Barbados, which has since suffered severely from the want of a market for its sugar, seemed to Froude’s eyes to present in a sort of comic picture the summit of human felicity.  “Swarms of niggers on board—­delightful fat woman in blue calico with a sailor straw hat, and a pipe in her mouth.  All of them perfectly happy, without a notion of morality—­piously given too—­psalm-singing, doing all they please without scruple, rarely married, for easiness of parting, looking as if they never knew a care ....  Niggerdom perfect happiness.  Schopenhauer should come here.”  Schopenhauer would perhaps have said that “niggers” were happier than other men because they come nearer to the beasts.

As Froude has been accused of injustice to the Church of Rome, it may be as well to quote an entry from his journal at Trinidad:* “Went to Roman Catholic Cathedral—­saw a few men and women on their knees at solitary prayers—­much better for them than Methodist addresses on salvation.”  In another place he says:+ “Religion as a motive alters the aspect of everything—­so much of the world rescued from Rome and the great enemy.  Yet the Roman Church after all is something.  It is a cause and a home everywhere—­something to care for outside oneself—­an something which does not change.”

—­ * January 15th, 1887. + February 1st. —­

Again at Barbados, on the 17th of February he writes:  “By far the most prosperous of the upper classes that I have seen in the islands are the Roman Catholic priests and bishops.  They stand, step, and speak out with as fine a consciousness of power as in Ireland itself ....  Large, authoritative, dignified, with their long sweeping robes.  The old thing is getting fast on its feet again.  The philosophers and critics have done for Protestantism as a positive, manly, and intellectually credible explanation of the world.  The old organism and old superstition steps into its ancient dominion-finding it swept and garnished.”

In San Domingo at sunrise Froude’s meditations were far from cheerful:  “The sense of natural beauty is nothing where man is degraded.”  So far Bishop Heber in a well-known couplet.

Froude proceeds:  “The perception of beauty is the perception of something which is acting upon and elevating the intellectual nature. . .  It is connected with hope, connected with the consciousness of the noble element in the human soul; and where it is unperceived, or where there is none to perceive it, or where it falls dead, and fails in its effect, the solitary eye which gazes will find no pleasure, no joy—­only distress—­as for something calling to him out of a visionary world from which his own race is shut out.  We cannot feel healthily alone.  The sense of worship, the sense of beauty, the sense of sight, is only alive and keen when shared by others ....  It is something not alone, but generated by the action of the object on the soul.  Thus in these islands there is only sadness.  In New Zealand there was hope and life.”