complete truth.  Some people do this—­deliberately blind their eyes, and because they never see again declare loudly that no one else can see.  Other people, less happy, find by experience that they cannot believe what they have taken to in this way, and fly for a change to the next theory and then to the next.  I remain for myself unconvinced of much which is generally called the essential part of things; but convinced with all my heart of what I regard as essential.”

Froude made no secret of his religious opinions and they may be collected from his numerous books, especially perhaps from The Oxford Counter-Reformation.  A curious paper, first published in 1879, called “A Siding at a Railway Station,” is one of his most direct utterances on the subject.  It will be found in the fourth series of Short Studies, and is in many respects the most remarkable of them all.  “Some years’ ago,” it begins, “I was travelling by railway, no matter whence or whither.”  The railway is life, and the siding at which the train was suddenly stopped is the end that awaits all travellers through this world.  The examination of the luggage is the judgment which will be passed upon all human actions hereafter.  Wages received are placed on one side, and value to mankind of service rendered on the other.  Naturally working men come out best.  The worst show is made by idle and luxurious grandees.  Authors occupy a middle position, and in Froude’s own books “chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean as if no compositor had ever laboured in setting type for it.  Pale and illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly prided myself.  A few passages, however, survived here and there at long intervals.  They were those on which I had laboured least and had almost forgotten, or those, as I observed in one or two instances, which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly journals.”  The hit at The Saturday Review is amusing enough, and Froude goes on to plead successfully that though he may have been ignorant, prejudiced, or careless, no charge of dishonesty could be established against him.  Apart from his own personal case, the allegory means little more than the gospel of work which is the noblest part in the teaching of Carlyle.  Titled personages come off badly, and the most ridiculous figure in the motley throng is an Archbishop.  Not much sympathy is shown with any one, except with a widow who hopes to rejoin her husband, and sympathy is all that Froude can give her.

Of Froude’s friendships much has been said.  They were numerous, and drawn from very different classes.  Beginning at Oxford, they increased rather than diminished throughout his life, notwithstanding the gaps which death inevitably and inexorably made.  To one Fellow of Exeter who stood by him in his troubles, George Butler, afterwards Canon of Winchester, he remained always attached.  Dean Stanley throughout life he loved, and another clerical friend, Cowley