became one of Froude’s most intimate friends.  In the Table Talk of Shirley* are some interesting extracts from Froude’s letters, as well as a very vivid description of Froude himself.  On the 12th of January, when he was only just installed, Froude began a correspondence kept up for thirty years by a brief note about Thelatta, a political romance by Skelton, with an odd, mixed portrait of Canning and Disraeli, very pleasant to read, but now almost, I do not know why, neglected.

—­ * Blackwood, 1895. —­

Froude is hardly just to it.  “I have read Thalatta,” he writes, “and now what shall I say? for it is so charming, and it might be so much more charming.  There is no mistake about its value.  The yacht scene made me groan over the recollections of days and occupations exactly the same.  To wander round the world in a hundred tons schooner would be my highest realisation of human felicity.”  Even the name of the book must have appealed to Froude.  For more than almost any other man of letters he loved the sea.  Yachting was his passion.  He pursued it in youth despite of qualms, and in later life they disappeared.  Constitutionally fearless, and an excellent sailor, a voyage was to him the best of holidays, invigorating the body and refreshing the brain.

Froude was already at work on the reign of Elizabeth, and in March, 1861, he went to Spain for two months.  This was the occasion of his earliest visit to Simancas, where he was allowed free access to the diplomatic correspondence and other records there collected and kept.  The advantage to Froude of these documents, especially the despatches from the Spanish Ambassadors in London to the Government at Madrid, was enormous, and it is from them that the last volumes of the History derive their peculiar value.  He used his opportunities to the utmost, and his bulky, voluminous transcripts may be seen at the British Museum.  His plan was to take rooms at Valladolid, from which he drove to Simancas, a wretched little village, and worked for the day.  The unpublished materials which he found at his disposal were such as scarcely any historian had ever enjoyed before.

A few months after his return to England, on the 12th of September, 1861, he married his second wife, Henrietta Warre.  Miss Warre, who had been his first wife’s intimate friend, was exactly suited to him, and their union was one of perfect happiness.  So long as he was editor of Fraser, Froude felt it his duty to write pretty regularly for it, so that his hands were constantly full.  But of course his main business for the next ten years was the continuation of his History, which involved frequent visits to Simancas, as well as many to the British Museum, the Record Office, and Hatfield House.