“I came home from the Cape, and almost lived on the way with Mr. Froude ....  It was rather a sad mind, sometimes grand, sometimes pathetic and tender, usually cynical, but often relating with the highest appreciation, and with wonderful beauty of language, some gallant deed of some of his heroes of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.  He seemed to have gone through every phase of thought, and come to the end ‘All is vanity.’  He himself used to say the interest of life to a thinking man was exhausted at thirty, or thirty-five.  After that there remained nothing but disappointment of earlier visions and hopes.  Sometimes there was something almost fearful in the gloom, and utter disbelief, and defiance of his mind."*

—­ * Butler’s Life of Colley, p. 145. —­

The picture is a sombre one.  But it must be remembered that the death of his wife was still weighing heavily upon Froude.

A few days after his return to London Froude wrote a long and interesting Report to the Secretary of State, which was laid before Parliament in due course.  Few documents more thoroughly unofficial have ever appeared in a Blue Book.  The excellence of the paper as a literary essay is conspicuous.  But its chief value lies in the impression produced by South African politics upon a penetrating and observant mind trained under wholly different conditions.  Froude would not have been a true disciple of Carlyle if he had felt or expressed much sympathy with the native race.  He wanted them to be comfortable.  For freedom he did not consider them fit.  It was the Boers who really attracted him, and the man he admired the most in South Africa was President Brand.  The sketch of the two Dutch Republics in his Report is drawn with a very friendly hand.  He thought, not without reason, that they had been badly treated.  Their independence, which they did not then desire, had been forced upon them by Lord Grey and the Duke of Newcastle.  The Sand River Convention of 1852, and the Orange River Convention of 1854, resulted from British desire to avoid future responsibility outside Cape Colony and Natal.  As for the Dutch treatment of the Kaffirs, it had never in Froude’s opinion been half so bad as Pine’s treatment of Langalibalele.  By the second article of the Orange River Convention, renewed and ratified at Aliwal after the Basuto war in 1869, Her Majesty’s Government promised not to make any agreement with native chiefs north of the Vaal River.  Yet, when diamonds were discovered north of the Vaal in Griqualand West, the territory was purchased by Lord Kimberley from Nicholas Waterboer, without the consent, and notwithstanding the protests, of the Orange Free State.  But although Lord Kimberley assented to the annexation of Griqualand West in 1871, he only did so on the distinct understanding that Cape Colony would undertake to administer the Diamond Fields, and this the Cape Ministers refused to do, lest they should offend their Dutch constituents.