can refrain from tears at the thought of that bright and beautiful Froude?” is the expression of one of them shortly before his death, and when it was quite certain that the doom which had so long hung over him was at hand.[23] He had the love of doing, for the mere sake of doing, what was difficult or even dangerous to do, which is the mainspring of characteristic English sports and games.  He loved the sea; he liked to sail his own boat, and enjoyed rough weather, and took interest in the niceties of seamanship and shipcraft.  He was a bold rider across country.  With a powerful grasp on mathematical truths and principles, he entered with whole-hearted zest into inviting problems, or into practical details of mechanical or hydrostatic or astronomical science.  His letters are full of such observations, put in a way which he thought would interest his friends, and marked by his strong habit of getting into touch with what was real and of the substance of questions.  He applied his thoughts to architecture with a power and originality which at the time were not common.  No one who only cared for this world could be more attracted and interested than he was by the wonder and beauty of its facts and appearances.  With the deepest allegiance to his home and reverence for its ties and authority, a home of the old-fashioned ecclesiastical sort, sober, manly, religious, orderly, he carried into his wider life the feelings with which he had been brought up; bold as he was, his reason and his character craved for authority, but authority which morally and reasonably he could respect.  Mr. Keble’s goodness and purity subdued him, and disposed him to accept without reserve his master’s teaching:  and towards Mr. Keble, along with an outside show of playful criticism and privileged impertinence, there was a reverence which governed Froude’s whole nature.  In the wild and rough heyday of reform, he was a Tory of the Tories.  But when authority failed him, from cowardice or stupidity or self-interest, he could not easily pardon it; and he was ready to startle his friends by proclaiming himself a Radical, prepared for the sake of the highest and greatest interests to sacrifice all second-rate and subordinate ones.

When his friends, after his death, published selections from his journals and letters, the world was shocked by what seemed his amazing audacity both of thought and expression about a number of things and persons which it was customary to regard as almost beyond the reach of criticism.  The Remains lent themselves admirably to the controversial process of culling choice phrases and sentences and epithets surprisingly at variance with conventional and popular estimates.  Friends were pained and disturbed; foes naturally enough could not hold in their overflowing exultation at such a disclosure of the spirit of the movement.  Sermons and newspapers drew attention to Froude’s extravagances with horror and disgust.  The truth is that if the off-hand sayings in conversation or