In appearance he was a cold, hard, stern man, despising sentiment, reticent and self-restrained.  But beneath the surface there lay deep emotions and an aesthetic sense, of which his drawings were the only outward sign.  To these sketches he himself attached no value.  “You can buy better at the nearest shop for sixpence,” he would say, if he heard them praised.  Yet good judges of art compared them with the early sketches of Turner, and Ruskin afterwards gave them enthusiastic praise.  Mr. Froude had married, when quite a young man, Margaret Spedding, the daughter of an old college friend, from Armathwaite in Cumberland.  Her nephew is known as the prince of Baconian scholars and the J. S. of Tennyson’s poem.  She was a woman of great beauty, deeply religious, belonging to a family more strongly given to letters and to science than the Froudes, whose tastes were rather for the active life of sport and adventure.  One can imagine the Froudes of the sixteenth century manning the ships of Queen Bess and sailing with Frobisher or Drake.  For many years Mrs. Froude was the mistress of a happy home, the mother of many handsome sons and fair daughters.  The two eldest, Hurrell and Robert, were especially striking, brilliant lads, popular at Eton, their father’s companions in the hunting-field or on the moors.  But in Dartington Rectory, with all its outward signs of prosperity and welfare, there were the seeds of death.  Before Anthony Froude, the youngest of eight, was three years old, his mother died of a decline, and within a few years the same illness proved fatal to five of her children.  The whole aspect of life at Dartington was changed.  The Archdeacon retired into himself and nursed his grief in silence, melancholy, isolated, austere.

This irreparable calamity was made by circumstances doubly calamitous.  Though destined to survive all his brothers and sisters, Anthony was a weak, sickly child, not considered never heard the mention of his mother’s name, or was the Archdeacon himself capable of showing any tenderness whatever.  In place of a mother the little boy had an aunt, who applied to him principles of Spartan severity.  At the mature age of three he was ducked every morning at a trough, to harden him, in the ice-cold water from a spring, and whenever he was naughty he was whipped.  It may have been from this unpleasant discipline that he derived the contempt for self-indulgence, and the indifference to pain, which distinguished him in after life.  On the other hand, he was allowed to read what he liked, and devoured Grimm’s Tales, The Seven Champions of Christendom, and The Arabian Nights.  He was an imaginative and reflective child, full of the wonder in which philosophy begins.