of mind was thoroughly wretched.  The creed in which he had been brought up was giving way under him, and he could find no principle of action at all.  Brooding ceaselessly over these problems, he at the same time lowered his physical strength by abstinence, living upon bread, milk, and vegetables, giving up meat and wine.  In this unpromising frame of mind, and in the course of solitary rambles, he composed The Nemesis of Faith.* The book is, both in substance and in style, quite unworthy of Froude.  But in the life of a man who afterwards wrote what the world would not willingly let die it is an epoch of critical importance.  To describe it in a word is impossible.  To describe it in a few words is not easy.  Froude himself called it in after life a “cry of pain,” meaning that it was intended to relieve the intolerable pressure of his thoughts.  It is not a novel, it is not a treatise, it is not poetry, it is not romance.  It is the delineation of a mood; and though it was called, with some reason, sceptical, its moral, if it has a moral, is that scepticism leads to misconduct.  That unpleasant and unverified hypothesis, soon rejected by Froude himself, has been revived by M. Bourget in Le Disciple, and L’Etape.  The Nemesis of Faith is as unwholesome as either of these books, and has not their literary charm.  It had few friends, because it disgusted free-thinking Liberals as much as it scandalised orthodox Conservatives.  If it were read at all nowadays, as it is not, it would be read for the early sketches of Newman and Carlyle, afterwards amplified in memorable pages which are not likely to perish.

—­ * Chapman, 1849. —­

In a letter to Charles Kingsley, written from Dartington on New Year’s Day, 1849, Froude speaks with transparent candour of his book, and of his own mind: 

“I wish to give up my Fellowship.  I hate the Articles.  I have said I hate chapel to the Rector himself; and then I must live somehow, and England is not hospitable, and the parties here to whom I am in submission believe too devoutly in the God of this world to forgive an absolute apostasy.  Under pain of lost favour for ever if I leave my provision at Oxford, I must find another, and immediately.  There are many matters I wish to talk over with you.  I have a book advertised.  You may have seen it.  It is too utterly subjective to please you.  I can’t help it.  If the creatures breed, they must come to the birth.  There is something in the thing, I know; for I cut a hole in my heart, and wrote with the blood.  I wouldn’t write such another at the cost of the same pain for anything short of direct promotion into heaven.”

Of Kingsley himself Froude wrote* to another clerical friend, friend of a lifetime, Cowley Powles:  “Kingsley is such a fine fellow—­I almost wish, though, he wouldn’t write and talk Chartism, and be always in such a stringent excitement about it all.  He dreams of nothing but barricades and provisional Governments and grand Smithfield bonfires, where the landlords are all roasting in the fat of their own prize oxen.  He is so musical and beautiful in poetry, and so rough and harsh in prose, and he doesn’t know the least that it is because in the first the art is carrying him out of himself, and making him forget just for a little that the age is so entirely out of joint.”  A very fine and discriminating piece of criticism.