at once, but then Arnold was a classical, academic poet.  About Tennyson he agreed with the rest of the world, while Tennyson, who was a personal friend, paid him the great compliment of taking from him the subject of a poem and the material of a play.  His prejudice against Browning’s style, much as he liked Browning himself, was hard to overcome, and on this point he had a serious difference with his friend Skelton.  “Browning’s verse!” he exclaims.  “With intellect, thought, power, grace, all the charms in detail which poetry should have, it rings after all like a bell of lead.”  This was in 1863, when Browning had published Men and Women, and Dramatic Lyrics.  However, he admitted Skelton’s article on the other side, and added, with magnificent candour, that “to this generation Browning’s poetry is as uninteresting as Shakespeare’s Sonnets were to the last century.”  The most fervent Browningite could have said no more than that.  To Mr. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads Froude was conspicuously fair.  There was much in them which offended his Puritanism, but he was disgusted with the virulence of the critics, and he allowed Skelton to write in Fraser a qualified apology.

“The Saturday Review temperament,” he wrote, “is ten thousand thousand times more damnable than the worst of Swinburne’s skits.  Modern respectability is so utterly without God, faith, heart; it shows so singular an ingenuity in and injuring everything that is noble and good, and so systematic a preference for what is mean and paltry, that I am not surprised at a young fellow dashing his heels into the face of it ....  When there is any kind of true genius, we have no right to drive it mad.  We must deal with it wisely, justly, fairly."*

—­ * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 137. —­

Froude was an excellent editor; appreciative, discriminating, and alert.  He prided himself on Carlyle’s approval, though perhaps Carlyle was not the best judge of such things.  His energy was multifarious.  Besides his History and his magazine, he found time for a stray lecture at odd times, and he could always reckon upon a good audience.  His discourse at the Royal Institution in February, 1864, on “The Science of History,” for which he was “called an atheist,” is in the main a criticism of Buckle, the one really scientific historian.  According to Buckle, the history of mankind was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the past that made the impossibility of predicting the future.  Great men were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle more erratic in their behaviour.  Political economy was history in little, illustrating the regularity of human, like all other natural, forces.  But can we predict historical events, as we can predict an eclipse?  That is Froude’s answer to Buckle, in the form of a question.