he did not care to find or make for himself a pedigree.  He knew that the Froudes had been settled in Devonshire time out of mind as yeomen with small estates, and that one of them, to whom his own father always referred with contempt, had bought from the Heralds’ College what Gibbon calls the most useless of all coats, a coat of arms.  Froude’s grandfather did a more sensible thing by marrying an heiress, a Devonshire heiress, Miss Hurrell, and thereby doubling his possessions.  Although he died before he was five-and-twenty, he left four children behind him, and his only son was the historian’s father.

James Anthony Froude, known as Anthony to those who called him by his Christian name, was born at Dartington, two miles from Totnes, on St. George’s Day, Shakespeare’s birthday, the 23rd of April, 1818.  His father, who had taken a pass degree at Oxford, and had then taken orders, was by that time Rector of Dartington and Archdeacon of Totnes.  Archdeacon Froude belonged to a type of clergyman now almost extinct in the Church of England, though with strong idiosyncrasies of his own.  Orthodox without being spiritual, he was a landowner as well as a parson, a high and dry Churchman, an active magistrate, a zealous Tory, with a solid and unclerical income of two or three thousand a year.  He was a personage in the county, as well as a dignitary of the Church.  Every one in Devonshire knew the name of Froude, if only from “Parson Froude,” no credit to his cloth, who appears as Parson Chowne in Blackmore’s once popular novel, The Maid of Sker.  But the Archdeacon was a man of blameless life, and not in the least like Parson Froude.  A hard rider and passionately fond of hunting, he was a good judge of a horse and usually the best mounted man in the field.  One of his exploits as an undergraduate was to jump the turnpike gate on the Abingdon road with pennies under his seat, between his knees and the saddle, and between his feet and the stirrups, without dropping one.

Although he had been rather extravagant and something of a dandy, he was able to say that he could account for every sixpence he spent after the age of twenty-one.  On leaving Oxford he settled down to the life of a country parson with conscientious thoroughness, and was reputed the best magistrate in the South Hams.  Farming his own glebe, as he did, with skill and knowledge, perpetually occupied, as he was, with clerical or secular business, he found the Church of England, not then disturbed by any wave of enthusiasm, at once necessary and sufficient to his religious sense.  His horror of Nonconformists was such that he would not have a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress in his house.  He upheld the Bishop and all established institutions, believing that the way to heaven was to turn to the right and go straight on.  There were many such clergymen in his day.