and we cannot leave what works somehow for what only promises to work, and has yet by no means largely realised that promise.  I consider it a bad sign in the thinkers among the Christian Socialists if they set to cursing those who don’t agree with them.  The multitudes must, but the thinkers should not.  I cannot believe that if Clement of Alexandria had been asked whether he candidly believed Tacitus was damned because he was a heathen he would have said ‘Yes.’  Indeed, on indifferent matters (supposing he had been alive in Tacitus’s time), I don’t think he would have minded writing a leader in the Acta Diurna, even though Tacitus followed on the other side!”

Oxford, and its old clothes, Froude had cast behind him.  He had never taken priest’s orders, and the clerical disabilities imposed upon him were not only cruel, but ridiculous.  Shut out from the law, he turned to literature, and became a regular reviewer.  There was not so much reviewing then as there is now, but it was better paid.  His services were soon in great request, for he wrote an incomparable style.

The origin of Froude’s style is not obscure.  Too original to be an imitator, he was in his handling of English an apt pupil of Newman.  There is the same ease, the same grace, the same lightness of elastic strength.  Froude, like Newman, can pass from racy, colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full.  His vocabulary was large and various.  He was familiar with every device of rhetoric.  He could play with every pipe in the language, and sound what stop he pleased.  Oxford men used to talk very much in those days, and have talked more or less ever since, about the Oriel style.  Perhaps the best example of it is Church, the accomplished Dean of St. Paul’s.  Church does not rival Newman and Froude at their best.  But he never, as they sometimes do, falls into loose and slipshod writing.  He was the fine flower of the old Oxford education, growing in hedged gardens, sheltered from the winds of heaven, such as Catullus painted in everlasting colours long centuries ago.  Froude was a man of the world, who knew the classics, and the minds of men, and cities, and governments, and the various races which make up the medley of the universe.  He wrote for the multitude who read books for relaxation, who want to have their facts clearly stated, and their thinking done for them.  He satisfied all their requirements, and yet he expressed himself with the natural eloquence of a fastidious scholar.  Lucky indeed were the editors who could obtain the services of such a reviewer, and he was fortunate in being able to recommend with power the poetry of his friend, Matthew Arnold.*

—­ * His recommendation was entirely sincere.  “Matt.  A.’s Sohrab and Rustum,” he wrote to Clough, “is to my taste all but perfect.” —­