the last day of 1886, while he was crossing the Bay of Biscay, he meditated upon the subject which occupied Cicero at an earlier period of his life.  “Last day of the year.  One more gone of the few which can now remain to me.  Old age is not what I looked for.  It is much pleasanter.  Physically, except that I cannot run, or jump, or dance, I do not feel much difference, and I don’t want to do those things.  Spirits are better.  Life itself has less worries with it, and seems prettier and truer to me now that I can look at it objectively, without hopes and anxieties on my own account.  I have nothing to expect in this world in the way of good.  It has given me all that it will or can.  I am less liable to illusions.  One knows by experience that nothing is so good or so bad as one has fancied, and that what is to be will be mainly what has been.  So many of one’s friends are dead!  Yes, but one will soon die too.  Each friend gone is the cutting a link which would have made death painful.  It loses its terror as it draws nearer, especially when one thinks what it would be if one were not allowed to die.”  Tennyson has expressed in Tithonus the idea at which Froude glances, and from which he averts his gaze.  Carlyle’s senility was not enviable, and even that sturdy veteran Stratford Canning* told Gladstone that longevity was “not a blessing.”  Like Cephalus at the opening of Plato’s Republic, Froude found that he could see more clearly when the mists of sentiment were dispersed.

While at sea Froude pursued his favourite musings on the worthlessness of all orators, from Demosthenes and Cicero to Burke and Fox, from Burke and Fox to Gladstone and Bright.  The world was conveniently divided into talking men and acting men.  Gladstone had never done anything.  He had always talked.

“I wonder whether people will ever open their eyes about all this.  The orators go in for virtue, freedom, etc., the cheap cant which will charm the constituencies.  They are generous with what costs them nothing—­Irish land, religious liberty, emancipation of niggers—­sacrificing the dependencies to tickle the vanity of an English mob and catch the praises of the newspapers.  If ever the tide turns, surely the first step will be to hang the great misleaders of the people—­as the pirates used to be—­along the House of Commons terrace by the river as a sign to mankind, and send the rest for ever back into silence and impotence.”

—­ * Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. —­

Whether a man be a pirate is a matter of fact.  Whether he be a misleader of the people is a matter of opinion.  “Whom shall we hang?” would become a party question, and perhaps a general amnesty for mere debaters is the most practical solution of the problem.