In a gentle voice, and with the air of an anxious inquirer, he asked whether Dr. Blomfield had happened to acquaint the Commissioners with the nature and extent of his own emoluments.  Then, without pausing for a reply, he added, still gently, “Because it always used to be said that there were only two persons who knew what the Bishop of London’s income was; himself and the devil.”  The remark may not have been a new one.  It was not offered as such, but it served its purpose, for the interrupted lecture was never resumed.

Froude’s vast reading and his wide human experience enabled him to hold his own in any company, but he never paraded his knowledge, or lay in wait to trip people up.  Although the prospect of going out worried him, and his first impulse was to refuse an invitation, he enjoyed society when he was in it, being neither vain nor shy.  At Oxford he could not dine out.  Late hours interfered with his work.  But he was hospitable both to tutors and to undergraduates, liking to show himself at home in the old place.  Except for the failure of his health, perhaps in spite of it, his enjoyment of his Oxford professorship was unmixed.  He did not hold it long enough to feel the brevity of the generations which makes the real sadness of the place.  Many ghosts he must have seen, but he had reached an age when men are prepared for them, and his academic career in the forties had come to such an unfortunate end that comparison of the past with the present can only have been cheerful and honourable.  He found a Provost of Oriel and a Rector of Exeter who could read his books, and appreciate them, without prejudice against the author.  But indeed, though he was capable of being profoundly bored, he was at his ease in the most diverse societies, and no form of conversation not absolutely foolish came amiss to him.  He had read so many books, and seen so much of the world, he held such strong opinions, and expressed them with such placid freedom, that he never failed to command attention, or to deserve it.  Contemptuous enough, perhaps too contemptuous, of human frailties, he at least knew how to make them entertaining, and his urbane irony dissolved pretentious egoism.

It is a familiar saying that men’s characters and habits are formed in the earliest years of their lives.  Froude was by profession and by choice a man of letters.  He loved writing, and whatever he read, or heard, or saw, turned itself without effort into literary shape.  The occupations and amusements of his life can be traced in his Short Studies.  But he had not been reared in a literary atmosphere.  He had been brought up among horses and dogs, with grooms and keepers, on the moors and the sea.  He describes it himself as “the old wild scratch way, when the keeper was the rabbit-catcher, and sporting was enjoyed more for the adventure than for the bag.”  He never lost his love of sport, and he gave his own son the same training he had himself.  Even in