CHAPTER IX

BOOKS AND TRAVEL

The two passions of Froude’s life were Devonshire and the sea.  “Summer has come at last,” he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley from Salcombe in the middle of September, “after two months of rain and storm.  The fields from which the wrecks of the harvest were scraped up mined and sprouting now lie basking in stillest sunshine, as if wind and rain had never been heard of.  The coast is extremely beautiful, and I, in addition to the charms of the place, hear my native tongue spoken and sung in the churches in undiminished purity.”  Carlyle often kept him in London when he would much rather have been elsewhere.  But, wherever he was, he had a ready pen, and his thoughts naturally clothed themselves in a literary garb.  His enjoyment of books, especially old books, was intense.  Reading, however, is idle work, and idleness was impossible to Froude.  On his return from South Africa, where everything was being done which he thought least wise, he took up a classical subject, and began to write a book about Caesar.  He read Cicero, Plutarch, Suetonius, Caesar himself, and produced early in 1879 a volume which was always a particular favourite of his own.  “I believe,” he said to Skelton, “it is the best book I have ever written.”  The public did not altogether agree with him, and it never became so popular as Short Studies.

Yet it is undoubtedly a brilliant performance, with just the qualities which might have been expected to make it popular, and a second edition was soon required.  It is interesting from the first page to the last, and its whole object is to show that the Roman world in the last days of the Republic was very like the English world under Queen Victoria.  In Rome itself it has a steady sale.  The general reader, however, was not wrong in thinking that these eloquent pages are below the level of Froude at his best.  There is a hard metallic glitter in the style, and a forced comparison of ancient with modern things not really parallel, which make the whole narrative artificial and unreal.  Lord Dufferin said, with his natural acuteness, “It is interesting, and forcibly written, but one feels he is not a safe guide.  As they say of the mansions of Ireland, ’they are always within a hundred yards of the best situation,’ so one feels that Froude is never quite in the bull’s-eye in the view he gives."*

—­ * Lyall’s Life of Dufferin, vol. ii. p. 244. —­

Those who criticised the book as if it were a formal and historical narrative showed a lack of humour, which is a sense of proportion.  Macaulay might almost as well be judged by his Fragment of a Roman Tale.  Froude himself calls his Caesar a sketch, and it is scarcely more authoritative than the pamphlet of Louis Napoleon on the same subject.  On the other hand, it is quite untrue that Froude had not read Cicero’s letters.  He had read those which bore upon his subject, and he quotes them freely