by what he said upon ordinary minds, and his love, which might almost be called mischievous, of giving small electric shocks.  In the case of Carlyle, however, the out-cry was wholly unexpected, and for a time he was distressed, though never mastered, by it.  What he could not understand, what it took him a long time to live down, was that friends who really knew him should believe him capable of baseness and treachery.  Now that it is all over, that Froude’s biography has taken its place in classical literature, and that Mrs. Carlyle’s letters are acknowledged to be among the best in the language, the whole story appears like a nightmare.  But it was real enough twenty years ago, when people who never read books of any kind thought that Froude was the name of the man that whitewashed Henry viii. and blackened Carlyle.  Froude would probably have been happier if he had turned upon his assailants once for all, as he once finally and decisively turned upon Freeman.  Freeman, however, was an open enemy.  A false friend is a more difficult person to dispose of, and even to deny the charge of deliberate treachery hardly consistent with self-respect.  Long before Froude died the clamour against him had by all decent people been dropped.  But he himself continued to feel the effect of it until he became Professor of History at Oxford.  That rehabilitated him, where only he required it, in his own eyes.  It was a public recognition by the country through the Prime Minister of the honour he had reflected upon Oxford since his virtual expulsion in 1849, and he felt himself again.  From that time the whole incident was blotted from his mind, and he forgot that some of his friends had forgotten the meaning of friendship.  The last two years of his life were indeed the fullest he had ever known.  Forty-two lectures in two terms at the age of seventy-four are a serious undertaking.  Happily he knew the sixteenth century so well that the process of refreshing his memory was rather a pleasure than a task, and he could have written good English in his sleep.  Yet few even of his warmest admirers expected that in a year and a half he would compose three volumes which both for style and for substance are on a level with the best work of his prime.  It was less surprising, and intensely characteristic, that his subjects should be the Reformation and the sea.

Froude’s religious position is best stated in his own words, written when he was in South Africa, to a member of his family: 

“I know by sad experience much of what is passing in your mind.  Although my young days were chequered with much which I look back on with regret and shame, still I believe I always tried to learn what was true, and when I had found it to stick to it.  The High Church theology was long attractive to me, but then I found, or thought I found, that it had no foundation, and indeed that very few of its professors in their heart of hearts believed what they were saying.