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