if he had been left to himself, have stayed at home.  He wrote to Lady Salisbury:  “I must trust to your kindness to make allowance for my old-fashioned ways.  I am so much engaged in the week that I give my Sunday evenings to my children, and never go out.”  But when he was in company he talked better than almost any one else, and he had a magnetic power of fascination which men as well as women often found quite irresistible.  Living in London, he saw people of all sorts, and the puritan sternness which lay at the root of his character was concealed by the cynical humour which gave zest to his conversation.  He had not forgotten his native county, and in 1863 he took a house at Salcombe on the southern coast of Devonshire.  Ringrone, which he rented from Lord Kingsale, is a beautiful spot, now a hotel, then remote from railways, and an ideal refuge for a student.  “We have a sea like the Mediterranean,” he tells Skelton, “and estuaries beautiful as Loch Fyne, the green water washing our garden wall, and boats and mackerel.”  Froude worked there, however, besides yachting, fishing, and shooting.

In 1864, for instance, he “floundered all the summer among the extinct mine-shafts of Scotch politics—­the most damnable set of pitfalls mortal man was ever set to blunder through in the dark.”  His study opened on the garden, from which the sea-view is one of the finest in England.  Froude loved Devonshire folk, and enjoyed talking to them in their own dialect, or smoking with them on the shore.  He was particularly fond of the indignant expostulation of a poor woman whose husband had been injured by his own chopper, and obliged in consequence to keep his bed.  If, she said, it had been “a visitation of Providence, or the like of that there,” he would have borne it patiently.  “But to come upon a man in the wood-house” was not in the fitness of things.  Froude’s favourite places of worship in London were Westminster Abbey during Dean Stanley’s time, and afterwards the Temple Church, as may be gathered from his Short Study on the Templars.  In Devonshire he frequented an old-fashioned church where stringed instruments were still played, and was much delighted with the remark of a fiddler which he overheard.  “Who is the King of glory?” had been given out as the anthem.  While the fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say:  “Hand us up the rosin, Tom; us’it soon tell them who’s the King of glory.”

As an editor Froude was tolerant and catholic.  “On controverted points,” he said, “I approve myself of the practice of the Reformation.  When St. Paul’s Cross pulpit was occupied one Sunday by a Lutheran, the next by a Catholic, the next by a Calvinist, all sides had a hearing, and the preachers knew that they would be pulled up before the same audience for what they might say.”  His own literary judgments were rather conventional.  The mixture of classes in Clough’s Bothie disturbed him.  The genius of Matthew Arnold he had recognised