Froude had a fitful and uncertain admiration for Disraeli.  Gladstone he never liked or trusted, and did not take the trouble to understand.  He had been brought up to despise oratory, he had caught from Carlyle a horror of democracy, he disliked the Anglo-Catholic party in the Church of England, and Gladstone’s financial genius was out of his line.  The Liberal Government of 1868 was in his opinion criminally indifferent to the Colonies.  An earnest advocate of Federation, he did not see that the best way of retaining colonial loyalty was to preserve colonial independence intact.  Nevertheless Froude was a pioneer of the modern movement, still in progress, for a closer union with the scattered parts of the British Empire.  He feared that the Colonies would go if some effort were not made to retain them, and he turned over in his mind the various means of building up a federal system.  Although Canadian Federation was emphatically Canadian in its origin, and had been adopted in principle by Cardwell during the Government of Lord Russell, it was Lord Carnarvon who carried it out, and he had no warmer supporter than Froude.

Of Froude’s favourite recreations at this time the best account is to be found in his two Short Studies on A Fortnight in Kerry.  From 1868 to 1870 he rented from Lord Lansdowne a place called Derreen, thirty-six miles from Killarney, and seventeen from Kenmare, where he spent the best part of the summer and autumn.  If Froude did not altogether understand the Irish people, at least the Irish Catholics, and had no sympathy with their political aspirations, he loved their humour, and the scenery of “the most beautiful island in the world” had been familiar to him from his early manhood.  In one of his youthful rambles he had been struck down by small-pox, and nursed with a devotion which he never forgot.  Yet between him and the Celt, as between him and the Catholic, there was a mysterious, impassable barrier.  They had not the same fundamental ideas of right and wrong.  They did not in very truth worship the same God.  But of Froude and the Irish I shall have to speak more at length hereafter.  In Kerry he enjoyed himself, while at the same time he finished his History of England, and his description of the country is enchanting.

“A glance out of the window in the morning showed that I had not overrated the general charm of the situation.  The colours were unlike those of any mountain scenery to which I was accustomed elsewhere.  The temperature is many degrees higher than that of the Scotch highlands.  The Gulf Stream impinges full upon the mouths of its long bays.  Every tide carries the flood of warm water forty miles inland, and the vegetation consequently is rarely or never checked by frost even two thousand feet above the sea-level.  Thus the mountains have a greenness altogether peculiar, stretches of grass as rich as water-meadows reaching between the crags and precipices to the very summits.