on the spot.  A Regius Professor is a national institution, a public man, not like a college tutor, who has purely local functions to discharge.  That is a point on which Freeman would have agreed with Froude, and Stubbs would have agreed with both of them.  Froude’s success in spite of limitations does not show that they were wise, but that genius surmounts obstacles and breaks the barriers which seek to impede it.  “To my sorrow I am popular,” he said, “and my room is crowded.  I know not who they are, and have no means of knowing.  So it is not satisfactory.  I must alter things somehow.

—­ * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 222. —­

I can’t yet tell how.”  The opportunity never came.  But he was too old and too wise a man to let such things affect his happiness, and he was happier in Oxford than in London.  “Some of the old Dons,” he wrote, “have been rather touchingly kind.”

There was indeed only one chance of escaping Froude’s magnetism, and that was to keep out of his way.  The charm of his company was always irresistible.  Different as the Oxford of 1893 was from the Oxford of 1843, young men are always the same, and Froude thoroughly understood them.  He had enjoyed himself at Oriel not as a reading recluse, but as a boy out of school, and he was as young in heart as ever.  Strange is the hold that Oxford lays upon men, and not less strong than strange.  Nothing weakens it; neither time, nor distance, nor success, nor failure, nor the revolution of opinion, nor the deaths of friends.  Oxford had been unjust to Froude, and had driven out one of her most illustrious sons in something like disgrace.  Yet he never wavered in his affection for her, and the many vicissitudes of his life he came back to Oriel with the spirits of a boy.  The spells of Oxford, like the spells of Medea, disperse the weight of years.

CHAPTER XI

THE END

He lectures on Erasmus were not public; they were delivered in Froude’s private house at Cherwell Edge, and attended only by members of the University reading for the Modern History School.  His public lectures on the Council of Trent and on English seamen had been so much crowded by men and women, young and old, that candidates for honours in history were scarcely able to find room.  Nothing could be more honourable to Froude, or to Oxford, than his enthusiastic reception by his old University at the close of his brilliant and laborious career.  But it was too much for him.  Like Voltaire in Paris, he was stifled with flowers.  His twentieth discourse on Erasmus begins with the pathetic sentence, “This will be my last lecture, for the life of Erasmus was drawing to an end.”  So was his own.  His final task in this world was the preparation of Erasmus for the press.  He had been all his life accustomed to work at his own time, and the strain of living by rule at Oxford had told upon him more than he knew.