guest were Knowsley, Highclere, Tortworth, and Castle Howard.  In his own family there were troubles and bereavements.  His eldest son, who died before him, gave him much trouble and anxiety.  His second daughter died of consumption a few months after her stepmother, while he was in South Africa alone.  Otherwise, his relations with his children were perfect and unbroken, for no father was more beloved and adored.  Indeed, all intelligent children delighted in his company, because they could not help understanding him, and yet he paid them the acceptable compliment of talking to them as if they were grown up.

There is nothing in the world more evanescent than good conversation.  Froude was one of the best and most agreeable talkers of his day.  He could talk to old and young, to men, women, and children, to Devonshire seamen or labourers, to the most highly cultivated society of Oxford or London, with equal ease and equal enjoyment.  He never tried to monopolise the conversation, and yet somehow the chief share fell naturally to him.  If he were bored, he could be as silent as the grave.  But when his interest was roused, and most things roused it, he always had something pointed and forcible to say.  He was not always a sympathetic hearer.  Once he sat between two extremely intellectual women who considered themselves leaders of advanced thought.  When they left the room after dinner he turned to a friend of mine, and said simply, “I think all these bigots ought to be burnt.”  Such deplorable intolerance was happily rare.  Less rare, perhaps, were his irresistible sense of the ludicrous and irrepressible tendency to sarcasm.  Of a famous clergyman he said, “At least they have not put him into a bishop’s apron, the emblem of our first parents’ shame.”  “What can education do for a man,” he once asked, “except enable him to tell a lie in five ways instead of one?” As a rule, Froude, like most good talkers, listened well, and responded readily.  If he had not Carlyle’s rich, exuberant humour, he was also without the prophet’s leaning to dogmatism and anathema.  Sardonic irony was his nearest approach to an offensive weapon, and even in that he was sparing.  But he had a look which seemed to say, “Don’t offer me any theories, or creeds, or speculations, for I have tried them all.”

Perhaps I may be permitted in this connection to describe my one and only experience of Froude and his ways.  It was after dinner, and the talk had fallen into the hands, or the mouth, of an eminent administrator, who seemed to be a pillar, a model of talent and virtue.  His language was copious, his subject “schoolmaster Bishops,” and the services they had rendered to the Church of England.  Bishop Blomfield, for example, had procured the appointment of the Ecclesiastical Commission.  There might, for aught we knew, be endless examples, and the prospect was appalling.  The host was a Roman Catholic, and the guests were not ecclesiastical.  Froude came to the rescue.