sports, and was never happier than when he had a rod or a gun in his hand, or was steering his yacht in the English Channel. The archdeacon was 'a Tory of the old school;' and, after a fashion of his own, Anthony was likewise a Tory of increasing intensity to the close of his days. On the other hand, there was 'a sort of Stoicism about Archdeacon Froude's character which sometimes surprised those who had only seen him for a day or two.' His son admired the Stoical type beyond all others, others, but

Stoicism is the last characteristic we should think of attributing to him either in youth or age. It is evident, indeed, that father and son were of essentially different natures, and that the one never quite understood the other. And not only with his father, but also with his two elder brothers, Hurrell and William, Froude never appears to have been in cordial sympathy. Hurrell, whose brilliant gifts and enthusiastic temper made him one of the most distinguished figures among his contemporaries at Oxford, was one of Newman's most ardent associates in his mission of de-Protestantising

love of the sea which remained the chief pleasure of his life; and it was then, also, that he acquired that interest in those 'forgotten worthies'-the naval heroes of his native Devon-to whose exploits he has devoted some of his most brilliant pages. And from these two interests we may deduce another characteristic-his passionate patriotism, which to foreigners is the predominating note of his work as a historian.

the

After three years (1830-33) spent at Westminster School, and other two at a private school at Merton, Froude proceeded to Oriel College, Oxford, at age of seventeen. The High Church movement, of which Newman, a Fellow of Oriel, was the inspiring leader, was then in full flood; and from the example of his brother Hurrell, it was to be expected that Anthony would naturally be drawn into it. Newman was prepared to give him a warm welcome; but from the first Froude showed that he meant to take a way of his own. He held himself aloof from Newman and his friends, and gave the general impression 'that he combined in a rare degree self-confi

the Church of England, and, as Anthony's future career was to show, the mission was one which appealed neither to his heart nor his head. As for the second brother, William, his tastes lay in another direction than those of Anthony-mechanical science being the subject to which he devoted himself with all the ability which was the common inheritance of the family. 'From his early years,' we are told by a friend of the family, Anthony felt chilled, crushed, and fettered; and, as such an experience is never outlived, it may partly explain that undertone of austerity which is seldom absent from anything he wrote.

But, if his home was uncongenial, he was in lively sympathy with the surroundings where his home lay. It was in youth that he acquired that

dence, imagination, and inquiry.' His experience in his college was thus a repetition of his experience of home, and he was again thrown in upon himself by uncongenial surroundings. Though he took only a second-class in the Final Schools, he showed his aptitude for the studies of his later life by winning the Chancellor's English prize for an essay on 'The Influence of Political Economy on the Moral and Social Welfare of the Nation,' while in the same year (1842) he was elected to a fellowship in Exeter College. Froude had as yet shown no enthusiasm for the new religious movement, but his action now proved that, for a time at least, he was to some degree under its influence. In the Life of St Ninian, which he wrote for Newman's series of the Lives of the English Saints, his mental

and spiritual attitude is as correct as either his brother Hurrell or Newman could have wished; he speaks of the 'awful note of heresy' with pure sacramental fervour, and he virtually accepts all the astonishing miracles of the saint. As about the same date (1844) he also took Deacon's orders, it seemed as if he had definitively chosen his

career.

But the spell of Newman over Froude, if it was ever real, was of brief duration. In 1847 he published a volume entitled Shadows of the Clouds, under the pseudonym of Zeta, and in 1848 his Nemesis of Faith (anonymously). Taken together these two books reveal a moral and intellectual distemper which is a vivid commentary on the spiritual strain which their author had undergone. Morally, they are the product of a nature which had lost its bearings in the conflict of morbid sentiments and emotions; intellectually, they prove that Froude had lost his faith not only in Tractarianism, but in the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion. The loss of his fellowship, his abandonment of the Church, and his resignation of the headmastership of the High School of Hobart Town in Tasmania, to which he had been appointed, were the necessary consequences of his spiritual transformation. His 'Sturm und Drang' period, the only period at which we have a glimpse into his inner life, was now at an end; and a fortunate destiny had brought him into contact with a teacher who renewed his moral basis and gave a direction to his life which he was henceforth to follow with such happy results for English literature. Froude ungrudgingly acknowledged his debt to the teaching and example of Carlyle, and the whole scope and tendency of his work bear manifest proof of the extent of his obligation. The fundamental ideas of Carlyle-his views regarding the function of great men, his contempt for the vor populi, his deification of force as the expression of ethical value, his antagonism to the developments of modern civilisation-all these are likewise the stock ideas of Froude, who saves his originality only by his individual manner of expressing them.

Froude had turned his thirtieth year when he broke with his past by the publication of his Nemesis of Faith; and henceforward the world knows him only as the indefatigable author who speedily took his place among the chief literary figures of his time. In the Westminster Review he began that series of papers, continued in Fraser's Magazine (of which he was editor from 1860 to 1874) and in other magazines, which are collected in the four volumes entitled Short Studies on Great Subjects. The general character of these papers is the sufficient proof that their author was essentially the man of letters' rather than the historical specialist. The historical specialist hesitates to pass beyond his proper domain, knowing as he does what accumulated knowledge is necessary towards a well-grounded judgment; but Froude in these short studies discusses philosophers and

poets, theologians and saints, statesmen and commanders of every age and country. He made no pretension to add to our knowledge regarding the different subjects which he treated; but only pedantry would deny that, in adorning as he did every theme that he touched, he clothed them with an interest which it is not the least valuable function of literature to evoke.

In 1856 appeared the first two volumes of his greatest literary achievement, his History of England from the Fall of Cardinal Wolsey to the Spanish Armada, which, in his own words, was 'the companion of twenty years of pleasant but unintermittent labour.' Like all Froude's historical work, it was conceived with a controversial intention, and it expressed at once the new influence of Carlyle and his rebound of feeling from his Tractarian bondage. In his delineation of Henry VIII, the most original part of his work, both of these tendencies were focussed; he made him a figure in the mould of Carlyle's 'heroes,' and in so doing passed judgment on the High Church view that Henry was merely the unscrupulous author of an unhappy schism. Few books have been subjected to more searching criticism; but no fair reader will deny the justice of the estimate of the work as a whole pronounced by Bishop Stubbs, a historian whose methods and general views were so fundamentally opposed to Froude's own. It is a book, says Bishop Stubbs, to which even those who differ in principle from the writer will not refuse the tribute of praise, as a work of great industry, power, and importance.' Equally polemical in intention and equally inspired by the Carlylean oracle was The English in Ireland, which appeared in three volumes between 1871 and 1874. The immediate occasion of the book was Mr Gladstone's policy of conciliation towards Ireland, and its object was to prove that only by the strong hand could Ireland be made a prosperous country and a tolerable neighbour. His Cæsar, a Sketch (1879), in which the hero is again the providential 'strong man,' Froude regarded as his best book, an opinion which was not shared by Carlyle, whose brief comment on it was-'It tells me nothing of Cæsar.'

From the beginning of his career as an author, Froude had shown that he deliberately meant that each of his books should produce a sensation; and an opportunity now came to him of surpassing all his previous efforts in this direction. As literary executor of Carlyle, it devolved on him to be at once his editor and his biographer, and by the manner in which he performed both tasks he evoked a storm of controversy which is hardly to be paralleled in the history of English literature. Of his edition of Carlyle's Reminiscences (1881) it may be safely said that no English writer of eminence ever gave a work to the public with such cynical disregard of the primary duties of an editor. To take but one example of his negligence-surely Froude should have laid his hand on his heart

when he made Carlyle speak of his friend Sir Henry Taylor's 'morbid vanity,' when the words he actually wrote were marked veracity.' Inaccuracy had from the first been Froude's besetting sin, but the general public now first realised the full measure of the sins of which he was capable under this head. With regard to the portrait of Carlyle which he has drawn in the biography (1882-84), there will probably be always a difference of opinion; but it is to be noted that to the great majority of those who knew Carlyle as well as Froude himself (the only fitting judges) it seemed an essentially distorted image, the creation of the idiosyncrasies of the man who drew it. Nevertheless, of all Froude's books it is doubtless the one which will preserve his name longest; the eminence and distinctiveness of its subject and the skill of the biographer combine to make it a representative book of an epoch, and as such it has its only companion in Boswell's Life of Johnson.

A few pleasant incidents had diversified Froude's somewhat stormy career as a man of letters. In 1869 he was chosen Lord Rector of the University of St Andrews-an honour which he described as the first public recognition which he had received; in 1876 he was appointed a member of the Scottish University Commission; and in 1875 he was sent out as a commissioner to South Africa, for whose troubles he prescribed his borrowed panacea of a benevolent dictatorship. Two unofficial journeys, one to the Australian colonies and the other to the West Indies, resulted in his Oceana (1886) and the West Indies, or the Bow of Ulysses (1888)-in both of which, though he expressed the hope it might be otherwise, he as usual 'trod on many corns.' But the distinction of his life which he valued most came to him near its close. In 1892 he was made Regius Professor of History in Oxford, and thus, by an irony which he keenly appreciated, he came to sit in the chair of his adversary Freeman, who in season and out of season had denounced him as a sciolist and a charlatan. He held his appointment only for two years, but in that space he crowned his long and industrious life by the most charming books that came from his hand-The Life and Letters of Erasmus (1894), Elizabethan Seamen of the Sixteenth Century (1895), and Lectures on the Council of Trent (1896). He died on the 20th of October 1894, at Salcombe, his home in his native Devon.

In many passages of his writings Froude has told us how he thought history should be conceived and written. 'The address of history,' he says, 'is less to the understanding than to the higher emotions.' 'History,' he says again, is 'nature's drama,' should be written like a drama, and should teach like a drama. A science of history he scouted as a vain imagination, and maintained that, if our knowledge of the past taught us anything, it was 'that we should draw no horoscopes.' But, if history cannot be reduced to a science for the guidance of states, it performs a service of no less

importance: 'It is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong.' In his own treatment of history Froude gave the freest play to these conceptions. The essential character of his chief historical writings is that they are conceived and written as dramas. Ever in his foreground there is a great central figure-hero or villain-round whom all events cluster, and with reference to whom they are selected and appraised. This personage develops in his hands, not as the rigid scrutiny of facts should determine, but in the fashion in which a character grows in the mind of the creative artist. Such are his delineations of Henry VIII., of Thomas Cromwell, of Mary Stewart, of Charles V., of Julius Cæsar, and, it may be added, of Carlyle—all of whom, before he has done with them, become gigantesque figures with their natural traits distorted beyond recogniEqually characteristic of Froude as a historian is his insistence on the ethical import of persons and events. In this respect he, of course, resembles his master, Carlyle; but, though he owes to Carlyle his fundamental ethical principles, it was by his own natural instincts that he was primarily concerned with the problems of human destiny. In the case of Froude, as in the case of Carlyle, it was but the accident of circumstances that made him a historian and not an official preacher; and to his ethical fervour is doubtless due the polemical tone which is present in most of what he wrote. 'Having nobody to abuse,' he writes to his friend [Sir] John Skelton, with reference to his Oceana, 'I am like trying to fly a kite without wind.'

tion.

As

History thus conceived makes a wide popular appeal; and Froude possessed precisely the requisite gifts for the successful exemplification of his theories. He was master of a style which by its rapidity, clearness, and idiomatic grace is unsurpassed for the purposes of pure narrative. much a man of the world as a student, he knew the range of common interests, selected his facts accordingly, and in his presentation of them had an unerring instinct as to the limits of the average intelligence. Moreover, though the only dull book he ever wrote was his romance, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, he had in a high degree that 'picturesque sensibility' which instinctively apprehends the poetic aspects of persons and events, and can make them visible to others. From these eminent merits, however, large abatements have to be made; his inaccuracy was such that in matters of fact he cannot be quoted with confidence, and there are few writers of equal intellectual force whose judgments carry less authority than Froude's. Yet, after every reserve, he remains one of the most interesting and important literary figures of his time. For the general public he has done the invaluable service of making history an attractive study; and English literature owes him a debt of another kind and of not less account: no writer has done more than Froude to maintain the best

traditions of English prose in that middle style which is the work-a-day instrument of every literature.

History.

What, then, is the use of History? and what are its lessons? If it can tell us little of the past and nothing of the future, why waste our time over so barren a study? First, it is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last: not always by the chief offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.

That is one lesson of History. Another is, that we should draw no horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not come to pass. Revolutions, reformations-those vast movements into which heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were the dawn of the millennium-have not borne the fruit which they looked for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions leave the world changed -perhaps improved-but not improved as the actors in them hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with less heart could he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the distance the theology of Tübingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against England could he have seen the country which he made as we see it now [February 1864].

The most reasonable anticipations fail us-antecedents the most apposite mislead us; because the conditions of human problems never repeat themselves. Some new feature alters everything-some element which we detect only in its after-operation.

But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its conquests, teach us no more than this? Let us approach the subject from another side.

If you were asked to point out the special features in which Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention, perhaps, among others, this, that his stories are not put together, and his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction which they contain, there remains still something unresolved-something which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give.

It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's supreme truth lies. He represents

real life. His dramas teach as life teaches-neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics as nature does, on right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make nature more systematic than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil-in the unmerited sufferings of innocence -in the disproportion of penalties to desert-in the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin -Shakespeare is true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it; and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the intellectual emotions than the understanding-knowing well that

the understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage as ignorant as the child.

(From 'The Science of History' in Short Studies on Great Subjects, vol. i.)

Flight of Mary Stuart from Holyrood to Dunbar after the Murder of Rizzio.

The important point gained, Darnley would not awake suspicion by returning to the Queen; he sent her word privately that all was well;' and at eight in the evening Stewart of Traquair, Captain of the Royal Guard; Arthur Erskine, 'whom she would trust with a thousand lives;' and Standen, a young and gallant gentleman, assembled in the Queen's room to arrange a plan for the escape from Holyrood. The first question was where she was to go. Though the gates were no longer occupied, the Palace would doubtless be watched; and to attempt flight and to fail would be certain ruin. In the Castle of Edinburgh she would be safe with Lord Erskine, but she could reach the Castle only through the streets, which would be beset with enemies; and unfit as she was for the exertion, she determined to make for Dunbar.

She stirred the blood of the three youths with the most touching appeal which could be made to the generosity of man. Pointing to the child that was in her womb, she adjured them by their loyalty to save the unborn hope of Scotland. So addressed, they would have flung themselves naked on the pikes of Morton's troopers. They swore they would do her bidding be it what it would; and then, after her sweet manner and wise directions, she dismissed them till midnight to put all in order as she herself excellently directed.'

'The rendezvous appointed with the horses was near the broken tombs and demolished sepultures in the ruined Abbey of Holyrood.' A secret passage led underground from the palace to the vaults of the abbey; and at midnight Mary Stuart, accompanied by one servant and her husband-who had left the lords under pretence of going to bed-'crawled through the charnelhouse, among the bones and skulls of the antient kings,' and came out of the earth' where the horses were shivering in the March midnight air.

The moon was clear and full. 'The Queen with incredible animosity was mounted en croup behind Sir Arthur Erskine upon a beautiful English double gelding,' the King on a courser of Naples;' and then away-away-past Restalrig, past Arthur's Seat, across the bridge and across the field of Musselburgh, past Seton, past Prestonpans, fast as their horses could speed; 'six in all-their Majesties, Erskine, Traquair, and a chamberer of the Queen.' In two hours the heavy gates of Dunbar had closed behind them, and Mary Stuart was safe. (From the History of England, Chap. XLIV.) Froude's account of the escape is based on a letter of Standen's. The King is Darnley, and animosity means 'spirit.' Prestonpans is nearer Edinburgh than Seton, and should accordingly come first.

to all things and persons. His writings were passing through edition on edition. He was always adding and correcting; while new tracts, new editions of the Fathers, show an acuteness of attention and an extent of reading which to a modern student seems beyond the reach of any single intellect. Yet he was no stationary scholar confined to desk or closet. He was out in the world, travelling from city to city, gathering materials among all places and all persons, from palace to village alehouse, and missing nothing which had meaning or amusement in it. In all literary history there is no more extraordinary figure. Harassed by orthodox theologians, uncertain of his duties in the revolutionary tempest, doubtful in what country to find rest or shelter, anxious for his future, anxious for his life (for he knew how Orthodoxy hated him, and he had no wish to be a martyr in an ambiguous cause), he was putting together another work which, like Moria, was to make his name immortal. Of his learned productions, brilliant as they were, Erasmus thought but little. He considered them hastily and inaccurately done; he even wondered how any one could read them. But his letters, his Moria, and now the Colloquies, which he was composing in his intervals of leisure, are pictures of his own mind, pictures of men and things which show the hand of an artist in the highest sense, never spiteful, never malicious, always delightful and amusing, and finished photographs of the world in which he lived and moved. The subject might be mean or high, a carver of genius will make a work of art out of the end of a broomstick. The journey to Brindisi was a common adventure in a fly-boat; Horace has made it live for ever. Erasmus had the true artist's gift of so handling everything that he touched, vulgar or sublime, that human interest is immediately awakened, and in these Colloquies, which are the record of what he himself saw and heard, we have the human inhabitants of Europe before us as they then were in all countries except Spain, and of all degrees and sorts; bishops and abbots, monks and parish priests, lords and commoners, French grisettes, soldiers of fortune, treasure-seekers, quacks, conjurers, tavern-keepers, there they all stand, the very image and mirror of the time. Miserable as he often considered himself, Erasmus shows nothing of it in the Colloquies. No bitterness, no complainings, no sour austerity or would-be virtuous earnestness, but everywhere a genial human sympathy which will not be too hard upon the wretchedest of rogues, with the healthy apprehension of all that is innocent and good.

(From Life and Letters of Erasmus, Lecture 11.)

Froude left injunctions that no authorised biography of him should be written. For the early part of his life our chief sources of information are his Essay, entitled 'The Oxford Counter-Refor. mation' (Short Studies, vol. iv.), and Canon Mozley's Reminiscences (vol. ii.). Regarding his later life there are interesting details in The Table-Talk of Shirley ([Sir] John Skelton). See also Mr Pollard's article in the Appendix to the Dictionary of National Biography, and Mr David Wilson's Mr Froude and Carlyle (1898). Estimates of Froude are given by Sir Leslie Stephen (National Review, January 1901) and by Mr Goldwin Smith (North American Review, clix. 677). In 1903, in reply to criticism by Mr Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne, there appeared a posthumous volume, entitled My Relations with Carlyle, in which Froude defended his estimates of Carlyle and his wife, and maintained his own fairness as executor; printing a letter from his co-executor, Sir James Stephen, completely approving Froude's discharge of his trust. The Nemesis of Froude was a rejoinder by Sir James Crichton-Browne.

P. HUME BROWN.

Ernest Jones (1819–69)—in full, ERNEST CHARLES JONES-Chartist poet, was the son of Major Charles Jones, equerry to the Duke of Cumberland who became King of Hanover. The major lived long on his German estate, and the son, born at Berlin, was carefully educated at Lüneburg, and early became a poet and a politician. He came to England with his father in 1838, was popular in society, published a highly romantic novel, The Wood Spirit (1841), and in 1841 was called to the Bar. In 1846 he threw himself strongly into the Chartist movement, supported Feargus O'Connor energetically on the platform and in the press, and was believed to have resigned brilliant prospects to become a political agitator. In 1848 he was active as far north as Aberdeen, but, arrested at Manchester, was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for seditious speeches. On his release he was for a while the leader of the lost cause, and in his Notes to the People wrote a history of the democratic movement and edited a People's Paper. When the Chartists disappeared as a party he, to the disgust of the faithful remnant, was content to energise as a mere Radical and advocate land nationalisation. About the same time he resumed practice at the Bar, and began to write industriously at first sensational novels and tales, such as The Lass and the Lady, The Maid of Warsaw, Woman's Wrongs, Beldagan Church, The Painter of Florence. Landor praised enthusiastically the poem that gave name to The Battle Day and other Poems (1855). In 1857 Jones published The Revolt of Hindostan (privately printed in 1850), a poem said to have been written with his own blood in an old Prayer-book while he was in prison; Corayda and other Poems appeared in 1859. He continued to issue pamphlets and lecture in the democratic cause, had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament repeatedly from 1847 on, and was expected to get in for Manchester as Radical member when he suddenly died. His best-known lyrics were 'The Song of the Poor,' 'The Song of the Day-labourers,' 'The Song of the Factory Slave,' and 'The Song of the Poorer Classes.'

Angus Bethune Reach (1821-56), born at Inverness, came to London in 1842, and wrote much for Punch, for many of the magazines, and for the newspapers. His two novels were Clement Lorimer (1848; illustrated by Cruikshank) and Leonard Lindsay (1850); but, spite of failing health, he produced innumerable satirical and social sketches and dramatic trifles.