The life of society, and of towns, never satisfied Froude.  Apart from his genius and his training, he was a country gentleman, and felt most at home when he was out of doors.

From Panshanger he wrote to Lady Derby: 

“How well I understand what you felt sitting on the top of the Pyrenees.  We men are but a sorry part of the creation.  Now and then there comes to us a breath out of another order of things; a sudden perception—­coming we cannot tell how—­of the artificial and contemptible existence we are all living; a longing to be out of it and have done with it—­by a pistol-shot if nothing else will do.  I continually wonder at myself for remaining in London when I can go where I please, and take with me all the occupations I am fit for.  Alas! it is oneself that one wants really to be rid of.  If we did not ourselves share in the passions and follies that are working round us we should not be touched by them.  I have made up my mind to leave it all, at all events, as soon as Mr. Carlyle is gone; but the enchantment which scenery, grand or beautiful, or which simple country life promises at a distance, will never abide—­let us be where we will.  It comes in moments like a revelation; like the faces of those whom we have loved and lost; which pass before us, and we stretch our hands to clasp them and they are gone.  I came here yesterday for two or three days.  The house is full of the young generation.  They don’t attract me ....  Whatever their faults, diffidence is not one of them.  Macaulay’s doctrine of the natural superiority of each new generation to its predecessor seems most heartily accepted and believed.  The superb pictures in the house are a silent protest against the cant of progress.  You look into the faces of the men and the women on the walls and can scarcely believe they are the same race with us.  I have sometimes thought ’the numbers’ of the elect have been really fulfilled, and that the rest of us are left to gibber away an existence back into an apehood which we now recognise as our real primitive type.”

From the Molt, on the other hand, he wrote: 

“It is near midnight.  I have just come in from the terrace.  The moon is full over the sea, which is glittering as if it was molten gold.  The rocks and promontories stand out dear and ghost-like.  There is not a breath to rustle the leaves or to stir the painted wash upon the shore.  Men and men’s doings, and their speeches and idle excitement, seem all poor, transient, and contemptible.  Sea and rocks and moonlight looked just as they look to-night before Adam sinned in Paradise.  They remain—­we come and go, hardly more enduring than the moth that flutters in through the window, and we are hardly of more consequence.”

CHAPTER X

THE OXFORD PROFESSORSHIP