career, and touched them with an artist’s hand.  As to what it all meant, or whether it meant anything, he left his readers as much, in the dark as they were before.  My own theory, if one must have a theory, is that one word explains Disraeli, and that that word is “ambition.”  If so, he was one of the most marvellously successful men that ever lived.  If not, and if a different standard should be applied, other consequences would ensue.  Froude gives no help in the solution of the problem.  What he does is to portray the original genius which no absurdities could cover, and no obstacles could restrain.  Disraeli the “Imperialist” had no more to do with building empires than with building churches, but he was twice Prime Minister of England.

—­ * Disraeli’s contempt for italics is well known.  He called them “the last resort of the forcible Feebles.” —­

Froude’s Sea Studies in the third series of his collected essays are chiefly a series of thoughts on the plays of Euripides.  But, like so much of his writing, they are redolent of the ocean, on which and near which he always felt at home.  The opening sentences of this fresh and wholesome paper are too characteristic not to be quoted.

“To a man of middle age whose occupations have long confined him to the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library, there is something unspeakably delightful in a sea voyage.  Increasing years, if they bring little else that is agreeable with them, bring to some of us immunity from sea-sickness.  The regularity of habit on board a ship, the absence of dinner parties, the exchange of the table in the close room for the open deck under an awning, and the ever-flowing breeze which the motion of the vessel forbids to sink into a calm, give vigour to the tired system, restore the conscious enjoyment of elastic health, and even mock us for the moment with the belief that age is an illusion, and that ‘the wild freshness’ of the morning of life has not yet passed away for ever.  Above our heads is the arch of the sky, around us the ocean, rolling free and fresh as it rolled a million years ago, and our spirits catch a contagion from the elements.  Our step on the boards recovers its buoyancy.  We are rocked to rest at night by a gentle movement which soothes you into the dreamless sleep of childhood, and we wake with the certainty that we are beyond the reach of the postman.  We are shut off, in a Catholic retreat, from the worries and anxieties of the world.”

This is not the language of a man who ever suffered seriously from sea-sickness, and Froude’s face had an open-air look which never suggested “the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library.”  But he was of course a laborious student, and nothing refreshed him like a voyage.  On the yacht of his old friend Lord Ducie, as Enthusiastic a sailor and fisherman as himself, he made several journeys to Norway, and caught plenty of big salmon.  He has done ample justice to these expeditions in the last volume of his essays, which contains The Spanish Story of the Armada.  A country where the mountains are impassable, and the fiords the only roads, just suited his taste.  It even inspired him with a poem, Rornsdal Fiord, which appeared in Blackwood for April, 1883, and it gave him health, which is not always, like poetry, a pure gift of nature.