which I was entangled, the weak intrigues which, like the flies in summer, irritate far worse than more serious evils—I have escaped them all. . . All I really grieve for is my father" (The Nemesis of Faith, p. 76).

It is certainly difficult to discover in Froude's writings any traces of departed fervour or unction; and yet if he never had any, how are we to account for his close relations with Newman, and his share, such as it was, in the Lives of the Saints?

In the earlier of the two sketches which make up the little book Shadows of the Clouds, which was published annonymously in 1847, and gave great annoyance to the archdeacon, Froude boldly deals with the subject of the Lives of the Saints:

I thought you knew me too well to be surprised at my taking to the Lives of the Saints, taking to anything that offered itself. You know I affect to be a philosopher, who does not believe that Truth ever shows herself completely in either of the rival armies that claim so loudly to be her champions. She seems to me to lie like the tongue of the balance, only kept in the centre by the equipoise of contending forces, or, rather, if I may use a better illustration, like a boat in a canal drawn forward by a rope from both sides; which appear as if they would negative each other, and yet produce only a uniform straightforward motion. I throw myself on this side or on that, as I please, without fear of injuring her. The thought of the great world sweeps on its own great road, but it is its own road; quite an independent one, not in the least resembling that which Catholic or Protestant, Roundhead or Cavalier, have carved out for it.

This is not a very pious passage, and I find it impossible to believe that Froude's Neo-Catholicism was ever more than a piece of eclecticism, a boyish tribute to Newman, whose voice never ceased to echo through the chambers of his old disciple's memory. A visit to Ireland, paid just

after his degree, introduced Froude for the first time in his life to Evangelicalism, as it was called; that Evangelicalism for which, so Newman tells us in his Apologia, he had learned to entertain a profound contempt, but which affected his young associate very differently. In Ireland Froude met men "who had gone through as many, as various, and as subtle Christian experiences as the most developed saint in the Catholic calendar. I saw it in their sermons, in their hymns, in their conversation." He tells us of a clergyman, afterwards a bishop in the Irish Church, who declared in his 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; 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. Froude listened to these blasphemies without terror, and returned to Oxford to take up his residence as a Fellow, convinced at least of this, that a holy life was no monopoly of the sacramental theory. It was now a mere question of time when Froude should run off the Catholic rails. He read Carlyle's French Revolution, and contrasted the Scottish author with the Oxford one. "For the first time now it was brought home to me that two men may be as sincere, as faithful, as uncompromising, and yet hold opinions far asunder as the poles. I have

before said that I think the moment of this conviction is the most perilous crisis of our lives; for myself it threw me at once on my own responsibility, obliged me to look for myself at what men said, instead of simply accepting all because they said it" (The Nemesis of Faith, p. 156).

There is something childish, almost despicable, in the system of education which in the case of so clever a man as Froude postponed this discovery so long. Before many days were over J. A. Froude was a heretic. What faith was he now to pursue? Positive theological opinions were evidently out of his beat. He might admire his Irish friends and their beauty of holiness, but the Evangelical doctrine of the Atonement would have proved as much a stumbling-block as the miracle of the Mass. Froude's historical imagination came to his assistance. A Devonshire man, he was English to the core, and having quarrelled with priests and popes, his thoughts turned to the great discomfiture which befell priests and popes at the Reformation. He very quickly grew excited. He had early perceived that the object of the Oxford tract writers was to unprotestantise England-to make John Bull once more a Catholic, full of reverence for saints and shrines and priests and mysteries; or, as he says in The Nemesis of Faith, p. 151, "to make England cease to produce great men, as we count greatness-and for poetry, courage, daring enterprise, resolution, and broad honest understanding, substitute devotion, endurance, humility, self-denial, sanctity and faith." This is to put the case fairly enough, and thenceforward Froude was before everything else a Protestant, preaching a broad

Protestant John Bullism as opposed to Catholic piety and submission. Theology, properly so called, he abandoned, though as he grew older and became more conservative he discouraged free thought, and regretted the days when plain people took their creed from their parson just as they did their meat from their butcher, with only a very occasional threat of changing their custom. In scientific research and the origin of species he simply took no interest whatever. He would have us believe that his faith in the Judge of all the earth was unwavering, but his readers will find it hard to recall to mind any passage which even approaches the tone or temper of devotional religion. Certainly, on the whole Froude's antipathies seem stronger than his affections.

Once rid of his orders and deprived of his fellowship, Froude naturally turned to literature, and to literature on its historical side. He had from the first a passion for expressing himself forcibly and clearly. "Oh, how I wish I could write! I try sometimes; for I seem to feel myself overflowing with thoughts, and I cry out to be relieved of them. But it is so stiff and miserable when I get anything done. What seemed so clear and liquid comes out so thick, stupid, and frost-bitten, that I myself, who put the idea there, can hardly find it for shame if I go look for it a few days after." The man who could write thus was bound ultimately to succeed; and by dint of taking pains Froude obtained the mastery of his pen, and for the last forty years of his life was a great though very careless artist in words.

The growing devotion to Carlyle was a little

puzzling, and in the opinion of some keen though unfriendly critics, who had good opportunities of judging, not wholly free from affectation. His talk of "the piety of Oliver and the grandeur of Calvin " does not carry conviction with it. It was Carlyle's humour to fancy himself a Puritan, and he perhaps was one to this extent, that he would not allow anyone but himself a tirade against "old Jews' clothes "; but how did Froude squeeze himself into that galley?

The true Froude, that is, the Froude apart from his animosities and pet foes, is to be found in such passages as these:

We should draw no horoscopes; we should expect little, for what we expect will not come to pass. Revolutions, reformations-those vast movements into which heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were the dawn of the millennium-have not borne the fruit which they looked for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions leave the world changed, perhaps improved, but not improved as the actors in them hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with less heart could he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the distance the theology of Tübingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against England could he have seen the country which he made, as we see it now (February, 1864; Short Studies, vol. i., p. 28).

The mythic element cannot be eliminated out of history. Men who play leading parts on the world's stage gather about them the admiration of friends and the animosity of disappointed rivals or political enemies. The atmosphere becomes charged with legends of what they have said or done -some inventions, some distortions of facts, but rarely or never accurate. Their outward acts, being public, cannot be absolutely misstated; their motives, being known only to themselves, are an open field for imagination; and as the disposition is to believe evil rather than good, the portraits drawn may vary indefinitely, according to the sympathies of the describer, but are seldom too favourable. The more distinguished a man is the more he is talked about. Stories are current about him in his own lifetime, guaranteed apparently by the highest authorities; related, insisted upon;