Froude contributed in 1880 to Mr. Morley’s English Men of Letters a critical and biographical sketch of Bunyan.  The Pilgrim’s Progress, as the work of a Dissenter, had been excluded from the Rectory at Dartington.  But Froude was not long in supplying the deficiency for himself, and his literary appreciation of Bunyan’s style was accompanied by a sincere sympathy with the Puritan part of his faith.  All religious people, he thought, might find common ground in Bunyan, a man who lived for religion, and for nothing else.  Yet even here Froude’s Erastianism, and respect for authority, come into play.  He gravely defends Bunyan’s imprisonment in Bedford gaol, which lasted, with some intermissions, from 1660 to 1672, as necessary to enforce respect for the law.  That such a man as Charles Stuart should have had power to punish such a man as John Bunyan for preaching the word of God is a strange comment on the nature of a Christian country.  But it cannot be denied that Charles and his judges, Sir Matthew Hale among them, provided the leisure to which we owe the best religious allegories in the language.  Nor can it be said that Froude’s apology for the confinement Bunyan is so repugnant to reason and justice as Gibbon’s apology for the martyrdom of Cyprian.

The General Election of 1880 was regarded by Froude with mixed feelings.

“I am glad,” he wrote to Lady Derby on the 9th of April, 1880, “that there is to be an end of ‘glory and gunpowder,’ but my feelings about Gladstone remain where they were.  When you came into power in 1874, I dreamed of a revival of real Conservatism which under wiser guiding might and would have lasted to the end of the century.  This is gone—­gone for ever.  The old England of order and rational government is past and will not return.  Now I should like to see a moderate triumvirate—­Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, and your husband, with a Cabinet which they could control.  This too may easily be among the impossibilities, but I am sure that at the bottom of its heart the country wants quiet, and a Liberal revolutionary sensationalism will be just as distasteful to reasonable people as ‘Asian Mysteries,’ tall talk, and ambitious buffooneries.”

Lord Derby became more and more Liberal, until in December, 1882, he joined Mr. Gladstone’s Cabinet.  Before that decisive step, however, it became evident in which direction he was tending, and Froude wrote to Lady Derby on the 5th of March: 

“I will call on Tuesday about 5.  I have not been out of town, but my afternoons have been taken up with a multitude of small engagements, and indeed I have been sulky too, and imagined Lord D. had delivered himself over to the enemy.  But what right have I to say anything when I am going this evening to dine with Chamberlain?  I like Chamberlain.  He knows his mind.  There is no dust in his eyes, and he throws no dust in the eyes of others.”

Of the great struggle between Lords and Commons over the franchise in 1884, Froude wrote to the same correspondent on the 31st of July: