felt that his time was growing short and the hand of death was upon him.  But to the end, the elevation and improvement of the English Church remained his great purpose.  To his friend, as we know, the Roman Church was either the Truth or Antichrist.  To Froude it was neither the whole Truth nor Antichrist; but like the English Church itself, a great and defective Church, whose defects were the opposite to ours, and which we should do wisely to learn from rather than abuse.  But to the last his allegiance never wavered to the English Church.

It is very striking to come from Froude’s boisterous freedom in his letters to his sermons and the papers he prepared for publication.  In his sermons his manner of writing is severe and restrained even to dryness.  If they startle it is by the force and searching point of an idea, not by any strength of words.  The style is chastened, simple, calm, with the most careful avoidance of over-statement or anything rhetorical.  And so in his papers, his mode of argument, forcible and cogent as it is, avoids all appearance of exaggeration or even illustrative expansion; it is all muscle and sinew; it is modelled on the argumentative style of Bishop Butler, and still more, of William Law.  No one could suppose from these papers Froude’s fiery impetuosity, or the frank daring of his disrespectful vocabulary.  Those who can read between the lines can trace the grave irony which clung everywhere to his deep earnestness.

There was yet another side of Froude’s character which was little thought of by his critics, or recognised by all his friends.  With all his keenness of judgment and all his readiness for conflict, some who knew him best were impressed by the melancholy which hung over his life, and which, though he ignored it, they could detect.  It is remembered still by Cardinal Newman.  “I thought,” wrote Mr. Isaac Williams, “that knowing him, I better understood Hamlet, a person most natural, but so original as to be unlike any one else, hiding depth of delicate thought in apparent extravagances. Hamlet, and the Georgics of Virgil, he used to say, he should have bound together.”  “Isaac Williams,” wrote Mr. Copeland, “mentioned to me a remark made on Froude by S. Wilberforce in his early days:  ’They talk of Froude’s fun, but somehow I cannot be in a room with him alone for ten minutes without feeling so intensely melancholy, that I do not know what to do with myself.  At Brightstone, in my Eden days, he was with me, and I was overwhelmed with the deep sense which possessed him of yearning which nothing could satisfy and of the unsatisfying nature of all things.’"[25]