that appealed to Froude.  He once playfully compared himself with the Mephistopheles of Faust, sitting in the Professor’s chair.  But in truth he saw always behind historical events the directing providence of God.  Newman held that no belief could stand against the destructive force of the human reason, the intellectus sibi permissus.  Froude felt that there were things which reason could not explain, and that no revelation was needed to trace the limits of knowledge.  Sceptical as he was in many ways, he had the belief which is fundamental, which no scientific discovery or philosophic speculation can shake or move.  Creeds and Churches might come or go.  The moral law remained where it was.  His own creed is expressed in that which he attributes to Luther.  “The faith which Luther himself would have described as the faith that saved is the faith that beyond all things and always truth is the most precious of possessions, and truthfulness the most precious of qualities; that when truth calls, whatever the consequence, a brave man is bound to follow."*

—­ * Short Studies, iii. 189. —­

Although Froude was probably happier at Oxford than he had been at any time since 1874, the regulations of his professorship worried him, as they had worried Stubbs and Freeman.  They seemed to have been drawn on the assumption that a Professor would evade his duties, and behave like an idle undergraduate.  Froude, on the contrary, interpreted them in the sense most adverse to himself.  The authorities of the place, or some of them, would have had him spare his pains, and colourably evade the statute by talking instead of lecturing.  But Froude was too conscientious to seek relief in this way.  Whatever he had to do he did thoroughly, conscientiously, and as well as he could.  There is no trace of senility in his professorial utterances.  On the contrary, they are full of life and fire.  Yet Froude was by no means entirely engrossed in his work.  He had time for hospitality, and for making friends with young men.  He loved his familiar surroundings, for nothing can vulgarise Oxford.  He found men who still read the classics as literature, not to convict Aeschylus of violating Dawes’s Canon, or to get loafers through the schools.  He was not in all respects, it must be admitted, abreast of modern thought.  His education had been unscientific, and he cared no more for Darwin than Carlyle did.  He had learnt from his brother William, who died in 1879,* the scope and tendency of modern experiments, and astronomical illustrations are not uncommon in his writings.  But the bent of his mind was in other directions, and he had never been under the influence of Spencer or of Mill.  The Oxford which he left in 1849 was dominated by Aristotle and Bishop Butler.  He came back to find Butler dethroned, and more modern philosophers established in his place.  Aristotle remained where he was, not the type and symbol of universal knowledge, as Dante conceived him, but the