ease and grace were the unconscious delight of the humblest reader.  Froude gave to the Protestant cause the same sort of distinction which Newman had given to the Oxford Movement.  Newman’s University sermons are neither learned nor profound.  Yet the preacher’s mastery of the English language in all its rich and manifold resources has, and must always have, an irresistible charm.  The mantle of Newman had fallen on Froude, and Froude had also the indefatigable diligence of the born historian.  None of his mistakes were due to carelessness.  They proceeded rather from the multitude of the documents he studied and the self-reliance which led him to dispense with all external aid.  He had of course friendly reviewers, such as William Bodham Donne; afterwards Examiner of Plays, in Fraser, and Charles Kingsley in Macmillan.  Kingsley, however, though Lord Palmerston made him Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, was not altogether the best ally for an historian.  It was in defending Froude that Kingsley made his unfortunate attack upon Newman, which led to his own discomfiture in the first Preface to the Apologia.  Froude was unable to support his champion’s irrelevant and unlucky onslaught.  Newman’s casuistry was a fair subject for criticism; his personal integrity should have been above suspicion, and Kingsley’s insinuations against it only recoiled upon himself.  No one, as his History shows, could do ampler justice to individual Catholics than Froude, and his feelings for Newman were never altered, either by disagreement or by time.

The first part of the History had just been finished when a sudden bereavement altered the whole course of Froude’s life.  On the 21st of April, 1860, Mrs. Froude died.  Her religious opinions had been very different from her husband’s.  She had always leant towards the Church of Rome, though after her marriage she did not conform to it.  He was probably under Mrs. Froude’s influence when he wrote his Essay on the Philosophy of Catholicism in 1851, reprinted in the first series of Short Studies, which does not strike one as at all characteristic of him, and is certainly quite different from his noble discourse on the Book of Job, published two years later.  Mrs. Froude never cared for London, and had always lived in the country.  After her death Froude took for the first time a London house, and settled himself with his children in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park.

Later in the same year died his publisher, John Parker the younger, of a painful and distressing illness, through which Froude nursed him with tender affection.  The elder Parker kept on the business, and brought out the remaining volumes of Froude’s History.  His son had been editor of Fraser’s Magazine, and in that position Froude succeeded him at the beginning of 1861.  He thus found a regular occupation besides his History.  Fraser had a high literary reputation, and among its regular contributors was John Skelton, writing under the name of “Shirley,” who