constitutions did not greatly attract or keenly interest him.  Old as he was by the almanac, he retained the buoyant freshness of youth, and loved watching the eights on the river as much as any undergraduate.  The chapel services, especially at Magdalen, brought back old times and tastes.  As Professor of History he became a Fellow of Oriel, where he had been a commoner in the thick of the Oxford Movement.  If the Tractarian tutors could have heard the conversation of their successors, they would have been astonished and perplexed.  Even the Essayists and Reviewers would have been inclined to wish that some things could be taken for granted.  Modern Oxford was not altogether congenial to Froude.  While he could not be called orthodox, he detested materialism, and felt sympathy, if not agreement, with Evangelical Protestants.  Like Bacon, he would rather believe all the legends of the Talmud than that this universal frame was without a mind.

Of the questions which absorbed High Churchmen he said, “One might as well be interested in the amours of the heathen gods.”  On the other hand, he had no sympathy with the new school of specialists, the devotees of original research.  He believed in education as a training of the mental faculties, and thought that undergraduates should learn to use their own minds.  “I can see what books the boys have read,” he observed, after examining for the Arnold Prize, “but I cannot see that they make any use of what they have read.  They seem to have power of assimilation.”  The study of authorities at first hand, to which he had given so much of his own time, he regarded as the work of a few, and as occupation for later years.  The faculty of thinking, and the art of writing, could not be learned too soon.

Few indeed were the old friends who remained at Oxford to welcome him back.  Max Muller was the most intimate of them, and among his few surviving contemporaries was Bartholomew Price, Master of Pembroke, a clergyman more distinguished in mathematics than in theology.  The Rector of Exeter* gave a cordial welcome to the most illustrious of its former Fellows.  The Provost of Oriel+ was equally gracious.  In the younger generation of Heads his chief friends were the Dean of Christ Church,^ now Bishop of Oxford, and the President of Magdalen.# But the Oxford of 1892 was so unlike the Oxford of 1849 that Froude might well feel like one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.  And if there had been many changes in Oxford, there had been some also in himself.  He had long ceased to be, so far as he ever was, a clergyman.  He had been twice married, and twice left a widower.  His children had grown up.  His fame as an author extended far beyond the limits of his own country, and of Europe.  He had made Carlyle’s acquaintance, become his intimate friend, and written a biography of him which numbered as many readers as The French Revolution itself.  He had lectured in the United States, and challenged the representatives of Irish Nationalism