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.