his last illness he liked the young man to go out shooting, and always asked what sport he had had.  His own father had been a country gentleman, as well as a clergyman, and his brothers, while their health lasted, all rode to hounds.  He himself never forgot how he had been put by Robert on a horse without a saddle, and thrown seventeen times in one afternoon without hurting himself on the soft Devonshire grass.  He went out shooting with his brothers long before he could himself shoot.  For his first two years at Oxford he had done little except ride, and boat, and play tennis.  At Plas Gwynant he was as much out of doors as in, and even to the last his physical enjoyment of an expedition in the open air was intense.  Yet this was the same man who could sit patiently down at Simancas in a room full of dusty, disorderly documents, ill written in a foreign tongue, and patiently decipher them all.  If a healthy mind in a healthy body be, as the Roman satirist says, the greatest of blessings, Froude was certainly blessed.  The hardness of his frame, and the soundness of his nerves, gave him the imperturbable temper which Marlborough is said to have valued more than money itself.  Of money Froude was always careful, and he was most judicious in his investments.  He held the Puritan view of luxury as a thing bad in itself, and the parent of evil, relaxing the moral fibre.  The sternness of temperament he had inherited from his father was concealed by an easy, sociable disposition, inclined to make the best of the present, but it was always there.  In the struggle between Knox and Mary Stuart all his sympathies are with Knox, who had the root of the matter in him, Calvinism and the moral law.  Few imaginative artists could have resisted as he did the temptation to draw a dazzling picture of Mary’s charms and accomplishments, scholarship and statesmanship, beauty and wit.  Froude felt of her as Jehu felt of Jezebel, that she was the enemy of the people of God.  So with his own contemporaries, such as Carlyle’s “copper captain,” Louis Napoleon.

He was never dazzled by the blaze of the Tuileries and the glare of temporary success.  He might have said after Boileau, J’ appelle un chat un chat, et Louis un fripon.

The peculiarity of Froude’s nature was to combine this firm foundation with superficial layers of cynicism, paradox, and irony, as in his apology for the rack, his character of Henry viii., his defence of Cranmer’s churchmanship, and Parker’s.  He shared with Carlyle the belief that conventional views were sham views, and ought to be exposed.  Ridicule, if not a test of truth, is at all events a weapon against falsehood, and has done much to clear the air of history.  Froude’s sense of humour was rather receptive than expansive, and he did not often display it in his writings.  Tristram Shandy he knew almost by heart, and he never tired of Candide, or Zadig.

Voltaire’s wit and Sterne’s humour have not in their own lines been surpassed.  But sure as Froude’s taste was in such matters, he did not himself enter the lists as a competitor.  He was too much occupied with his narrative, or his theory, as the case might be, to spare time for such diversion by the way.  He was too earnest to be impartial.