—­ * Guiney’s Hurrell Froude, p. 8. —­

Anthony was the baby brother, and though this form of teasing was soon given up, the temper which dictated it remained.  Hurrell, it should be said, inflicted severe discipline upon himself to curb his own refractory nature.  In applying the same to his little brother he showed that he did not understand the difference between Anthony’s character and his own.  But lack of insight and want of sympathy were among Hurrell’s acknowledged defects.

Conceiving that the child wanted spirit, Hurrell once took him up by the heels, and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom of a stream.  Another time he threw him into deep water out of a boat to make him manly.  But he was not satisfied by inspiring physical terror.  Invoking the aid of the preternatural, he taught his brother that the hollow behind the house was haunted by a monstrous and malevolent phantom, to which, in the plenitude of his imagination, he gave the name of Peningre.  Gradually the child discovered that Peningre was an illusion, and began to suspect that other ideas of Hurrell’s might be illusions too.  Superstition is the parent of scepticism from the cradle to the gave.  At the same time his own faculty of invention was rather stimulated than repressed.  He was encouraged in telling, as children will, imaginative stories of things which never occurred.

In spite of ghosts and muddy water Anthony worshipped Hurrell, a born leader of men, who had a fascination for his brothers and sisters, though not perhaps of the most wholesome kind.  The Archdeacon himself had no crotchets.  He was a religious man, to whom religion meant duty rather than dogma, a light to the feet, and a lantern for the path.  A Tory and a Churchman, he was yet a moderate Tory and a moderate Churchman; prudent, sensible, a man of the world.  To Hurrell Dissenters were rogues and idiots, a Liberal was half an infidel, a Radical was, at least in intention, a thief.  From the effect of this nonsense Anthony was saved for a time by his first school.  At the age of nine he was sent to Buckfastleigh, five miles up the River Dart, where Mr. Lowndes, the rector and patron of the living, took boarders and taught them, mostly Devonshire boys.  Buckfastleigh was not a bad school for the period.  There was plenty of caning, but no bullying, and Latin was well taught.  Froude was a gentle, amiable child, “such a very good-tempered little fellow that, in spite of his sawneyness, he is sure to be liked,” as his eldest brother wrote in 1828.  He suffered at this time from an internal weakness, which made games impossible.  His passion, which he never lost, was for Greek, and especially for Homer.  With a precocity which Mill or Macaulay might have envied, he had read both the Iliad and the Odyssey twice before he was eleven.  The standard of accuracy at Buckfastleigh was not high, and Froude’s scholarship was inexact.  What he learnt there was to enjoy Homer, to feel on friendly terms with the Greeks and Trojans, at ease with the everlasting wanderer in the best story-book composed by man.  Anthony’s holidays were not altogether happy.  He was made to work instead of amusing himself, and forced into an unwholesome precocity.  Then at eleven he was sent to Westminster.