—­ * 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