began.  His essay on England’s Forgotten Worthies, which appeared in The Westminster Review for 1852, was suggested by a new, and very bad, edition of Hakluyt.  It inspired Kingsley with the idea of his historical novel, Westward Ho! and Tennyson drew from it, many years later, the story of his noble poem, The Revenge.  The eloquence is splendid, and the patriotic fervour stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet.  The cruelties of the Spaniards in South America, perpetrated in the name of Holy Church, are described with unflinching fidelity and unsparing truth.  For instance, four hundred French Huguenots were massacred in cold blood by Spaniards, who invaded their settlement in Florida at a time when France was at peace with Spain.  These Protestants were flayed alive, and, to show that it was done in the cause of religion, an inscription was suspended over their bodies, “Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.”  Even at this distance of time it is satisfactory to reflect that these defenders of the faith were not left to the slow judgment of God.  A French privateer, Dominique de Gourges, whose name deserves to be held in honour and remembrance, sailed from Rochelle, collected a body of American Indians, swooped down upon the Spanish forts, and hanged their pious inmates, wretches not less guilty than the authors of St. Bartholomew, with the appropriate legend, “Not as Spaniards, but as murderers.”  “It was at such a time,” says Froude, “and to take their part amidst such scenes as these, that the English navigators appeared along the shores of South America as the armed soldiers of the Reformation, and as the avengers of humanity.”  Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh, Davis, Grenville, are bright names in the annals of British seamanship.  But they were not merely staunch patriots, and loyal subjects of the great Queen; they were pioneers of civil and religious freedom from the most grievous yoke and most intolerable bondage that had ever oppressed mankind.

In The Westminster for 1853 appeared Froude’s essay on the Book of Job, which may be taken as his final expression of theological belief.  Henceforward he turned from theology to history, from speculation to fact.  Even his friendship for Frederic Maurice could not rouse him to any great interest in the latter’s expulsion from King’s College.  “As thinkers,” he wrote to Clough on the 22nd of November, 1853, “Maurice, and still more the Mauricians, appear to me the most hopelessly imbecile that any section of the world have been driven to believe in.  I am glad you liked Job, though my writing it was a mere accident, and I am not likely to do more of the kind.  I am going to stick to the History in spite of your discouragement, and I believe I shall make something of it.  At any rate one has substantial stuff between one’s fingers to be moulding at, and not those slime and sea sand ladders to the moon ‘opinion.’”