Or again, of poor old Oxford:—­

“The increase of knowledge, and consequently of morality, is the great aim of such a noble establishment as this; and the rewards and honours dispensed there are bestowed in proportion to the industry and good conduct of those who receive them.”

But the interesting point about these very lapses is that they remain purely exceptional.  They do not affect either the tone of his writing or the value and intricacy of his argument.  They may be compared to those undignified and valueless chips of conversational English that pop up in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an enthusiastic and wide man.

While, however, one is in the mood of criticism it is not unjust to show what other lapses in him are connected with this common sympathy of his and this very comprehension of his class to which he owed his opportunity and his effect.

Thus he is either so careless or so hurried as to use—­ much too commonly—­words which have lost all vitality, and which are for the most part meaningless, but which go the rounds still like shining flat sixpences worn smooth.  The word “practical” drops from his pen; he quotes “in a glass darkly,” and speaks of “a picture of human life”; the walls of Oxford are “time-hallowed”; he enters a church and finds in it “a dim religious light”; a man of Froude’s capacity has no right to find such a thing there.  If he writes the word “sin” the word “shame” comes tripping after.  It may be that he was a man readily caught by fatigue, or it may bet it is more probable, that he thought it small millinery to “travailler le verbe” At any rate the result as a whole hangs to his identity of spirit with the thousands for whom he wrote.

To this character of universality attach also faults not only in his occasional choice of words but in his general style.

The word “style” has been so grossly abused during the last thirty years that one mentions it with diffidence.  Matthew Arnold well said that when people came to him and asked to be told how to write a good style he was unable to reply; for indeed it is not a thing to be taught.  It is a by-product, though a necessary by-product, of good thinking.  But when Matthew Arnold went on to say that there was no such thing as style except knowing clearly what you wanted to say, and saying it as clearly as you could, he was talking nonsense.  There is such a thing as style.  It is that combination of rhythm, lucidity, and emphasis, which certainly must not be consciously produced, but which if it arise naturally from a man’s pen and from his method of thought makes all the difference between what is readable and what is not readable.  If any one doubt this let him compare the French Bible with the English—­both literal and lucid translations of the same original; or again let him contrast the prose phrases of Milton when he is dealing with the claims of the Church in the Middle Ages with those of Mr. Bryce in the same connection.