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 an

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

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 t

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

"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

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

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,

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 descri

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 r

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