The rock, chiefly old red sandstone, is purple.  The heather, of which there are enormous masses, is in many places waist deep.”  Yachting and fishing, fishing and yachting, were the staple amusements at Derreen.  Nothing was more characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air.  Sport, in the proper sense of the term, he also loved.  “I always consider,” he said, “that the proudest moment of my life was, when sliding down a shale heap, I got a right and left at woodcocks.”  For luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never cared at all.  But let him once more explain himself in his own words.  “I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my five brace of grouse.  I see no amusement in dawdling over a lowland moor where the packs are as thick as chickens in a poultry-yard.  I like better than most things a day with my own dogs in scattered covers, when I know not what may rise—­a woodcock, an odd pheasant, a snipe in the out-lying willow-bed, and perhaps a mallard or a teal.  A hare or two falls in agreeably when the mistress of the house takes an interest in the bag.  I detest battues and hot corners, and slaughter for slaughter’s sake.  I wish every tenant in England had his share in amusements which in moderation are good for us all, and was allowed to shoot such birds or beasts as were bred on his own farm, any clause in his lease to the contrary notwithstanding.”  Considering that this passage was written ten years before the Ground Game Act, it must be admitted that the sentiment is remarkably liberal.  The chief interest of these papers,* however, is not political, but personal.  They show what Froude’s natural tastes were, the tastes of a sportsman and a country gentleman.  He had long outgrown the weakness of his boyhood, and his physical health was robust.  With a firm foot and a strong head he walked freely over cliffs where a false step would have meant a fall of a thousand feet.  No man of letters was ever more devoted to exercise and sport.  Though subject, like most men, and all editors, to fits of despondency, he had a sound mind in a healthy frame, and his pessimism was purely theoretical.

—­ * Short Studies, vol. ii. pp. 217-308. —­

Froude’s History, the great work of his life, was completed in 1870.  He deliberately chose, after the twelve volumes, to leave Elizabeth at the height of her power, mistress of the seas, with Spain crushed at her feet.  As he says himself, in the opening paragraph of his own Conclusion, “Chess-players, when they have brought their game to a point at which the result can be foreseen with certainty, regard their contest as ended, and sweep the pieces from the board.”  Froude had accomplished his purpose.  He had rewritten the story of the Reformation.  He had proved that the Church of England, though in a sense it dated from St. Austin of Canterbury, became under Henry viii. a self-contained institution, independent of Rome and subject to the supremacy of the Crown.