FRERE, JOHN HOOKHAM (1769-1846).—­Diplomatist, translator, and author, eldest s. of John F., a distinguished antiquary, was b. in London, and ed. at Eton and Camb.  He became a clerk in the Foreign Office, and subsequently entering Parliament was appointed Under Foreign Sec.  In 1800 he was Envoy to Portugal, and was Ambassador to Spain 1802-4, and again 1808-9.  In 1818 he retired to Malta, where he d. He was a contributor to the Anti-Jacobin, to Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Poets (1801), and to Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid.  He also made some masterly translations from Aristophanes; but his chief original contribution to literature was a burlesque poem on Arthur and the Round Table, purporting to be by William and Robert Whistlecraft.  All F.’s writings are characterised no less by scholarship than by wit.

FROUDE, JAMES ANTHONY (1818-1894).—­Historian and essayist, 3rd s. of the Archdeacon of Totnes, Devonshire, near which he was b., and brother of Richard Hurrell.  F., one of the leaders of the Tractarian party, was ed. at Westminster School and Oxf., where for a short time he came under the influence of Newman, and contributed to his Lives of the English Saints, and in 1844 he took Deacon’s orders.  The connection with Newman was, however, short-lived; and the publication in 1848 of The Nemesis of Faith showed that in the severe mental and spiritual conflict through which he had passed, the writer had not only escaped from all Tractarian influences, but was in revolt against many of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.  One result of the book was his resignation of his Fellowship at Oxf.:  another was his loss of an appointment as Head Master of the Grammar School of Hobart Town, Tasmania.  In the same year began his friendship with Carlyle, and about the same time he became a contributor to the Westminster Review and to Fraser’s Magazine, of which he was ed. from 1860-74.  These papers were afterwards coll. and pub. in the 4 vols. of Short Studies on Great Subjects.  In 1856 he pub. the first 2 vols. of the great work of his life, The History of England from the Fall of Cardinal Wolsey to the Spanish Armada, which extended to 12 vols., the last of which appeared in 1870.  As literature this work has a place among the greatest productions of the century; but in its treatment it is much more dramatic, ethical, and polemical than historical in the strict sense; and indeed the inaccuracy in matters of fact to which F. was liable, combined with his tendency to idealise and to colour with his own prejudices the characters who figure in his narrative, are serious deductions from the value of his work considered as history. The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century appeared in 1872-4.  On the death of Carlyle in 1881, F. found himself in the position of his sole literary executor, and in that capacity