The second is his universality—­the word is not over-exact, but I can find no other.  I mean that Froude was the exact opposite of the sciolist and was even other than the student.  He was kneaded right into his own time and his own people.  The arena in which he fought was small, the ideas he combated were few.  He was not universal as those are universal who appeal to any man in any country.  But he was eager upon these problems which his contemporaries wrangled over.  He was in tune with, even when he directly opposed, the class from which he sprang, the mass of well-to-do Protestant Englishmen of Queen Victoria’s reign.  Their furniture had nothing shocking for him nor their steel engravings.  He took for granted their probity, their common sense, and their reading.  He knew what they were thinking about and therefore all he did to praise or blame their convictions, to soothe or to exasperate them, told.  He could see the target.

Perpetually this looking at the world from the standpoint of the men around him makes him say things that irritate more particular and more acute minds than his own, but I will maintain that in his case the fault was a necessary fault and went with a power which permitted him to achieve the sympathy which he did achieve.  He talks of the “Celt” and the “Saxon,” and ascribes what he calls “our failures in Ireland” to the “incongruity of character” between these two imaginaries.  He takes it for granted that “we are something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by an impassable gulf.”  When he speaks of asceticism he must quote “the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket.”  If he is speaking of Oxford undergraduates one has “pleasant faces, cheerful voices, and animal spirits,” and at the end of the fine but partial essay on Spinoza we have six lines which might come bodily from a leader in the Daily Telegraph, or from any copy of the Spectator picked up at random.

These are grave faults, but, I repeat, they are the faults of those great qualities which gave him his position.

And side by side with such faults go an exceptional lucidity, a good order within the paragraph and in the succession of the paragraphs.  A choice of subject suited to his audience, an excision of that which would have bored or bewildered it, a vividness of description wherewith to amuse and a directness of conclusion wherewith to arrest his readers —­all these he had, beyond perhaps any of his contemporaries.

Occasionally that brotherhood in him leads him to faults more serious.  You get gross commonplace and utterly false commonplace, of which when he came back to them (if indeed he was a man who read his own works) he must have been ashamed:—­

“Persecutions come, and martyrdoms, and religious wars; and, at last, the old faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.

“Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions, natural and moral.”