Before the end of the summer term in 1894 he left Oxford for Devonshire, worn out and broken down.  “Education,” he wrote in his last letter to Skelton, “like so much else in these days, has gone mad, and has turned into a large examination mill.”  He was so much exhausted that he could not go again to Norway with Lord Ducie,* though with characteristic pluck he half thought of paying another visit to Sir George Grey in New Zealand.  But it was not to be.  During the summer his strength failed, and it became known that the disorder was incurable.  With philosophic calmness he awaited the inevitable close, feeling, as he had always felt, that he was in the hands of God.  His religion, very deep, constant, and genuine, was not a spiritual emotion, nor a dogmatic creed, but a calm and steady confidence that, whatever weak mortals might do, the Judge of all the earth would do right.  “It is impossible,” said Emerson, whom he loved and admired, “for a man not to be always praying.”  The relations of such men with the unseen are an inseparable part of their daily lives.  Froude had no more sympathy with the self-complacent “agnosticism” of modern thought than he had with Catholic authority or ecstatic revivalism.  To fear God and to keep His commandments was with him the whole duty of man.  The materialistic hypothesis he rejected as incredible, explaining nothing, meaning nothing, a presumptuous attempt to put ignorance in the place of knowledge.

—­ * “Ducie wanted me to go to Norway with him, salmon-fishing; but I didn’t feel that I could do justice to the opportunity.  In the debased state to which I am reduced, if I hooked a thirty-pound salmon, I should only pray him to get off.”—­Table Talk of Shirley, pp. 222, 223. —­

His soul had always dwelt apart.  His early training did not encourage spiritual sympathy, and, except in his books, he habitually kept silence on ultimate things.  But he had always thought of them; and as he lay dying, in almost the last moments of consciousness, he repeated dearly to himself those great, those superhuman lines which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Macbeth between his wife’s death and his own.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle;
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.

Still later he murmured, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”