at Oxford, to despise Evangelicals as silly, ignorant, ridiculous persons.  He saw in Mr. Cleaver the perfect type of a Christian gentleman, cultivated, pious, and well bred.  Mrs. Cleaver was worthy of her husband.  They were both models of practical Christianity.  They and their circle held all the opinions about Catholicism and the Reformation which Newman and the Anglo-Catholics denounced.  The real thing was always among them, and they did not want any imitation.  “A clergyman,” says Froude, “who was afterwards a Bishop in the Irish Church, declared in my 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, which had varied in form in different ages, and might vary again; that it was always fallible; 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.  Yet the man who said these things had devoted his whole life to his Master’s service—­thought of nothing else, and cared for nothing else."*

—­ * Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 212. —­

Froude had been taught by his brother, and his brother’s set, to believe that Dissenters were, morally and intellectually, the scum of the earth.  Here were men who, though not Dissenters themselves, held doctrines practically undistinguishable from theirs, and yet united the highest mental training with the service of God and the imitation of Christ.  There was in the Cleaver household none of that reserve which the Tractarians inculcated in matters of religion.  The Christian standard was habitually held up as the guide of life and conduct, an example to be always followed whatever the immediate consequences that might ensue.  Mr. Cleaver was a man of moderate fortune, who could be hospitable without pinching, and he was acquainted with the best Protestant society in Ireland.  Public affairs were discussed in his house with full knowledge, and without the frivolity affected by public men.  O’Connell was at that time supreme in the government of Ireland, though his reign was drawing to a close.  The Whigs held office by virtue of a compact with the Irish leader, and their Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, Thomas Drummond, had gained the affections of the people by his sympathetic statesmanship.  An epigrammatic speaker said in the House of Commons that Peel governed England, O’Connell governed Ireland, and the Whigs governed Downing Street.  It was all coming to an end.  Drummond died, the Whigs went out of office, Peel governed Ireland, and England too.  Froude just saw the last phase of O’Connellism, and he did not like it.  In politics he never looked very far below the surface of things, and the