This sermon, of which he gave a copy to John Duke Coleridge, the future Lord Chief Justice of England, was Froude’s first experiment in authorship, and it was at least harmless.  As much cannot be said for the second, two anonymous stories, called Shadows of the Clouds and The Lieutenant’s Daughter.  The Lieutenant’s Daughter has been long and deservedly forgotten.  Shadows of the Clouds is a valuable piece of autobiography.  Without literary merit, without any quality to attract the public, it gives a vivid and faithful account of the author’s troubles at school and at home, together with a slight sketch of his unfortunate love-affair.

Froude was a born story-teller, with an irresistible propensity for making books.  The fascination which, throughout his life, he had for women showed itself almost before he was out of his teens; and in this case the feeling was abundantly returned.  Nevertheless he could, within a few years, publish the whole narrative, changing only the names, and then feel genuine surprise that the other person concerned should be pained.  He was not inconsiderate.  Those who lived with him never heard from him a rough or unkind word.  But his dramatic instinct was uncontrollable and had to be expressed.  The Archdeacon read the book, and was naturally furious.  If he could have been in any way convinced of his errors, which may be doubted, to publish an account of them was not the best way to begin.  Reconciliation had been made impossible, and Anthony was left to his own devices.  His miscellaneous reading was not checked by an ordination which imposed no duties.  Goethe sent him to Spinoza, a “God-intoxicated man,” and a philosophical genius, but not a pillar of ecclesiastical orthodoxy.  Vestiges of Creation, which had appeared in 1844, woke Oxford to the discovery that physical science might have something to say about the origin, or at least the growth, of the universe.  The writer, Robert Chambers, whose name was not then known, so far anticipated Darwin that he dispensed with the necessity for a special creation of each plant and animal.  He did not, any more than Darwin, attack the Christian religion, and he did not really go much farther than Lucretius.  But he had more modern lights, he understood science, and he wrote in a popular style.  He made a lively impression upon Froude, who learnt from him that natural phenomena were due to natural causes, at the same time that he acquired from Spinoza a disbelief in the freedom of the will.  When Dr. Johnson said, “Sir, we know that the will is free, and there’s an end on’t,” he did not understand the question.  We all know that the will is free to act.  But is man free to will?  If everything about a man were within our cognisance, we could predict his conduct in given circumstances as certainly as a chemist can foretell the effect of mixing an acid with an alkali.  I have no intention of expressing any opinion of my own upon this subject.  The important thing is that Froude became in the philosophic sense a Determinist, and his conviction that Calvin was in that respect the best philosopher among theologians strengthened his attachment to the Protestant cause.