Besides Clough, Matthew Arnold came to Plas Gwynant, and Charles Kingsley, and John Conington, the Oxford Professor of Latin, and Max Muller, the great philologist.  A letter to Max Muller, dated the 25th of June, 1851, gives a pleasant picture of existence there.

“I shall be so glad to see you in July.  Come and stay as long as work will let you, and you can endure our hospitality.  We are poor, and so are not living at a high rate.  I can’t give you any wine, because I haven’t a drop in the house, and you must bring your own cigars, as I am come down to pipes.  But to set against that, you shall have the best dinner in Wales every day—­fresh trout, Welsh mutton, as much bitter ale as you can drink; a bedroom and a little sitting-room joining it all for your own self, and the most beautiful look-out from the window that I have ever seen.  You may vary your retirement.  You may change your rooms for the flower-garden, which is an island in the river, or for the edge of the waterfall, the music of which will every night lull you to sleep.  Last of all, you will have the society of myself, and of my wife, and, what ought to weigh with you too, you will give us the great pleasure of yours.”

Clough neither fished, nor shot, nor boated, but as a walking companion there was no one, in Froude’s opinion, to be put above him.  For fishing he gave pre-eminence to Kingsley, and together they carried up their coracles to waters higher than ordinary boats could reach.  Kingsley was ardent in all forms of sport, and an enthusiast for Maurician theology, holding, as he said, that it had pleased God to show him and Maurice things which He had concealed from Carlyle.  He had concealed them also from Froude, who regarded Carlyle as his teacher, feeling that he owed him his emancipation from clerical bonds.

Froude and Kingsley did not agree either in theology or in politics.  “I meant to say,” Froude wrote to his wife’s brother-in-law in 1851, “that the philosophical necessity of the Incarnation as a fact must have been as cogent to the earliest thinkers as to ourselves.  If we may say it must have been, they might say so.  And they might, and indeed must, have concluded, each at their several date, that the highest historical person known to them must have been the Incarnate God; so that unless the Incarnation was the first fact in human history, there must have been a time when they would have used the argument and it would have led them wrong.”

Concerning Kingsley’s Socialism, especially as shown in Hypatia, Froude was cold and critical.  “It is by no means as yet clear to me,” he wrote about this time, “that all good people are Socialists, and that therefore whoever sticks to the old thing is a bad fellow.  Whatever is has no end of claims on us.  I have no doubt that we could not get on without the devil.  If it had not been so, he would not have been.  The ideas must be content to fight a long time before they assimilate all the wholesome flesh in the universe,