to know. Froude had stated them plainly
+enough in Fraser's Magazine, which Carlyle always saw, for June,
+1876. He prefaced an article on the present Sir George Trevelyan's
+Life of Macaulay, a daring attack upon that historian for the very
+faults that were attributed to himself, with the following
+sentences: "Every man who has played a distinguished part in life,
+and has largely influenced either the fortunes or the opinions of
+his contemporaries, becomes the property of the public. We desire to
+know, and we have a right to know, the inner history of the person
+who has obtained our confidence." This doctrine would not have been
+universally accepted. Tennyson, for instance, would have vehemently
+denied it. But it is at least frankly expressed, and Carlyle must
+have known very well what sort of biography Froude would write.
+
+If Froude dwelt on Carlyle's failings, it was because he knew that
+his reputation would bear the strain. He has been justified by the
+result, for Carlyle's fame stands higher to-day than it ever stood
+before. That man, be he prince or peasant, is not to be envied who
+can read Froude's account of Carlyle's early life without feeling
+the better for it. It is by no means a cheerful story. The first
+forty years of Carlyle's existence, when the French Revolution had
+not been published, were an apparently hopeless struggle against
+poverty and obscurity. Sartor Resartus was scarcely understood by
+any one, and though his wife saw that it was a work of genius, it
+seemed to most people unintelligible mysticism. With the splendid
+exception of Goethe, hardly any one saw at that time what Carlyle
+was. He was too transcendental for The Edinburgh Review, to which he
+had occasionally contributed, and the payment for Sartor in Fraser's
+Magazine was beggarly.* For some years after his marriage in 1826
+Carlyle was within measurable distance of starvation. Jeffrey had to
+explain to him, or did explain to him, that he was unfit for any
+public employment. He could not dig. To beg he was ashamed. When his
+father died in 1832 he refused to touch a penny of what the old man
+left, lest there should not be enough for his brothers and sisters.
+His personal dignity made it impossible for any stranger to assist
+him, except by giving him work. He worked incessantly, devouring
+books of all sorts, especially French and German, translating
+Wilhelm Meister so superbly well as to make it almost an English
+book. There was no greater intellect then in the British Islands
+than Carlyle's and very few with which it could be compared. Yet it
+was difficult for him to earn a bare subsistence for his wife and
+himself. Froude has brought out with wonderful power and beauty the
+character which in Carlyle was above and beyond all the gifts of his
+mind. If he was a severe critic of others, he was a still sterner
+judge of himself. It would have been easy for him to make money by
+writing what people wanted to read. He was determined that if they
+read anything of his, they should read what would do them good. His
+isolation was complete. His wife encouraged him and believed in him.
+Nobody could help him.
+
+--
+* I need hardly say that this was long before Froude's connection
+with Fraser.
+--
+
+Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
+And hope without an object cannot live.
+
+Carlyle, unlike Coleridge, was a real moralist, and it was duty, not
+hope, that guided his pen. Health he had, though he never would
+admit it, and with excellent sense he invested his first savings in
+a horse. His frugal life was at least wholesome, and the one comfort
+with which he could not dispense was the cheap comfort of tobacco.
+Idleness would have been impossible to him if he had been a
+millionaire, and labour was his refuge from despondency. Like most
+humourists, he had low spirits, though his "genial sympathy with the
+under side of things," to quote his own definition of the
+undefinable, must have been some solace for his woes. He could read
+all day without wearying, so that he need never be alone. As a
+talker no one surpassed him, or perhaps equalled him at his best, in
+London or even in Annandale. What ought to have struck all readers
+of these volumes was the courage, the patience, the dignity, the
+generosity, and the genius of this Scottish peasant. What chiefly
+struck too many of them was that he did not get on with his wife.
+
+Froude's defence is first Carlyle's precept, and secondly his own
+conviction that the truth would be advantageous rather than
+injurious to Carlyle. Carlyle's way of writing about other people,
+for instance Charles Lamb, Saint Charles, as Thackeray called him,
+is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those
+passages he would have done well. His own personal conduct is a
+lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one
+to read. "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his
+diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men
+who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would
+be still noisier, still more inane.
+
+Next year the gossips had a still richer feast. In 1883 Froude,
+faithful to his trust, brought out three volumes Letters and
+Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The true and permanent interest of
+this book is that it introduced the British and American public to
+some of the most brilliantly witty and amusing epistles that the
+language contains. Indeed, there are very few letter-writers in any
+language who can be compared with Mrs. Carlyle. Inferior to her
+husband in humourous description, as in depth of thought, she
+surpassed him in liveliness of wit, in pungency of satire, and in
+terseness of expression. Her narrative is inimitable, and sometimes,
+as in the account of her solitary visit to her old home at
+Haddington twenty-three years after her marriage, her dramatic power
+is overwhelming. Carlyle himself had been familiar to the public for
+half a century through his books. Until Mrs. Carlyle's letters
+appeared the world knew nothing of her at all, except through her
+husband's sketch. Considering that good letter-writers are almost as
+rare as good poets, and that Jane Carlyle is one of the very best,
+the general reader might have been simply grateful, as perhaps he
+was. But for purposes of scandal the value of the book was the light
+it threw upon the matrimonial squabbles, actual or imaginary, of two
+remarkable persons. Mrs. Carlyle had long been dead, and her
+relations with her husband were of no importance to any one. But the
+trivial mind grasps at trivialities, and will not be satisfied
+without them. Thousands who were quite incapable of appreciating the
+letters as literature could read between the lines, and apply the
+immortal principle that a warming-pan is a cover for hidden fire.
+Unfortunately, Carlyle's heart-broken ejaculations over his dead
+wife's words leant themselves to theories and surmises. He thought
+that he had not made enough of her when she was alive, and
+apparently he wanted the world to know that he thought so. Yet the
+bulk of the letters are not those of an unhappy, oppressed, down-
+trodden woman, nor of a woman unable to take care of herself. Some
+few are intensely miserable, almost like the cries of a wounded
+animal, and these, even in extracts, might well have been omitted.
+Mrs. Carlyle would not have written them if she had been herself,
+and in a collection of more than three hundred they would not have
+been missed. Some thought also that there were too many household
+details.* On the whole, however, these letters, with the others
+published in the Life, are a rich store-house, and they retain their
+permanent value, untouched by ephemeral rumour.
+
+--
+* "A good woman," I remember Lord Bowen saying of Mrs. Carlyle,
+"with perhaps an excessive passion for insecticide."
+--
+
+I doubt if he bathed before he dressed.
+A brasier? the pagan, he burned perfumes!
+You see, it is proved, what the neighbours guessed:
+His wife and himself had separate rooms.
+
+Carlyle had been dead more than twenty years before the
+controversies about all that was unimportant in him flickered out
+and died an unsavoury death. The vital fact about him and his wife
+is that they contributed, if not equally, at least in an
+unparalleled degree, to the common stock of genius. But for Froude
+we might never have known that Mrs. Carlyle had genius at all.
+Through him we have a series of letters not surpassed by Lady Mary
+Wortley's, or by any woman's except Madame de Sevigne's.
+
+Then in 1884 Froude completed his task with Carlyle' s Life in
+London, a biographical masterpiece if ever there was one. It is
+written on the same principle of telling the truth, painting the
+warts. But it brings out even more clearely than its predecessor the
+essential qualities of Carlyle. In one way this was easier. The
+period of fruitless struggle was almost over when Carlyle left
+Craigenputtock in 1834. After the appearance of The French
+Revolution in 1838 he was famous, and every one who read anything
+read that book. Southey read it six times. Dickens carried it about
+with him, and founded on it his Tale of Two Cities. Thackeray wrote
+an enthusiastic review of it. Its wisdom and eloquence were a
+treasure to Dr. Arnold, who knew, if any man did, what history was.
+It was like no other book that had ever been written, and critics
+were driven to talk of Aeschylus or Isaiah. Such comparisons profit
+little or nothing. The French Revolution is an original book by a
+man who believed in God's judgment upon sin. The memoirs of Madame
+Dubarry might have suggested it; but it came from Carlyle's own
+heart and soul.
+
+Professors may prove to their own satisfaction that it is not
+history at all, and Carlyle has been posthumously convicted of
+miscalculating the distance from Paris to Varennes. It remains one
+of the books that cannot be forgotten, that fascinate all readers,
+even the professors themselves. And yet, greater than the book
+itself is Carlyle's behaviour when the first volume had been lost by
+Mill.  Mill, himself in extreme misery, had to come and tell the
+author. He stayed a long time, and when he had gone Carlyle said to
+his wife, "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must
+endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is to us."
+Maximus in maximis; minimus in minimis; such was Carlyle, and as
+such Froude exhibits him, not concealing the fact that in small
+matters he could be very small.
+
+The two personalities of Carlyle and his wife are so fascinating
+that there may be some excuse for regarding even their quarrels,
+which were chiefly on her side,* with interest. But Frederick the
+Great will survive these broils, and so long as Carlyle's books are
+read his biography will be read too, as his best extraneous
+memorial, just, eloquent, appreciative, sincere. Carlyle was no
+model of austere, colourless consistency. His reverent admiration of
+Peel, whom he knew, is quite irreconcilable with his savage contempt
+of Gladstone, whom he did not know. Peel was a great parliamentary
+statesman, and Gladstone was his disciple. Both belonged equally to
+the class which Carlyle denounced as the ruin of England, and rose
+to supreme power through the representative system that he
+especially abhorred. On no important point, while Peel was alive,
+did they differ. "On the whole," said Gladstone, "Peel was the
+greatest man I ever knew," and in finance he was always a Peelite.
+That a man who was four times Prime Minister of England could have
+been a canting hypocrite, deceiving himself and others, implies that
+the whole nation was fit for a lunatic asylum. Carlyle seldom
+studied a political question thoroughly, and of public men with whom
+he was acquainted only through the newspapers he was no judge.
+Personal contact produced estimates which, though they might be
+harsh, hasty, and unfair, were always interesting, and sometimes
+marvellously accurate. Of Peel, for instance, though he saw him very
+seldom, he has left a finished portrait, not omitting the great
+Minister's humour, for any trace of which the Peel papers may be
+searched in vain.
+
+--
+* "Both he and she were noble and generous, but his was the soft heart
+and hers the stern one."---Carlyle's Life in London, vol. ii. p. 171.
+--
+
+The same can be said of Thirlwall, barring the groundless
+insinuation that he was dishonest in accepting a bishopric. A very
+different sort of bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, Carlyle liked for his
+cleverness, though here too he could not help suggesting that on the
+foundation, or rather baselessness, of the Christian religion, "Sam"
+agreed with him. The great historian of the age he did not
+appreciate at all. But, then, he never met Macaulay. "Some little
+ape called Keble," is not a happy formula for the author of the
+Christian Year, and this is one of the phrases which I think Froude
+might well have omitted, as meaning no more than a casual
+execration. Yet how minute are these defects, when set beside the
+intrinsic grandeur of the central figure in the book. Carlyle mixed
+with all sorts and conditions of men and women, from the peasants of
+Annandale to the best intellectual society of London. He was always,
+or almost always, the first man in the company, not elated, nor
+over-awed," standing on the adamantine basis of his manhood, casting
+aside all props and shoars." From snobbishness, the corroding vice
+of English society, he was, though he once jocularly charged himself
+with it, entirely free. He judged individuals on their merits with
+an eye as piercing and as pitiless as Saint Simon's. On pretence and
+affectation he had no mercy. Learning, intellect, character,
+humility, integrity, worth, he held always in true esteem. As Froude
+says, and it is the final word, Carlyle's "extraordinary talents
+were devoted, with an equally extraordinary purity of purpose, to
+his Maker's service, so far as he could see and understand that
+Maker's will." He led "a life of single-minded effort to do right
+and only that of constant truthfulness in word and deed."
+
+That the man who wrote these sentences at the close of a book with
+which they are quite in keeping should have been reviled as a
+traitor to Carlyle's memory is strange indeed. To Froude it was
+incredible. Conscious of regarding Carlyle as the greatest moral and
+intellectual force of his time, he could not have been more
+astonished if he had been charged with picking a pocket. For
+criticism of his own judgment he was prepared. He knew well that
+acute differences of opinion might arise. The dishonesty and
+malignity imputed to him were outside the habits of his life and the
+range of his ideas. He lived in a society where such things were not
+done, and where nobody was suspected of doing them. He had
+fulfilled, to the best of his ability, Carlyle's own injunctions,
+and he had faithfully portrayed as he knew him the man whom of all
+others he most revered. He was bewildered, almost dazed, at what
+seemed to him the perverse and unscrupulous recklessness of his
+accusers. Anonymous and abusive letters reached him daily; some even
+of his own friends looked coldly on him. He was a sensitive man, and
+he felt it deeply. He shrank from going out unless he knew exactly
+whom he was to meet. But his pride came to his rescue, and he
+preferred suffering injustice in silence to discussing in public, as
+though it admitted of doubt, the question whether he was an honest
+man. He did, however, invite the opinion of his co-executor, an
+English judge, a close friend of Carlyle, and a man whose personal
+integrity was above all suspicion. Although the calumnies which gave
+Froude so much distress have long sunk into an oblivion of contempt,
+and require no formal refutation, the conclusive verdict of Sir
+James Fitzjames Stephen may be fitly quoted here:
+
+"For about fifteen years I was the intimate friend and constant
+companion of both of you [Carlyle and Froude], and never in my life
+did I see any one man so much devoted to any other as you were to
+him during the whole of that period of time. The most affectionate
+son could not have acted better to the most venerated father. You
+cared for him, soothed him, protected him, as a guide might protect
+a weak old man down a steep and painful path. The admiration you
+have habitually expressed for him was unqualified. You never said to
+me one ill-natured word about him down to this day. It is to me
+wholly incredible that anything but a severe regard for truth,
+learnt to a great extent from his teaching, could ever have led you
+to embody in your portrait of him a delineation of the faults and
+weaknesses which mixed with his great qualities."*
+
+--
+* My Relations with Carlyle, p. 62.
+--
+
+Calling witnesses to the character of such a man as Froude is itself
+almost an insult. But there is one judgment so valuable and so
+emphatic that I cannot refrain from citing it. The fifteenth Earl of
+Derby held such a high position in the political world that his
+literary attainments have been comparatively neglected. He was in
+truth an omnivorous reader and a cool, sagacious critic, who was not
+led astray by enthusiasm, and never said more than he felt. Writing
+to Froude on the 20th of October, 1884, Lord Derby described the
+Life of Carlyle as the most interesting biography in the English
+language, and added, "I think you have finally silenced the foolish
+talk about indiscretion, and treachery to a friend's memory. It is
+clear that you have done only, and exactly, what Carlyle wished
+done: and to me it is also apparent that he and you were right: that
+his character could not have been understood without a full
+disclosure of what was least attractive in it: and that those
+defects--the product mainly of morbid physical conditions--do not
+really take away from his greatness, while they explain much that
+was dark, at least to me, in his writings." Lord Derby's opinions
+were not lightly formed, and he was as much guided by pure reason as
+mortal man can be.
+
+Froude's own judgment is given in a letter to Lady Derby, which
+contains also much interesting speculation on South African
+politics. Lord Derby, it will be remembered, was at that time
+Secretary of State for the Colonies.
+
+"October 14th, 1884.--Carlyle in London comes out this week. I loved
+and honoured him above all living men, and with this feeling I have
+done my best to produce a faithful likeness of him. This is a
+consolation to me, if the only one I am likely to have. We shall
+see. I am very anxious about South Africa. I have written twice at
+length to Lord Derby. Unfortunately my view is the exact opposite to
+that which is generally taken. Lord D. is evidently being driven
+into active measures against his will. My fear is that there will be
+some half-action insufficient to crush the Dutch, and sufficient to
+exasperate them. He relies on the promised support of the Colonial
+Ministry. They may promise, but I will believe only when I see it
+that a Cape Ministry and Legislature will oppose the Boers in
+earnest. They will encourage us to entangle ourselves, as they did
+with the Diamond Fields, and then leave us to get out of the mess as
+we can. South Africa cannot be self-governed in connection with this
+country, except with the good-will of the Dutch population. Enough
+may have been done, however, to quiet Parliament (which knows
+nothing about the matter) in the approaching Session--and that, I
+suppose, is the chief consideration. Carnarvon writes to me
+preliminary, I suppose, to some attack when Government meets. I have
+told him exactly what I have told Lord D. I hope I may turn out
+mistaken, but the course of things so far has generally confirmed my
+opinion whenever I have seen my way to forming one. I shall be glad
+to hear what you think about the book. From you I shall get the
+friendliest judgment that the circumstances admit of, and if you are
+dissatisfied I shall know what to look for from others. The last two
+hundred pages are the most interesting. The drift of the whole is
+that Carlyle was by far the most remarkable man of his time--that
+five hundred years hence he will be the only one of us all whose
+name will be so much as remembered, while perhaps he may be one who
+will have reshaped in a permanent form the religious belief of
+mankind. Therefore he ought to be known exactly as he was. The
+argument will not be felt by those who disbelieve in his greatness,
+and the idolaters--those who pretend to worship without believing-
+will be savagest of all. Idols must be draped in fine clothes, and
+are reduced to nothing by mere human garments."
+
+Perhaps the fullest, and certainly the least reserved, account of
+Froude's own feelings about the book is contained in a letter to
+Mrs. Charles Kingsley:
+
+"I tell Longmans to-day to send you the book. If you can find time,
+I shall like to hear the independent impression it makes upon you.
+Only remember this: that it was Carlyle's own determination (or at
+least desire) to do justice to his wife, and to do public penance
+himself--a desire which I think so noble as to obliterate in my own
+mind the occasion there was for it. I have long known the worst, and
+Charles knew it generally. We all knew it, and yet the more
+intimately I knew Carlyle, the more I loved and admired him; and
+some people, Lord Derby, for instance, after reading the Life, can
+tell me that their opinion of him is rather raised than diminished.
+There is something demonic both in him and her which will never be
+adequately understood; but the hearts of both of them were sound and
+true to the last fibre. You may guess what difficulty mine has been,
+and how weary the responsibility. You may guess, too, how dreary it
+is to me to hear myself praised for frankness, when I find the world
+all fastening on C.'s faults, while the splendid qualities are
+ignored or forgotten. Let them look into their own miserable souls,
+and ask themselves how they could bear to have their own private
+histories ransacked and laid bare. I deliberately say (and I have
+said it in the book), that C.'s was the finest nature I have ever
+known. It is a Rembrandt picture, but what a picture! Ruskin, too,
+understands him, and feels too, as he should, for me, if that
+mattered, which it doesn't in the least."
+
+A few years after publication the Reminiscences ran out of print,
+and Froude was anxious to bring out a corrected edition. Mrs.
+Alexander Carlyle, however, wished for another editor. The copyright
+was Froude's, and no one could reprint the book in Great Britain
+without his consent. At that time there was no international
+copyright between the United Kingdom and the United States. A
+distinguished American professor, Mr. Eliot Norton, was invited by
+Mary Carlyle to re-edit the book beyond the Atlantic, and he
+undertook the task. Froude always thought that Professor Norton
+should have communicated with him, and the public will probably be
+of the same opinion. In the end, however, Froude voluntarily
+assigned the copyright to Mrs. Carlyle, who then had possession of
+the papers, and Mr. Norton's edition appeared in England, published
+by Macmillan, six years after Carlyle's death. It proved to be very
+like the first, though some errors of the press were corrected and
+also some slips of the pen. The disputed memoir was not omitted, nor
+was anything of the slightest interest added by Mr. Norton to the
+book. In his Preface he attacked Froude for fulfilling Carlyle's own
+wishes, of which he seems to have known little or nothing, and, by
+way of further justification for his interference, he added the
+following paragraph:
+
+"The first edition of the Reminiscences was so carelessly printed as
+to do grave wrong to the sense. The punctuation, the use of capitals
+and italics, in the manuscript, characteristic of Carlyle's method
+of expression in print, were entirely disregarded. In the first five
+pages of the printed text there were more than a hundred and thirty
+corrections to be made of words, punctuation, capitals, quotation
+marks, and such like; and these pages are not exceptional."
+
+This looks like a formidable indictment, and in the literal sense of
+the words it may be true. I have compared the first five pages of
+the two editions, and there are a good many changes in the use of
+capitals and italics. But except one obvious misprint of a single
+letter, "even" for "ever," there is nothing which does "grave wrong"
+to the sense, or affects it in any way. "And these pages," as Mr.
+Norton says, with another meaning, "are not exceptional." The later
+reminiscences were not easy to decipher. Carlyle's handwriting was
+seriously affected by age, he wrote upon both sides of very thin
+paper, and I have seen several letters of his which bear out
+Froude's assertion that, after his hand began to shake, "it became
+harder to decipher than the worst manuscript which I have ever
+examined." In preparing the book Froude had to use a magnifying
+glass, and in many cases the true reading was a matter of opinion.
+In one case, however, it was not. Sir Henry Taylor, the most serene
+and dignified of men, found himself charged in Carlyle's sketch of
+Southey with the unpleasant attribute of "morbid vivacity," and not
+only with morbid vivacity simpliciter, or per se, but "in all senses
+of that deep-reaching word." Mr. Norton restored the true reading,
+which was "marked veracity," though, on the other hand, he replaced
+the statement, omitted by Froude, that Taylor, who had died between
+the two editions, was "not a well-read or wide-minded man." It must
+be admitted that in this instance Froude allowed a proof which made
+nonsense to pass, and that Mr. Norton did a public service by
+correcting the phrase. Froude's occasional carelessness in revision
+is a common failing enough. What made it remarkable in him was the
+combination of liability to these lapses with intensely laborious
+and methodical habits.
+
+Although Froude's legal connection with Carlyle's family ceased with
+the assignment to Carlyle's niece of the copyright in the
+Reminiscences, the names of the two men are as inseparably
+associated as Boswell's and Johnson's, Lockhart's and Scott's,
+Macaulay's and Trevelyan's, Morley's and Gladstone's. Some readers,
+such as Tennyson and Lecky, thought that Froude had revealed too
+much. Others, such as John Skelton and Edward FitzGerald, believed
+that he had raised Carlyle to a higher eminence than he had occupied
+before. Froude himself felt entire confidence both in the greatness
+of Carlyle's qualities and in the permanence of his fame. That was
+why he thought that the revelation of small defects would do more
+good than harm. A faultless character, even if he himself could have
+reconciled it with his conscience to draw one, would not have been
+accepted as genuine, would not have been treated as credible. The
+true character, in its strength and its weakness, would command
+belief, and admiration too. If Froude were alive, he would say that
+the time had not yet come for a final judgment, and might not come
+for a hundred years. Still, I think it will be conceded that the
+twenty years which have elapsed  since he accomplished his task are
+a period of growth rather than decadence in the number and zeal of
+Carlyle's admirers. This is no doubt in large measure due to
+Carlyle's own books. He has been called the father of modern
+socialism, and credited with the destruction of political economy. I
+am too much out of sympathy with these views to judge them fairly.
+But I suppose it cannot be denied that Carlyle fascinates thousands
+who do not accept him as an infallible, or even as a fallible,
+guide, or that they, as well as his disciples, devour the pages of
+Froude.
+
+Nothing annoyed Carlyle more than to be told that he confounded
+might with right. He declared that, on the contrary, he had never
+said, and would never say, a word for power which was not founded on
+justice. Cromwell was as good as he was great, and he had never
+glorified Frederick, unless to write a book about a man is
+necessarily to glorify him. This prevalent misconception of
+Carlyle's gospel, so prevalent that it deceived no less keen a
+critic than Lecky, was completely dissipated by Froude. No one can
+read his Life intelligently without perceiving that Carlyle's real
+foe was materialism. The French Revolution was to him the central
+fact of modern history, and at the same time a supreme judgment of
+Heaven upon a society given up to unrestrained licentiousness.
+Whether he was right or wrong is not the point. He was as far as
+possible from being, in the modern sense, a scientific historian.
+Yet in some respects he was utilitarian enough. The condition of
+England was to him more important than any constitutional change,
+any triumph in diplomacy, or any victory in war, and this fact
+explains apparently inconsistent admiration of Peel, who though a
+Parliamentary statesman, had accomplished a solid achievement for
+the benefit of the people. Carlyle in his own writings is an almost
+insoluble enigma. To have given the true solution is the supreme
+merit of Froude.*
+
+--
+* John Nichol, a name still dear in Scotland, formerly Professor
+of Literature at the University of Glasgow, who wrote on Carlyle
+for Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters in 1892, says in his preface:
+"Every critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligation to Mr. Froude
+as every critic of Byron to Moore, or of Scott to Lockhart .... I must
+here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the
+persistent, often virulent, attach directed against a loyal friend,
+betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith, and the defective reticence
+that often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But
+Mr. Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on Sir Walter Scott,
+requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with the
+most ample authority; that the restrictions under which he was first
+entrusted with the MSS. of the Reminiscences and the Letters and
+Memorials (annotated by Carlyle himself as if for publication) were
+withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached
+a practical injunction to communicate the whole."
+--
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+BOOKS AND TRAVEL
+
+The two passions of Froude's life were Devonshire and the sea.
+"Summer has come at last," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley from Salcombe
+in the middle of September, "after two months of rain and storm. The
+fields from which the wrecks of the harvest were scraped up mined
+and sprouting now lie basking in stillest sunshine, as if wind and
+rain had never been heard of. The coast is extremely beautiful, and
+I, in addition to the charms of the place, hear my native tongue
+spoken and sung in the churches in undiminished purity." Carlyle
+often kept him in London when he would much rather have been
+elsewhere. But, wherever he was, he had a ready pen, and his
+thoughts naturally clothed themselves in a literary garb. His
+enjoyment of books, especially old books, was intense. Reading,
+however, is idle work, and idleness was impossible to Froude. On his
+return from South Africa, where everything was being done which he
+thought least wise, he took up a classical subject, and began to
+write a book about Caesar. He read Cicero, Plutarch, Suetonius,
+Caesar himself, and produced early in 1879 a volume which was always
+a particular favourite of his own. "I believe," he said to Skelton,
+"it is the best book I have ever written." The public did not
+altogether agree with him, and it never became so popular as Short
+Studies.
+
+Yet it is undoubtedly a brilliant performance, with just the
+qualities which might have been expected to make it popular, and a
+second edition was soon required. It is interesting from the first
+page to the last, and its whole object is to show that the Roman
+world in the last days of the Republic was very like the English
+world under Queen Victoria. In Rome itself it has a steady sale. The
+general reader, however, was not wrong in thinking that these
+eloquent pages are below the level of Froude at his best. There is a
+hard metallic glitter in the style, and a forced comparison of
+ancient with modern things not really parallel, which make the whole
+narrative artificial and unreal. Lord Dufferin said, with his
+natural acuteness, "It is interesting, and forcibly written, but one
+feels he is not a safe guide. As they say of the mansions of
+Ireland, 'they are always within a hundred yards of the best
+situation,' so one feels that Froude is never quite in the bull's-
+eye in the view he gives."*
+
+--
+* Lyall's Life of Dufferin, vol. ii. p. 244.
+--
+
+Those who criticised the book as if it were a formal and historical
+narrative showed a lack of humour, which is a sense of proportion.
+Macaulay might almost as well be judged by his Fragment of a Roman
+Tale. Froude himself calls his Caesar a sketch, and it is scarcely
+more authoritative than the pamphlet of Louis Napoleon on the same
+subject. On the other hand, it is quite untrue that Froude had not
+read Cicero's letters. He had read those which bore upon his
+subject, and he quotes them freely enough. The fault of his Caesar
+is that he makes a wrong start. Points of resemblance between the
+first century before the Christian era and the nineteenth century
+after it may of course be found. But the differences are essential
+and fundamental. A society which rests upon servitude cannot be like
+a society which rests upon freedom. Christianity has modified the
+whole lives of those who do not profess it, and has created a
+totally new atmosphere, even if it be not in all respects a better
+one. Representative government, whether it be a good thing or a bad
+thing, is at least a thing which counts. Caesar could hardly have
+understood the idea of an indissoluble marriage, of a limited
+monarchy, of equality before the law.
+
+One strange similitude Froude did, in deference to outraged
+susceptibilities, omit, and only the first edition contains a formal
+comparison of Julius Caesar with Jesus Christ. No irreverence was
+intended. It was Froude's enthusiasm for Caesar that carried him
+away. Still, the instance is only an extreme form of what comes from
+pushing parallels below the surface. It is only a shade less
+misleading, though many shades less startling, to represent Caesar
+as a virtuous philanthropist abstemious habits who perished in a
+magnanimous effort to rescue the people from the tyranny of nobles.
+The people in the modern sense were slaves, and the Republic at
+least ensured that there should be some protection against military
+despotism, to which in due course its abolition led. That Caesar was
+intellectually among the greatest men of all time is beyond
+question. Both strategist and as historian he is supreme. His
+"thrasonical boast" was sober truth, and he stands above military or
+literary criticism, a lesson and a model. But he was steeped in all
+the vices of his age, and his motive was personal ambition. The
+Republic did not give him sufficient scope, and therefore he would
+have destroyed it, if he had not been himself destroyed.
+
+Froude adopted the position of a great German professor and
+historian, Theodor Mommsen, whose prejudices were as strong as his
+learning was profound. He went with Mommsen in adoration of Caesar,
+and in depreciation of Cicero. That Cicero used one sort of language
+in public speeches, and another sort in private correspondence, is
+true, and is notorious because some of his most intimate letters
+have been preserved. But it is not peculiar to him. The man who
+talked in public as he talked in private would have small sense of
+fitness. The man who talked in private as he talked in public would
+have small sense of humour. Although Cicero's humour was not brilliant,
+he had sufficient taste to preserve him from pedantry and
+from solecisms. His devotion to the Republic was perfectly sincere;
+and if he changed in his behaviour to Caesar, it was because Caesar
+changed in his behaviour to the Republic. Froude's specific charge
+of rapid tergiversation is disproved by dates. The speech for
+Marcellus, with its over-strained flattery of the conqueror, was
+delivered, not "within a few weeks of his murder," but eighteen
+months before that event, at a time when Cicero still hoped that
+Caesar would be moderate. If Cicero's Republic was a narrow
+oligarchy, it was also the only form of constitutional and civilian
+government which he knew or could imagine. He failed to preserve it.
+He was murdered like Caesar himself. Neither of them believed that
+political assassination was a crime. Cicero's only regret was that
+Antony had not been killed with Caesar. Antony's chief desire, which
+he accomplished, was to kill Cicero. The idea that Cicero was a mere
+declaimer, who did not count, never occurred either to Caesar or to
+Antony. It was left for Professor Mommsen to discover. Froude,
+always on the look-out for examples of his theory, or his father's
+theory, that orators must be useless and mistaken, seized it with an
+eager gasp. An agreeable looseness of treatment pervades the book,
+and "patricians" appear as wealthy leaders of fashionable society,
+being in fact a small number of old Roman families, who might be
+poor, or in trade, and could not legally under the Republic be
+increased in number, resembling rather a Hindu caste than any
+institution of Western Christendom. In Caesar's time they had almost
+died out, and the aristocracy of the day was an aristocracy of
+office. The book, however, though far from faultless, though in some
+respects misleading, has a singular fascination, the charm of a
+picture drawn by the hand of a master with consummate skill. As an
+historical study, what the French call une etude, it deserves a very
+high place, and it contains one sentence which all democrats would
+do well to learn:
+
+"Popular forms are possible only when individual men can govern
+their own lives on moral principles, and when duty is of more
+importance than pleasure, and justice than material expediency."
+
+That represents the best side of Carlyle's teaching; the
+subordination of material objects, the supremacy of the moral law.
+Carlyle, however, did not care for the book, as appears in the
+following letter from Froude to Lady Derby:
+
+"April 26th, 1879.--You are a most kind critic. If I have succeeded
+in creating interest in so old a subject my utmost wishes are
+accomplished. I am very curious indeed to hear what Lord D. says. I
+can guess that he thinks I ought to have said more in defence of the
+Constitutionalists, and that I have hardly used Cicero. Carlyle
+reduced me to the condition of a 'drenched hen'--to use one of his
+own images. He told me that the book was not clear, that 'he got no
+good of it'--in fact, that it was 'a failure.' It may be a failure,
+but 'want of clearness' is certainly not the cause. I fancy he
+wanted something else which he did not find, and he would not give
+himself the trouble to examine what he did find."
+
+Froude contributed in 1880 to Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters a
+critical and biographical sketch of Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress,
+as the work of a Dissenter, had been excluded from the Rectory at
+Dartington. But Froude was not long in supplying the deficiency for
+himself, and his literary appreciation of Bunyan's style was
+accompanied by a sincere sympathy with the Puritan part of his
+faith. All religious people, he thought, might find common ground in
+Bunyan, a man who lived for religion, and for nothing else. Yet even
+here Froude's Erastianism, and respect for authority, come into
+play. He gravely defends Bunyan's imprisonment in Bedford gaol,
+which lasted, with some intermissions, from 1660 to 1672, as
+necessary to enforce respect for the law. That such a man as Charles
+Stuart should have had power to punish such a man as John Bunyan for
+preaching the word of God is a strange comment on the nature of a
+Christian country. But it cannot be denied that Charles and his
+judges, Sir Matthew Hale among them, provided the leisure to which
+we owe the best religious allegories in the language. Nor can it be
+said that Froude's apology for the confinement Bunyan is so
+repugnant to reason and justice as Gibbon's apology for the
+martyrdom of Cyprian.
+
+The General Election of 1880 was regarded by Froude with mixed
+feelings.
+
+"I am glad," he wrote to Lady Derby on the 9th of April, 1880, "that
+there is to be an end of 'glory and gunpowder,' but my feelings
+about Gladstone remain where they were. When you came into power in
+1874, I dreamed of a revival of real Conservatism which under wiser
+guiding might and would have lasted to the end of the century. This
+is gone--gone for ever. The old England of order and rational
+government is past and will not return. Now I should like to see a
+moderate triumvirate--Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, and your
+husband, with a Cabinet which they could control. This too may
+easily be among the impossibilities, but I am sure that at the
+bottom of its heart the country wants quiet, and a Liberal
+revolutionary sensationalism will be just as distasteful to
+reasonable people as 'Asian Mysteries,' tall talk, and ambitious
+buffooneries."
+
+Lord Derby became more and more Liberal, until in December, 1882, he
+joined Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. Before that decisive step, however,
+it became evident in which direction he was tending, and Froude
+wrote to Lady Derby on the 5th of March:
+
+"I will call on Tuesday about 5. I have not been out of town, but my
+afternoons have been taken up with a multitude of small engagements,
+and indeed I have been sulky too, and imagined Lord D. had delivered
+himself over to the enemy. But what right have I to say anything
+when I am going this evening to dine with Chamberlain? I like
+Chamberlain. He knows his mind. There is no dust in his eyes, and he
+throws no dust in the eyes of others."
+
+Of the great struggle between Lords and Commons over the franchise
+in 1884, Froude wrote to the same correspondent on the 31st of July:
+
+"As to what has happened since I went away, I for my own humble part
+am heartily pleased, for it will clear the air. If we are to have
+democracy, as I suppose we are, let us go into it with our eyes
+open. I don't like drifting among cataracts, hiding the reality from
+ourselves by forms which are not allowed either sense or power. That
+I suppose to be Lord Salisbury's feeling. I greatly admired his
+speech in Cannon Street, which reminded me of a talk I had with him
+long ago at Hatfield. If the result is a change in the Constitution
+of the House of Lords which will make it a real power, no one will
+be more sorry than Chamberlain, whose own wish is to keep it in the
+condition of ornamental helplessness. Lord Derby himself can hardly
+wish to see the country entirely in the hands of a single
+irresponsible Chamber elected by universal suffrage--and of such a
+Chamber, which each extension of the suffrage brings to a lower
+intellectual level."
+
+The following letter was written from Salcombe just after the
+General Election of 1886 and the defeat of Home Rule:
+
+"A Devonshire farmer fell ill of typhus fever once. He had
+quarrelled with a neighbour, and the clergyman told him that he must
+not die out of charity, and must see the man and shake hands with
+him. He agreed. The man came. They were reconciled, and he was going
+away again when the sick farmer called him back to the bed-side.
+'Mind you,' he said, 'if so be as I get over this here, 'tis to be
+as 'twas.'
+
+"I am sorry to see we are taking for granted that we have got over
+the scare, and that ''tis to be as 'twas' in Parliament. If no way
+can be found of giving effect to the feeling of which has been just
+expressed, the old enemy will be back again stronger than ever. I,
+for my small part, shall finally despair of Parliamentary
+Government, and shall pray for a Chamberlain Dictatorship. I do not
+think politicians know how slight the respect which is now generally
+felt for Parliament, or how weary sensible people have grown of it
+and its factions.
+
+"We are very happy down here. We have lost the Molt, but have a very
+tolerable substitute for it. The Halifaxes are at the Molt
+themselves, and considering what I am, and that he is the President
+of the Church Union, I think he and I are both astonished to find
+how well we get on together. The Colonists come next week to
+Plymouth. I have promised to meet them. Their dinner will be the
+exact anniversary of the arrival of the Armada off the harbour. That
+was the beginning of the English naval greatness and of the English
+Colonial Empire. Think of poor Oceana--75,000 copies of it sold. It
+stands for something that the English nation is interested in....
+But I must not try your eyes any further."
+
+It was in 1881 that Froude, whose connection with Fraser had ceased,
+wrote for Good Words the series of papers on The Oxford Counter-
+Reformation which are the best record hitherto published of his
+college life.* I have already referred to the vivid picture of John
+Henry Newman contained in one of them. On the 2nd of March, 1881,
+the aged Cardinal, writing from the Birmingham Oratory, sent a
+gracious message of acknowledgment. "My dear Anthony Froude," he
+began, "I have seen some portions of what you have been writing
+about me, and I cannot help sending you a line to thank you... I
+thank you, not as being able to accept all you have said in praise
+of me. Of course I can't. Nor again as if there may not be other
+aspects of me which you cannot praise, and which you may in a coming
+chapter of your publication find it a duty, whether I allow them or
+not, to remark upon. But I write to thank you for such an evidence
+of your affectionate feelings towards me, for which I was not
+prepared, and which has touched me very much. May God's fullest
+blessings be upon you, and give you all good. Yours affectionately,
+John H. Cardinal Newman."
+
+--
+* Short Studies, fourth series, pp. 192-206.
+--
+
+Froude carefully kept this letter, and, remote as their opinions
+were, he never varied in his loyal admiration of the illustrious
+Oratorian. That admiration, however, was purely personal, and did
+not affect in any degree the staunchness of Froude's principles. In
+1883 Protestant Germany celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of
+Luther's birth, and Froude wrote for the occasion a short biography
+of the rebellious monk who changed the history of the world. He
+founded on the larger Life by Julius Koestlin, which had then just
+appeared, this little book makes no pretence to original learning or
+research. It is a polemical pamphlet by a master of English, and a
+fervent admirer of the illustrious Martin. "When the German states
+revolted against the Roman hierarchy," says Froude in his Preface,
+"we in England revolted also," and Luther's name was as familiar as
+Bunyan's to the Protestant Churches of England. The Catholic revival
+of which Froude had seen so much at Oxford was still in full swing.
+
+"Nevertheless, we are still a Protestant nation, and the majority of
+us intend to remain Protestant. If we are indifferent to our
+Smithfield and Oxford martyrs, we are not indifferent to the
+Reformation, and we can join with Germany in paying respect to the
+memory of a man to whom we also, in part,  owe our deliverance.
+Without Luther there would have been either no change in England in
+the sixteenth century, or a change purely political. Luther's was
+one of those great individualities which have modelled the history
+of mankind, and modelled it entirely for good. He revived and
+maintained the spirit of piety and reverence in which, and by which
+alone, real progress is possible."
+
+Such was the temper in which Froude set about his task, and which
+made it a labour of love. Besides the great public events in
+Luther's career which are familiar to all, he gave a charming
+picture of the affectionate father, the genial host, the eloquent,
+humourous talker whose fragments of conversation, his Tischreden,
+are in Germany almost as popular as his hymns. Luther's dominant
+quality was force, and that was a quality which Froude, like
+Carlyle, honoured above all others. Luther was not in all respects
+like a modern Protestant. He had a great respect for authority, when
+it was genuine, and he believed in transubstantiation, which Leo X.
+regarded as a juggle to deceive the vulgar. If Luther's appearance
+before the Diet of Worms was, as Froude says, "the finest scene in
+human history," it is so because this solitary monk stood not for
+one form of religion against another, but for truth against
+falsehood, for earnest belief in divine things against a Church
+governed by unbelievers. The Renaissance in its most Pagan form had
+invaded the Vatican, and the Vicar of Christ appeared to Luther as
+Anti-Christ himself. If Charles V. had been Pope, and Leo X. had
+been emperor, we might never have heard of Luther. Froude sincerely
+respected Charles V., and held that Protestant historians had done
+him less than justice. Although Charles opposed the Reformation, he
+opposed it honestly, and his faith in his own religion was absolute.
+He was a Christian gentleman. As he entered Wittenberg after the
+battle of Mahlberg, some bishop asked him to dig up Luther's body
+and burn it. "I war not with the dead," he perhaps remembering the
+grand old Roman line:
+
+Nullum cum victis certamen, et aethere cassis.
+
+One valuable truth Froude had learned not from Carlyle, but from
+study of the past, and from his own observation at the Cape. "If,"
+he wrote in Caesar, "there be one lesson which history clearly
+teaches, it is this, that free nations" cannot govern subject
+provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their
+dependencies to share their constitution, the constitution itself
+will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties." A critic
+in The Quarterly Review expressed a hope that this would not prove
+to be true of India. But Froude was not thinking of India. He had in
+his mind the self-governing Colonies, whose fortunes and future were
+to him a source of perpetual interest. He loved travel, and as soon
+as he had shaken off the burden of Carlyle he took a voyage round
+the world, described, not always with topical accuracy, in Oceana.
+The name of this delightful volume is of course taken from
+Harrington, More's successor in the days of the Commonwealth. The
+contents were a characteristic mixture of history, speculation, and
+personal experience. Froude had a fixed idea that English
+politicians, especially Liberal politicians, wanted to get rid of
+the Colonies. Else why had they withdrawn British troops from Canada
+and New Zealand? He could not see, perhaps they did not all see
+themselves, that to give the Colonies complete freedom, and to
+insist upon their providing, except so far as the Navy was
+concerned, for their own defence, would strengthen, not weaken, the
+tie. In proof of his theory he produced some singular evidence,
+comprising one of the strangest stories that ever was told. He heard
+it, so he informs us, from Sir Arthur Helps, and reproduces it in
+his own words.
+
+"A Government had gone out; Lord Palmerston was forming a new
+Ministry, and in a preliminary Council was arranging the composition
+of it. He had filled up the other places. He was at a loss for a
+Colonial Secretary. This name and that was suggested, and thrown
+aside. At last he said, 'I suppose I must take the thing myself.
+Come upstairs with me, Helps, when the Council is over. We will look
+at the maps, and you shall show me where these places are.'"
+
+If Froude's memory of this anecdote be accurate, Helps must, for
+once, have been drawing upon his imagination. As Clerk of the
+Council, he had no more to do with forming Cabinets than with
+appointing bishops. Palmerston was never Colonial Secretary in his
+life; and among his faults as a Minister, which were positive rather
+than negative, ignorance of political geography was certainly not
+included. Many people, however, especially the Tariff Reform League,
+will consider that the passage which immediately succeeds proves
+Froude to have been in advance of his age. For he argues that trade
+follows the flag, because "our colonists take three times as much of
+our productions in proportion to their number as foreigners take." A
+tour through the Colonies for the purpose of conversing with their
+most influential statesmen had long been one of his cherished plans.
+Hitherto he had got no farther than the Cape, where, as we have
+seen, he became entangled in South African politics, and had to
+repeat his visit. Now he was bound for Australasia, and on the 6th
+of December, 1884, he left Tilbury Docks, with his son Ashley, in an
+Aberdeen packet of four thousand tons. His love of the sea,
+Elizabethan in its intensity, was heightened by his enjoyment of
+Greek literature, especially the Odyssey, which he considered ideal
+reading for a ship, and, as it surely is, on ship or on shore, an
+incomparable tale of adventure.
+
+Before the end of the year Froude was at Cape Town, renewing his
+acquaintance with familiar scenes. Many of his former friends were
+dead, and his courteous enemy, now Sir John Molteno, had left Cape
+Town as well as public life. The Prime Minister was Mr. Upington, a
+clever lawyer, afterwards Sir Thomas Upington, and the chief topic
+was Sir Charles Warren's expedition to Bechuanaland, which happily
+did not end in war, as Upington apprehended that it would. Sir
+Hercules Robinson was Governor and High Commissioner, a man after
+Froude's heart, "too upright to belong to any party," and thoroughly
+appreciative of all that was best in the Boers. This time
+Froude's stay was a short one, and early in 1885 he was at
+Melbourne. Here the burning question was the German occupation of
+New Guinea, for which Colonial opinion held Gladstone's Government,
+and Lord Derby in particular, responsible. On the other hand, Lord
+Derby had suggested Australian Federation, which received a good
+deal of support, though it led to nothing at the time. On one point
+Froude seems always to have met with Sympathy. Abuse of Gladstone
+never failed to elicit a favourable response, and the news of
+Gordon's death was an opportunity not to be wasted. But when there
+came rumours of a possible war with Russia over the Afghan frontier,
+Froude took the side of Russia, or at all events of peace, and
+contended with his Tory companion, Lord Elphinstone, who was for
+war. In New Zealand he visited the venerable Sir George Grey, who
+had violated all precedent by entering local politics, and becoming
+Prime Minister, after the Duke of Buckingham had recalled him from
+the Governorship of the Colony. He was not equally successful in his
+second career, and Froude's unqualified praise of him was resented
+by many New Zealanders. That the Colonies would be true to the
+mother country if the mother country were true to them was the safe
+if somewhat vague conclusion at which the returning traveller
+arrived. He came home by America, and met with a more formidable
+antagonist than his old assailant Father Burke, in the shape of a
+terrific blizzard.
+
+But hardships had no deterring effect upon Froude, and his love of
+travel, like his love of the classics, suffered no diminution while
+strength remained. He returned from the Antipodes early in 1885.
+Before 1886 was out he had started on a voyage to the West Indies,
+so that his survey of our Colonial possessions might be complete.
+Ardent imperialist as he was, Froude was not less fully alive than
+Mr. Goldwin Smith to the difficulties inherent in a policy of
+Imperial Federation. "All of us are united at present," he had
+written in Oceana,* "by the invisible bonds of relationship and of
+affection for our common country, for our common sovereign, and for
+our joint spiritual inheritance. These links are growing, and if let
+alone will continue to grow, and the free fibres will of themselves
+become a rope of steel. A federation contrived by politicians would
+snap at the first strain." Australian Federation, which Froude did
+not live to see, was no contrivance of politicians, but the result
+of spontaneous opinion generated in Australia, and ratified as a
+matter of course by Parliament at home.
+
+--
+* P. 393.
+--
+
+The West Indian Islands had an especial fascination for Froude on
+account of the great naval exploits of Rodney, Hood, and other
+British sailors. 'Kingsley's At Last had revived his interest in
+them; and though Kingsley had long been dead, his memory was fresh
+among all who knew him. The diary which Froude kept during this
+journey has been preserved, and I am enabled to make a few extracts
+from it. On the last day of 1886, while he was crossing the Bay of
+Biscay, he meditated upon the subject which occupied Cicero at an
+earlier period of his life. "Last day of the year. One more gone of
+the few which can now remain to me. Old age is not what I looked
+for. It is much pleasanter. Physically, except that I cannot run, or
+jump, or dance, I do not feel much difference, and I don't want to
+do those things. Spirits are better. Life itself has less worries
+with it, and seems prettier and truer to me now that I can look at
+it objectively, without hopes and anxieties on my own account. I
+have nothing to expect in this world in the way of good. It has
+given me all that it will or can. I am less liable to illusions. One
+knows by experience that nothing is so good or so bad as one has
+fancied, and that what is to be will be mainly what has been. So
+many of one's friends are dead! Yes, but one will soon die too. Each
+friend gone is the cutting a link which would have made death
+painful. It loses its terror as it draws nearer, especially when one
+thinks what it would be if one were not allowed to die." Tennyson
+has expressed in Tithonus the idea at which Froude glances, and from
+which he averts his gaze. Carlyle's senility was not enviable, and
+even that sturdy veteran Stratford Canning* told Gladstone that
+longevity was "not a blessing." Like Cephalus at the opening of
+Plato's Republic, Froude found that he could see more clearly when
+the mists of sentiment were dispersed.
+
+While at sea Froude pursued his favourite musings on the
+worthlessness of all orators, from Demosthenes and Cicero to Burke
+and Fox, from Burke and Fox to Gladstone and Bright. The world was
+conveniently divided into talking men and acting men. Gladstone had
+never done anything. He had always talked.
+
+"I wonder whether people will ever open their eyes about all this.
+The orators go in for virtue, freedom, etc., the cheap cant which
+will charm the constituencies. They are generous with what costs
+them nothing--Irish land, religious liberty, emancipation of
+niggers--sacrificing the dependencies to tickle the vanity of an
+English mob and catch the praises of the newspapers. If ever the
+tide turns, surely the first step will be to hang the great
+misleaders of the people--as the pirates used to be--along the House
+of Commons terrace by the river as a sign to mankind, and send the
+rest for ever back into silence and impotence."
+
+--
+* Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.
+--
+
+Whether a man be a pirate is a matter of fact. Whether he be a
+misleader of the people is a matter of opinion. "Whom shall we
+hang?" would become a party question, and perhaps a general amnesty
+for mere debaters is the most practical solution of the problem.
+
+Barbados, which has since suffered severely from the want of a
+market for its sugar, seemed to Froude's eyes to present in a sort
+of comic picture the summit of human felicity. "Swarms of niggers on
+board--delightful fat woman in blue calico with a sailor straw hat,
+and a pipe in her mouth. All of them perfectly happy, without a
+notion of morality--piously given too--psalm-singing, doing all they
+please without scruple, rarely married, for easiness of parting,
+looking as if they never knew a care .... Niggerdom perfect
+happiness. Schopenhauer should come here." Schopenhauer would
+perhaps have said that "niggers" were happier than other men because
+they come nearer to the beasts.
+
+As Froude has been accused of injustice to the Church of Rome, it
+may be as well to quote an entry from his journal at Trinidad:*
+"Went to Roman Catholic Cathedral--saw a few men and women on their
+knees at solitary prayers--much better for them than Methodist
+addresses on salvation." In another place he says:+ "Religion as a
+motive alters the aspect of everything--so much of the world rescued
+from Rome and the great enemy. Yet the Roman Church after all is
+something. It is a cause and a home everywhere--something to care
+for outside oneself--an something which does not change."
+
+--
+* January 15th, 1887.
++ February 1st.
+--
+
+Again at Barbados, on the 17th of February he writes: "By far the
+most prosperous of the upper classes that I have seen in the islands
+are the Roman Catholic priests and bishops. They stand, step, and
+speak out with as fine a consciousness of power as in Ireland itself ....
+Large, authoritative, dignified, with their long sweeping
+robes. The old thing is getting fast on its feet again. The
+philosophers and critics have done for Protestantism as a positive,
+manly, and intellectually credible explanation of the world. The old
+organism and old superstition steps into its ancient dominion-
+finding it swept and garnished."
+
+In San Domingo at sunrise Froude's meditations were far from
+cheerful: "The sense of natural beauty is nothing where man is
+degraded." So far Bishop Heber in a well-known couplet.
+
+Froude proceeds: "The perception of beauty is the perception of
+something which is acting upon and elevating the intellectual
+nature. . . It is connected with hope, connected with the
+consciousness of the noble element in the human soul; and where it
+is unperceived, or where there is none to perceive it, or where it
+falls dead, and fails in its effect, the solitary eye which gazes
+will find no pleasure, no joy--only distress--as for something
+calling to him out of a visionary world from which his own race is
+shut out. We cannot feel healthily alone. The sense of worship, the
+sense of beauty, the sense of sight, is only alive and keen when
+shared by others .... It is something not alone, but generated by
+the action of the object on the soul. Thus in these islands there is
+only sadness. In New Zealand there was hope and life."
+
+A passage from the diary concerning the appointment of Colonial
+Governors will be regarded by all official persons as obsolete.
+
+"The English nation, if they wish to keep the Colonies, ought to
+insist on proper men being chosen as Governors ....  The Colonial
+Office is not to blame and will only be grateful for an expression
+of opinion which will enable them to answer pressure upon them with
+a peremptory 'Impossible.' Court influence, party influence, party
+convenience, all equally injurious. A noble lord is out at elbows;
+give him a Governorship of a Colony. A party politician must be
+disappointed in arrangements at home; console him with a Colony. The
+Colonists feel that no respect is felt for them; anybody will do for
+a Colony; and whether it is a Crown Colony, or a with responsible
+government of its own, the effect is equally mischievous. In fact,
+while they continue liable, and occasionally subject, to treatment
+of this kind, the feelings insensibly generate which will lead in
+the end to separation."
+
+The immediate consequence of Froude's West Indian travels was his
+well-known book The English in the West Indies, to which he gave a
+second title, one that he himself preferred, The Bow of Ulysses. It
+was illustrated from his own sketches, for he had inherited that
+gift from his father. Being often controversial in tone, and not
+always accurate in description, it provoked numerous criticisms,
+though not of the sort which interfere with success. In everything
+Froude wrote, though least of all in his History, allowance has to
+be made for the personal equation. He had not Carlyle's memory, nor
+his unfailing accuracy of eye. Where he wrote from mere
+recollection, deserting the safe ground of his diary, he was liable
+to error, and few men of letters have been less capable of producing
+a trustworthy guide book. The value of Oceana and The Bow of Ulysses
+is altogether different. They are the characteristic reflections of
+an intensely vivid, highly cultivated mind, bringing out of its
+treasure-house things new and old. "The King knows your book," it
+was said to Montaigne, "and would like to know you." "If the King
+knows my book," replied the philosopher, "he knows me." Froude is in
+his books, especially in his books of travel, for in them, more than
+anywhere else, he thinks aloud. There are strange people in the
+world. One of them criticised Froude in an obituary notice because,
+when he went to Jamaica, he sat in the shade reading Dante while he
+might have been studying the Jamaican Constitution. There may be
+those who would study the Jamaican Constitution, what there is of
+it, in the sun, while they might, if they could, read Dante in the
+shade, and the necrologist in question may be one of them. Froude
+did not go to study Constitutions, which he could have studied at
+home. He went to see for himself what the West Indian Colonies were
+like, and his incorrigible habit of reading the best literature did
+not forsake him even in tropical climates. He cared only too little
+for Constitutions even when they were his proper business, as they
+certainly were not in Jamaica. The object of The English in the West
+Indies is to make people at home feel an interest in their West
+Indian fellow-subjects, and that it did by the mere fact of its
+circulation. His belief that the West Indies should be governed,
+like the East Indies, despotically, is a subsidiary matter, and the
+quaint parody of the Athanasian Creed in which he epitomised what he
+supposed to be the Radical faith is merely an intellectual
+amusement. On the virtues of Rodney, and the future of the Colonies,
+he is serious, though scarcely practical.
+
+"Imperial Federation," he wrote in 1887, "is far away, if ever it is
+to be realised at all. If it is to come it will come of itself,
+brought about by circumstances and silent impulses working
+continuously through many years unseen and unspoken of. It is
+conceivable that Great Britain and her scattered offspring, under the
+pressure of danger from without, or impelled by some purpose, might
+agree to place themselves under a single administrative head. It is
+conceivable that out of a combination so formed, if it led to a
+successful immediate result, some union of a closer kind might
+eventually emerge. It is not only conceivable, but it is entirely
+certain, that attempts made when no such occasion has arisen, by
+politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves, will fail, and in
+failing will make the object that is aimed at more confessedly
+unattainable than it is now."*
+
+--
+* English in the West Indies, p. 168.
+--
+
+So far Froude's predictions have been realised. When he wrote, the
+Imperial Federation League had just been formed, and Lord Rosebery was
+arguing for Irish Home Rule as part of a much wider scheme. Except
+Australia, which is homogeneous, like the Dominion of Canada, the British
+Empire is no nearer Federation, and Ireland is no nearer
+Home Rule, than they were then. The depression of the sugar trade in
+the West Indian Islands has been met by a treaty which raises the
+price of sugar at home, and makes those Colonies proportionately
+unpopular with the working classes. It has since been proposed to
+carry the principle farther, and tax the British workman for the
+benefit of Colonial manufacturers. For these strange results of
+imperial thinking neither Froude nor any of his contemporaries were
+prepared. But they correspond accurately, especially the second of
+them, with the "attempt made by politicians ambitious of
+distinguishing themselves," against which Froude warned his
+countrymen. Froude was no scientific economist. He believed in "free
+trade within the Empire," which is not free trade. He was for an
+imperial tariff, a thing made in Germany, and called a Zollverein.
+But his practical experience and personal observation taught him
+that proposals for closer union with the Colonies must come from the
+Colonies themselves. The negroes were a difficulty. They were not
+really fit for self-government, as the statesmen of the American
+Union had found. Personal freedom, the inalienable right of all men
+and all women, is a very different thing from the possession of a
+vote. As for India, the idea of Home Rule there had receded a long
+way into the distance since the sanguine predictions of Macaulay.
+Perhaps Froude never quite worked out his conceptions of the federal
+system which he would have liked to see. In Australia it would have
+been plain sailing. In Canada it was already established. In South
+Africa it would have embodied the union of British with Dutch, and
+prevented the disasters which have since occurred.  In the West
+Indies it would have raised problems of race and colour which are
+more prudently agitated at a greater distance from the Black.
+Republic of Hayti. Imperial Federalists not yet explained what they
+would do with India.
+
+Froude neither was nor aimed at being practical politican. His
+object, in which he succeeded, was to kindle in the public mind at
+home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his
+own heart was full. Although the measure of Colonial loyalty was
+given afterwards in the South African War, the despatch of troops
+from Sydney to the Soudan in 1885 showed that ties of sentiment are
+the strongest of all. It was those ties, rather than any political
+or commercial bond, which Froude desired to strengthen. No one would
+have liked less to live in a Colony. Colonial society did not suit
+him. Colonial manners were not to his mind. But to meet governing
+men, like Sir Henry Norman, a "warm Gladstonian," by the way, was
+always a pleasure to him, and as a symbol of England's greatness he
+loved her territory beyond the seas.
+
+The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, published in 1889, was Froude's one mature
+and serious attempt at a novel. For distinction of style and beauty
+of thought it may be compared with the greatest of historical
+romances. If it was the least successful of his books, the failure
+can be assigned to the absence of women, or at least of love, which
+ever since Dr. Johnson's definition, if not before, has been
+expected in a novel. The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his
+favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth
+century. The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring.
+Goring "belonged to an order of men who, if they had been allowed
+fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory of an
+evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the Cromwellians
+had died out of the land, and was not to be revived by a single
+enthusiast." He was murdered, and Froude could point his favourite
+moral that the woes of the sister country would be healed by the
+appearance of another Cromwell, which he had to admit was
+improbable. The Irish hero, Morty Sullivan, has been in France, and
+is ready to fight for the Pretender. He did no good. Few Irishmen,
+in Froude's opinion, ever did any good. But in The Two Chiefs of
+Dunboy, if anywhere, Froude shows his sympathy with the softness of
+the Irish character, and Morty's meditations on his return from
+France are expressed as only Froude could express them. Morty was
+walking with his sister by the estuary of the Kenmare River opposite
+Derrynane, afterwards famous as the residence of Daniel O'Connell,
+"For how many ages had the bay and the rocks and the mountains
+looked exactly the same as they were looking then? How many
+generations had played their part on the same stage, eager and
+impassioned as if it had been erected only for them! The half-naked
+fishermen of forgotten centuries who had earned a scanty living
+there; the monks from the Skelligs who had come in on high days in
+their coracles to say mass for them, baptize the children, or bury
+the dead; the Celtic chief, with saffron shirt and battle-axe,
+driven from his richer lands by Norman or Saxon invaders, and
+keeping hold in this remote spot on his ragged independence; the
+Scandinavian pirates, the overflow of the Northern Fiords, looking
+for new soil where they could take root. These had all played their
+brief parts there and were gone, and as many more would follow in
+the cycles of the years that were to come, yet the scene itself was
+unchanged and would not change. The same soft had fed those that
+were departed, and would feed those that were to be. The same
+landscape had affected their imaginations with its beauty or awed
+them with its splendours; and each alike had yielded to the same
+delusion that the valley was theirs and was inseparably connected
+with themselves and their fortunes. Morty's career had been a stormy
+one .... He had gone out into the world, and had battled and
+struggled in the holy cause, yet the cause was not advanced, and it
+was all nothing. He was about to leave the old place, probably for
+ever. Yet there it was, tranquil, calm, indifferent whether he came
+or went. What was he? What was any one? To what purpose the
+ineffectual strivings of short-lived humanity? Man's life was but
+the shadow of a dream, and his work was but the heaping of sand
+which the next tide would level flat again."
+
+Wordsworth's "pathetic fallacy" that the moods of nature correspond
+with the moods of man has seldom found such eloquent illustration as
+in Morty's vain imaginings. Morty himself was shot dead by English
+soldiers in revenge for the murder of Goring. The story is a dismal
+and tragic one. But the best qualities of the Irish race are there,
+depicted with true sympathy, and perhaps this volume may be held to
+confirm Carlyle's opinion, expressed in a letter to Miss Davenport
+Bromley, that even The English in Ireland was "more disgraceful to
+the English Government by far than to the Irish savageries." Froude,
+indeed, never forgot the kindness of the Kerry peasants who nursed
+him through the small-pox. He would have done anything for the
+Irish, except allow them to govern  themselves.
+
+In 1890 Froude contributed to the series of The Queen's Prime
+Ministers, edited by Mr. Stuart Reid, a biographical study of Lord
+Beaconsfield. He wrote to Mr. Reid on the subject:
+
+". . . Lord Beaconsfield wore a mask to the generality of mankind.
+It was only when I read Lothair that I could form any notion to
+myself of the personality which was behind. I once alluded to that
+book in a speech at a Royal Academy banquet. Lord Beaconsfield was
+present, and was so far interested in what I said that he wished me
+to review Endymion in the Edinburgh, and sent me the proof-sheets of
+it before publication. Edymion did not take hold of me as Lothair
+did, and I declined, but I have never lost the impression which I
+gathered out of Lothair. It is worse than useless to attempt the
+biography of a man unless you know, or think you know, what his
+inner nature was .... I am quite sure that Lord Beaconsfield had a
+clearer insight than most men into the contemporary constitution of
+Europe--that he had a real interest in the welfare and prospects of
+mankind; and while perhaps he rather despised the great English
+aristocracy, he probably thought better of them than of any other
+class in England. I suppose that like Cicero he wished to excel, or
+perhaps more like Augustus to play his part well in the tragic
+comedy of life. I do not suppose that he had any vulgar ambition at
+all .... "
+
+The feelings with which he approached this not altogether congenial
+task are described in the following passages from letters to Lady
+Derby:
+
+.... "THE MOLT, September 14th, 1889.
+
+"If my wonderful adventure into the Beaconsfield country comes off,
+I shall want all the help which Lord D. offered to give me. I do not
+wonder that he and you were both startled at the proposition, and I
+am not at all sure that in a respectable series of Victorian Prime
+Ministers I should be allowed to treat the subject in the way that I
+wish. The point is to make out what there was behind the mask. Had
+it not been for Lothair I should have said nothing but a charlatan.
+But that altered my opinion, and the more often I read it the more I
+want to know what his real nature was. The early life is a blank
+filled up by imaginative people out of Vivian Grey. I am feeling my
+way indirectly with his brother, Ralph D'Israeli, and whether I go
+on or not will depend on whether he will help me."
+
+"THE MOLT, November 12th, 1889,
+
+"The difficulty is to find out the real man that lay behind the
+sphynx-like affectations. I have come to think that these
+affectations (natural at first) came to be themselves affected as a
+useful defensive armour which covered the vital parts. Anyway, the
+study of him is extremely amusing. I had nothing else to do, and I
+can easily throw what I write into the fire if it turns out
+unsatisfactory."
+
+Although the book was necessarily a short one, it is too
+characteristic to be lightly dismissed. When Froude gave Mr. Reid
+the manuscript, he said, "It will please neither Disraeli's friends
+nor his foes. But it is at least an honest book." He heard, with
+more amusement than satisfaction, that it had pleased Gladstone. For
+the political estimate of a modern and Parliamentary statesman
+Froude lacked some indispensable qualifications. He knew little, and
+cared less, about the House of Commons, in which the best years of
+Disraeli's life were passed. He despised the party system, of which
+Disraeli was at once a product and a devotee. He had no sympathy
+with Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy, and the colonial policy
+which he would have substituted for it was outside Lord
+Beaconsfield's scope. He had adopted from Carlyle the theory that
+Disraeli and Gladstone were both adventurers, the difference between
+them being that Disraeli only deceived others, whereas Gladstone
+deceived also himself. But Gladstone had ignored whereas Disraeli,
+with singular magnanimity, had offered to the author of Shooting
+Niagara a pension and a Grand Cross of the Bath.
+
+It was, however, as a man of letters rather than as a politician
+that Disraeli fascinated Froude, so much so that he is betrayed into
+the paradox of representing his hero as a lover of literature rather
+than politics. Disraeli sometimes talked in that way himself, as
+when he was persuading Lightfoot to accept the Bishopric of Durham, and
+remarked, "I, too, have sacrificed inclination to duty." But he
+was hardly serious, and even in his novels it is the political parts
+that survive. Although Froude had found it impossible to review
+Endymion, the book is very like the author, and can only be
+appreciated by those who have been behind the scenes in politics.
+Froude's idea of Disraeli as a man with a great opportunity who
+threw it away, who might have pacified Ireland and preferred to
+quarrel with Russia, was naturally not agreeable to Disraelites, and
+as a general rule it is desirable that a biographer should be able,
+to write from his victim's point of view. Yet, all said and done,
+Froude's Beaconsfield is a work of genius, the gem of the series.
+Professional politicians, with the curious exception of Gladstone,
+thought very little of it. It was not written for them. Disraeli was
+a many-sided man, so that there is room for various estimates of his
+character and career. Of his early life Froude had no special
+knowledge. He was not even aware that Disraeli had applied for
+office to Peel. He shows sometimes an indifference to dry details,
+as when he makes Gladstone dissolve Parliament in 1873 immediately
+after his defeat on the Irish University Bill, and represents Russia
+as having by her own act repealed the Black Sea Clauses in the
+Treaty of Paris. Startling too is his assertion that the Parliament
+of 1868 did nothing for England or Scotland, on account of its
+absorption in Irish affairs. But he was not writing a formal
+history, and these points did not appeal to him at all. He drew with
+inimitable skill a picture of the despised and fantastic Jew, vain
+as a peacock and absurdly dressed, alien in race and in his real
+creed, smiling sardonically at English ways, enthusiasms, and
+institutions, until he became, after years of struggle and obloquy, the
+idol of what was then the proudest aristocracy in the world.
+
+Disraeli's peculiar humour just suited Froude's taste. Disraeli
+never laughed. Even his smile was half inward. The irony of life, and of
+his own position, was a subject of inexhaustible amusement to him.
+There was nothing in his nature low, sordid, or petty. It was not
+money, nor rank, but power which he coveted, and at which he aimed.
+Irreproachable in domestic life, faithful in friendship, a placable
+enemy, undaunted by failure, accepting final defeat with philosophic
+calm, he played with political passions which he did not share, and
+made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as
+he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything
+stuffy and commonplace. From a constitutional history of English
+politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not
+his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In
+any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the principal
+figure. In the Congress of Berlin, where he did nothing, or next to
+nothing, he attracted the gaze of every one, not for anything he
+said there, but because he was there at all. If he had left an
+autobiography, it would be priceless, not for its facts, but for its
+opinions. That Froude thoroughly understood him it would be rash to
+say. But he did perceive by sympathetic intuition a great deal that
+an ordinary writer would have missed altogether. For instance, the
+full humour of that singular occasion when Benjamin Disraeli
+appeared on the platform of a Diocesan Conference at Oxford, with
+Samuel Wilberforce in the chair, could have been given by no one
+else exactly as Froude gave it. Nothing like it had ever happened
+before. It is scarcely possible that anything of the kind can ever
+happen again. Froude found the origin of the Established Church in
+the statutes of Henry VIII. Gladstone found it, or seemed to find
+it, in the poems of Homer. In Disraeli's eyes its pedigree was
+Semitic, and it ministered to the "craving credulity" of a sceptical
+age, undisturbed by the provincial arrogance that flashed or flared
+in an essay or review.
+
+"In the year 1864," says Froude, "Disraeli happened to be on a visit
+at Cuddesdon, and it happened equally that a Diocesan Conference was
+to be held at Oxford at the time, with Bishop Wilberforce in the
+chair. The clerical mind had been doubly exercised, by the
+appearance of Colenso on the 'Pentateuch' and Darwin on the 'Origin
+of Species.' Disraeli, to the surprise of every one, presented
+himself in the theatre. He had long abandoned the satins and silks
+of his youth, but he was as careful of effect as he had ever been,
+and had prepared himself in a elaborately negligent. He lounged into
+the assembly in a black velvet shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat,
+as if he had been accidentally passing through the town. It was the
+fashion with University intellect to despise Disraeli as a man with
+neither sweetness nor light; but he was famous, or at least
+notorious, and when he rose to speak there was a general curiosity.
+He began in his usual affected manner, slowly and rather pompously,
+as if he had nothing to say beyond perfunctory platitudes. The
+Oxford wits began to compare themselves favourably the dullness of
+Parliamentary orators; when first one sentence and then another
+startled them into attention. They were told that the Church was not
+likely to be disestablished. It would remain, but would remain
+subject to a Parliament which would not allow an imperium in
+imperio. It must exert itself and reassert its authority, but within
+the limits which the law laid down. The interest grew deeper when he
+came to touch on the parties to one or other of which all his
+listeners belonged. High Church and Low Church were historical and
+intelligible, but there had arisen lately, the speaker said, a party
+called the Broad, never before heard of. He went on to explain what
+Broad Churchmen were."
+
+Disraeli's gibes at Colenso and Maurice are too well known to need
+repetition here. The equally famous reference to Darwin will bear to
+be quoted once more, at least as an introduction for Froude's
+incisive comment.
+
+"What is the question now placed before society with a glibness the
+most astounding? The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I,
+my lord, am on the side of the angels."
+
+"Mr. Disraeli," so Froude continues, "is on the side of the angels.
+Pit and gallery echoed with laughter. Fellows and tutors repeated
+the phrase over their port in the common room with shaking sides.
+The newspapers carried the announcement the next morning over the
+length and breadth of the island, and the leading article writers
+struggled in their comments to maintain a decent gravity. Did
+Disraeli mean it, or was it but an idle jest? and what must a man be
+who could exercise his wit on such a subject? Disraeli was at least
+as much in earnest as his audience. The phrase answered its purpose.
+It has lived and become historical when the decorous protests of
+professional divines have been forgotten with the breath which
+uttered them. The note of scorn with which it rings has preserved it
+better than any affectation of pious horror, which indeed would have
+been out of place in the presence of such an assembly."
+
+I have taken the liberty of giving such emphasis as italics can
+confer to two brief passages in this brilliant description, because
+they express Froude's real opinion of Diocesan Conferences and those
+who frequented them.* Disraeli's audience applauded, partly in
+admiration of his wit, and partly because, they thought that he was
+amusing them at the expense of the latitudinarians they abhorred.
+Froude's appreciation came from an opposite source. He regarded
+Disraeli not as a flatterer, but as a busy mocker, laughing at the
+people thought he was laughing with them. He made no attempt at a
+really critical estimate of the most baffling figure in English
+politics. He fastened on the picturesque aspects of Disraeli's
+career, and touched them with an artist's hand. As to what it all
+meant, or whether it meant anything, he left his readers as much, in
+the dark as they were before. My own theory, if one must have a
+theory, is that one word explains Disraeli, and that that word is
+"ambition." If so, he was one of the most marvellously successful
+men that ever lived. If not, and if a different standard should be
+applied, other consequences would ensue. Froude gives no help in the
+solution of the problem. What he does is to portray the original
+genius which no absurdities could cover, and no obstacles could
+restrain. Disraeli the "Imperialist" had no more to do with building
+empires than with building churches, but he was twice Prime Minister
+of England.
+
+--
+* Disraeli's contempt for italics is well known. He called them "the
+last resort of the forcible Feebles."
+--
+
+Froude's Sea Studies in the third series of his collected essays are
+chiefly a series of thoughts on the plays of Euripides. But, like so
+much of his writing, they are redolent of the ocean, on which and
+near which he always felt at home. The opening sentences of this
+fresh and wholesome paper are too characteristic not to be quoted.
+
+"To a man of middle age whose occupations have long confined him to
+the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library, there is something
+unspeakably delightful in a sea voyage. Increasing years, if they
+bring little else that is agreeable with them, bring to some of us
+immunity from sea-sickness. The regularity of habit on board a ship,
+the absence of dinner parties, the exchange of the table in the
+close room for the open deck under an awning, and the ever-flowing
+breeze which the motion of the vessel forbids to sink into a calm,
+give vigour to the tired system, restore the conscious enjoyment of
+elastic health, and even mock us for the moment with the belief that
+age is an illusion, and that 'the wild freshness' of the morning of
+life has not yet passed away for ever. Above our heads is the arch
+of the sky, around us the ocean, rolling free and fresh as it rolled
+a million years ago, and our spirits catch a contagion from the
+elements. Our step on the boards recovers its buoyancy. We are
+rocked to rest at night by a gentle movement which soothes you into
+the dreamless sleep of childhood, and we wake with the certainty
+that we are beyond the reach of the postman. We are shut off, in a
+Catholic retreat, from the worries and anxieties of the world."
+
+This is not the language of a man who ever suffered seriously from
+sea-sickness, and Froude's face had an open-air look which never
+suggested "the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library." But he was
+of course a laborious student, and nothing refreshed him like a
+voyage. On the yacht of his old friend Lord Ducie, as Enthusiastic a
+sailor and fisherman as himself, he made several journeys to Norway,
+and caught plenty of big salmon. He has done ample justice to these
+expeditions in the last volume of his essays, which contains The
+Spanish Story of the Armada. A country where the mountains are
+impassable, and the fiords the only roads, just suited his taste. It
+even inspired him with a poem, Rornsdal Fiord, which appeared in
+Blackwood for April, 1883, and it gave him health, which is not
+always, like poetry, a pure gift of nature.
+
+The life of society, and of towns, never satisfied Froude. Apart
+from his genius and his training, he was a country gentleman, and
+felt most at home when he was out of doors.
+
+From Panshanger he wrote to Lady Derby:
+
+"How well I understand what you felt sitting on the top of the
+Pyrenees. We men are but a sorry part of the creation. Now and then
+there comes to us a breath out of another order of things; a sudden
+perception--coming we cannot tell how--of the artificial and
+contemptible existence we are all living; a longing to be out of it
+and have done with it--by a pistol-shot if nothing else will do. I
+continually wonder at myself for remaining in London when I can go
+where I please, and take with me all the occupations I am fit for.
+Alas! it is oneself that one wants really to be rid of. If we did
+not ourselves share in the passions and follies that are working
+round us we should not be touched by them. I have made up my mind to
+leave it all, at all events, as soon as Mr. Carlyle is gone; but the
+enchantment which scenery, grand or beautiful, or which simple
+country life promises at a distance, will never abide--let us be
+where we will. It comes in moments like a revelation; like the faces
+of those whom we have loved and lost; which pass before us, and we
+stretch our hands to clasp them and they are gone. I came here
+yesterday for two or three days. The house is full of the young
+generation. They don't attract me ....  Whatever their faults,
+diffidence is not one of them. Macaulay's doctrine of the natural
+superiority of each new generation to its predecessor seems most
+heartily accepted and believed. The superb pictures in the house are
+a silent protest against the cant of progress. You look into the
+faces of the men and the women on the walls and can scarcely believe
+they are the same race with us. I have sometimes thought 'the
+numbers' of the elect have been really fulfilled, and that the rest
+of us are left to gibber away an existence back into an apehood
+which we now recognise as our real primitive type."
+
+From the Molt, on the other hand, he wrote:
+
+"It is near midnight. I have just come in from the terrace. The moon
+is full over the sea, which is glittering as if it was molten gold.
+The rocks and promontories stand out dear and ghost-like. There is
+not a breath to rustle the leaves or to stir the painted wash upon
+the shore. Men and men's doings, and their speeches and idle
+excitement, seem all poor, transient, and contemptible. Sea and
+rocks and moonlight looked just as they look to-night before Adam
+sinned in Paradise. They remain--we come and go, hardly more
+enduring than the moth that flutters in through the window, and we
+are hardly of more consequence."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE OXFORD PROFESSORSHIP
+
+ON the 16th of March, 1892, Froude's old antagonist, Freeman, who
+had been Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford since Stubbs's
+elevation to the Episcopal Bench in 1884, died suddenly in Spain.
+The Prime Minister, who was also Chancellor of the University,
+offered the vacant Chair to Froude, and after some hesitation Froude
+accepted it. The doubt was due to his age. "There are seventy-four
+reasons against it," he said. Fortunately he yielded. "The
+temptation of going back to Oxford in a respectable way," he wrote
+to Skelton, "was too much for me. I must just do the best I can, and
+trust that I shall not be haunted by Freeman's ghost." Lord
+Salisbury did a bold thing when he appointed Froude successor to
+Freeman. Froude had indeed a more than European reputation as a man
+of letters, and was acknowledged to be a master of English prose.
+But he was seventy-four, five years older than Freeman, and he had
+never taught in his life, except as tutor for a very brief time in
+two private families. The Historical School at Oxford had been
+trained to believe that Stubbs was the great historian, that Freeman
+was his prophet, and that Froude was not an historian at all. Lord
+Salisbury of course knew better, for it was at Hatfield that some of
+Froude's most thorough historical work had been done. Still, it
+required some courage to fly in the face of all that was pedantic in
+Oxford, and to nominate in Freeman's room the writer that Freeman
+had spent the best years of his life in "belabouring." Some critics
+attributed the selection to Lord Salisbury's sardonic humour, or
+pronounced that, as Lamb said of Coleridge's metaphysics, "it was
+only his fun." Some stigmatised it as a party job. Gladstone's
+nominee Freeman, had been a Home Ruler, Froude was a Unionist; what
+could be clearer than the motive?  But both nominations could be
+defended on their own merits, and a Regius Professorship should not
+be the monopoly of a clique.
+
+Lord Salisbury's choice of Froude was indeed, like Lord Rosebery's
+subsequent choice of Lord Acton for Cambridge, an example which
+justified the patronage of the Crown. A Prime Minister has more
+courage than an academic board, and is guided by larger
+considerations. Froude was one of the most distinguished living
+Oxonians, and yet Oxford had not even given him an honorary degree.
+Membership the Scottish Universities Commission in 1876 was the only
+official acknowledgment of his services to culture that he had ever
+received, and that was more of an obligation than a compliment.
+"Froude," said Jowett, "is a man of genius. He has been abominably
+treated." Lord Salisbury had made amends. Himself a man of the
+highest intellectual distinction, apart from the offices he happened
+to hold, he had promoted Froude to great honour in the place he
+loved best, and the most eminent of living English historians
+returned to Oxford in the character which was his due.
+
+The new Professor gave up his house in London, and settled at
+Cherwell Edge, near the famous bathing-place called Parson' s
+Pleasure.* He found the University a totally different place from
+what it was when he first knew it. Dr. Arnold, who died in 1842, the
+year after his appointment, was the earliest Professor whose
+lectures were famous, or were attended, and Dr. Arnold did exactly
+as he pleased. There was no Board of Studies to supervise him, and
+it was thought rather good of a Professor to lecture at all. Now the
+Board of Studies was omnipotent, and a Professor's time was not his
+own. He was bound in fact to give forty-two lectures in a year, and
+to lecture twice a week for seven weeks in two terms out of the
+three. The prospect appalled him. "I never," he wrote to Max
+Muller,+  "I never gave a lecture on an historical subject without a
+fortnight or three weeks of preparation, and to undertake to deliver
+forty-two such lectures in six months would be to undertake an
+impossibility. If the University is to get any good out of me, I
+must work in my own way." He did not, however, work in his own way,
+and the University got a great deal of good out of him all the same.
+
+--
+* The house is now, oddly enough, a Catholic convent.
++ April 18th, 1892.
+--
+
+Lord Salisbury, in making Froude the offer, spoke apologetically of
+the stipend as small, but added that the work would be light. The
+accomplished Chancellor was imperfectly informed. The stipend  was
+small enough: the work was extremely hard for a man of seventy-four.
+Froude's conscientiousness in preparation was almost excessive.
+Every lecture was written out twice from notes for improvement of
+style and matter. His audiences were naturally large, for not since
+the days Mr. Goldwin Smith, who resigned in 1866, had anything like
+Froude's lectures been heard at Oxford. When I was an undergraduate,
+in the seventies, we all of course knew that Professor Stubbs had a
+European reputation for learning. But, except to those reading for
+the History School, Stubbs was a name, and nothing more. Nobody ever
+dreamt of going to hear him. Crowds flocked to hear Froude, as in my
+time they flocked to hear Ruskin.
+
+One sex was as well represented as the other. Froude had left the
+dons celibate and clerical. He found them, for the most part,
+married and lay. There was every variety of opinion in the common
+rooms, and every variety of perambulators in the parks. London hours
+had been adopted, and the society, though by no means frivolous or
+ostentatious, was anything rather than monastic. At Oxford, as in
+London, Froude was almost always the best talker in the room. He had
+travelled, not so much in Europe as in America and the more distant
+parts of the British Empire. He had read almost everything, and
+known almost every one. His boyish enthusiasm for deeds of adventure
+was not abated. He believed in soldiers and sailors, especially
+sailors. Creeds, Parliaments, and constitutions did not greatly
+attract or keenly interest him. Old as he was by the almanac, he
+retained the buoyant freshness of youth, and loved watching the
+eights on the river as much as any undergraduate. The chapel
+services, especially at Magdalen, brought back old times and tastes.
+As Professor of History he became a Fellow of Oriel, where he had
+been a commoner in the thick of the Oxford Movement. If the
+Tractarian tutors could have heard the conversation of their
+successors, they would have been astonished and perplexed. Even the
+Essayists and Reviewers would have been inclined to wish that some
+things could be taken for granted. Modern Oxford was not altogether
+congenial to Froude. While he could not be called orthodox, he
+detested materialism, and felt sympathy, if not agreement, with
+Evangelical Protestants. Like Bacon, he would rather believe all the
+legends of the Talmud than that this universal frame was without a
+mind.
+
+Of the questions which absorbed High Churchmen he said, "One might
+as well be interested in the amours of the heathen gods." On the
+other hand, he had no sympathy with the new school of specialists,
+the devotees of original research. He believed in education as a
+training of the mental faculties, and thought that undergraduates
+should learn to use their own minds. "I can see what books the boys
+have read," he observed, after examining for the Arnold Prize, "but
+I cannot see that they make any use of what they have read. They
+seem to have power of assimilation." The study of authorities at
+first hand, to which he had given so much of his own time, he
+regarded as the work of a few, and as occupation for later years. The
+faculty of thinking, and the art of writing, could not be learned
+too soon.
+
+Few indeed were the old friends who remained at Oxford to welcome
+him back. Max Muller was the most intimate of them, and among his
+few surviving contemporaries was Bartholomew Price, Master of
+Pembroke, a clergyman more distinguished in mathematics than in
+theology. The Rector of Exeter* gave a cordial welcome to the most
+illustrious of its former Fellows. The Provost of Oriel+ was equally
+gracious. In the younger generation of Heads his chief friends were
+the Dean of Christ Church,^ now Bishop of Oxford, and the President
+of Magdalen.# But the Oxford of 1892 was so unlike the Oxford of
+1849 that Froude might well feel like one of the Seven Sleepers of
+Ephesus. And if there had been many changes in Oxford, there had
+been some also in himself. He had long ceased to be, so far as he
+ever was, a clergyman. He had been twice married, and twice left a
+widower. His children had grown up. His fame as an author extended
+far beyond the limits of his own country, and of Europe. He had made
+Carlyle's acquaintance, become his intimate friend, and written a
+biography of him which numbered as many readers as The French
+Revolution itself. He had lectured in the United States, and
+challenged the representatives of Irish Nationalism on the history
+of their own land. He had visited most of the British Colonies, and
+promoted to the best of his ability the Federation of South Africa.
+Few men had seen more, or read more, or enjoyed a wider experience
+of the world. What were the lessons which after such a life he
+chiefly desired to teach young Englishmen who were studying the
+past? The value of their religious reformation, and the achievements
+of their naval heroes. The Authorised Version and the Navy were in
+his mind the symbols of England's greatness. Greater Britain,
+including Britain beyond the seas, was the goal of his hopes for the
+future progress of the race. There were in Oxford more learned men
+than Froude, Max Muller for one. There was not a single Professor,
+or tutor, who could compare with him for the multitude and variety
+of his experience. Undergraduates were fascinated by him, as
+everybody else was. The dignitaries of the place, except a stray
+Freemanite here and there, recognised the advantage of having so
+distinguished a personage in so conspicuous a Chair. Even in a
+Professor other qualities are required besides erudition. Stubbs's
+Constitutional History of England may be a useful book for students.
+Unless or until it is rewritten, it can have no existence for the
+general reader; and if the test of impartiality be applied, Stubbs
+is as much for the Church against the State as Froude is for the
+State against the Church. When Mr. Goldwin Smith resigned the
+Professorship of Modern History, or contemplated resigning it Stubbs
+wrote to Freeman, "It would be painful to have Froude, and worse
+still to have anybody else." He received the appointment himself,
+and held it for eighteen years, when he gave way to Freeman, and
+more than a quarter of century elapsed before the painful event
+occurred. By that time Stubbs was Bishop of Oxford, translated from
+Chester, and had shown what a fatal combination for a modern prelate
+is learning with humour. If Froude had been appointed twenty years
+earlier, on the completion of his twelve volumes, he might have made
+Oxford the great historical school of England. But it was too late.
+The aftermath was wonderful, and the lectures he delivered at Oxford
+show him at his best. But the effort was too much tor him, and
+hastened his end.
+
+--
+* 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
+
+
+
+
+
+
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