“Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end.  Had he lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon.  But a few years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era.  Battles, bloody as Napoleon’s, are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made the greatest progress are the arts of destruction.”  It is difficult to see the atheism in all this, but the common sense is plain enough.  Froude belonged to the school of literary historians, such as were Thucydides and Tacitus, Gibbon and Finlay, not to the school of Buckle, or, as we should now say, of Professor Bury.

In 1865 Froude removed from Clifton Place, Hyde Park, to Onslow Gardens in South Kensington, where he lived for the next quarter of a century.  In 1868 the students of St. Andrews chose him to be Lord Rector of the University, and on the 23rd of March, 1869, he delivered his Inaugural Address on Education, which compared the plain living and high thinking of the Scottish Universities with the expensive and luxurious idleness that he remembered at Oxford.  Froude was delighted with the compliment the students had paid him, and they were equally charmed with their Rector.  In fact, his visit to St. Andrews produced in 1869 a suggestion that he should become the Parliamentary representative of that University and of Edinburgh.  But the injustice of the law as it then stood disqualified him as a candidate.  His deacon’s orders, the shadowy remnant of a mistaken choice, stood in his way.  Next year, in 1870, Bouverie’s Act passed, and Froude was one of the first to take advantage of it by becoming again, what he had really never ceased to be, a layman.  As he did not enter the House of Commons, it is idle to speculate on what might have been his political career.  Probably it would have been undistinguished.  He was not a good speaker, and he was a bad party man.  His butler, who had been long with him, and knew him well, was once asked by a canvassing agent what his master’s politics were.  “Well,” he said reflectively, “when the Liberals are in, Mr. Froude is sometimes a Conservative.  When the Conservatives are in, Mr. Froude is always a Liberal.”  His own master, Carlyle, had been in early life an ardent reformer, and had hoped great things from the Act of 1832.  Perhaps he did not know very clearly what he expected.  At any rate he was disappointed, and, though he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Peel alter the abolition of the Corn Laws, he regarded the Reform Act of 1867 with indignant disgust.