Thus he was early cut off from direct and personal action on the course which things took.  But it would be a great mistake to suppose that his influence on the line taken and on the minds of others was inconsiderable.  It would be more true to say that with one exception no one was more responsible for the impulse which led to the movement; no one had more to do with shaping its distinct aims and its moral spirit and character in its first stage; no one was more daring and more clear, as far as he saw, in what he was prepared for.  There was no one to whom his friends so much looked up with admiration and enthusiasm.  There was no “wasted shade"[19] in Hurrell Froude’s disabled, prematurely shortened life.

Like Henry Martyn he was made by strong and even merciless self-discipline over a strong and for a long time refractory nature.  He was a man of great gifts, with much that was most attractive and noble; but joined with this them was originally in his character a vein of perversity and mischief, always in danger of breaking out, and with which he kept up a long and painful struggle.  His inmost thought and knowledge of himself have been laid bare in the papers which his friends published after his death.  He was in the habit of probing his motives to the bottom, and of recording without mercy what he thought his self-deceits and affectations.  The religious world of the day made merry over his methods of self-discipline; but whatever may be said of them, and such things are not easy to judge of, one thing is manifest, that they were true and sincere efforts to conquer what he thought evil in himself, to keep himself in order, to bring his inmost self into subjection to the law and will of God.  The self-chastening, which his private papers show, is no passion or value for asceticism, but a purely moral effort after self-command and honesty of character; and what makes the struggle so touching is its perfect reality and truth.  He “turned his thoughts on that desolate wilderness, his own conscience, and said what he saw there."[20] A man who has had a good deal to conquer in himself, and has gone a good way to conquer it, is not apt to be indulgent to self-deceit or indolence, or even weakness.  The basis of Froude’s character was a demand which would not be put off for what was real and thorough; an implacable scorn and hatred for what he counted shams and pretences.  “His highest ambition,” he used to say, “was to be a humdrum."[21] The intellectual and the moral parts of his character were of a piece.  The tricks and flimsinesses of a bad argument provoked him as much as the imposture and “flash” of insincere sentiment and fine talking; he might be conscious of “flash” in himself and his friends, and he would admit it unequivocally; but it was as unbearable to him to pretend not to see a fallacy as soon as it was detected, as it would have been to him to arrive at the right answer of a sum or a problem by tampering with the processes.  Such a man, with strong affections