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When James Spedding introduced Froude to Carlyle he made unconsciously an epoch in English literature. For though Froude was incapable of merging himself in another man, as Spedding merged himself in Bacon, he did more for the author of Sartor Resartus than Spedding did for the author of the Novum Organum. Spedding's Bacon is an impossible hero of unhistorical perfection.
One valuable truth Froude had learned not from Carlyle, but from study of the past, and from his own observation at the Cape. "If," he wrote in Caesar, "there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this, that free nations" cannot govern subject provinces.
By that time Stubbs was Bishop of Oxford, translated from Chester, and had shown what a fatal combination for a modern prelate is learning with humour. If Froude had been appointed twenty years earlier, on the completion of his twelve volumes, he might have made Oxford the great historical school of England. But it was too late.
Froude may pertinently be asked here the source whence he derived his certainty on this point, inasmuch as it is absolutely at variance with all that is sensible and natural; for surely it is both foolish and monstrous to suppose that educated men would infer the degradation of any one from the fact of such a one consenting to govern and co-operate with themselves for their own welfare.
Here the burning question was the German occupation of New Guinea, for which Colonial opinion held Gladstone's Government, and Lord Derby in particular, responsible. On the other hand, Lord Derby had suggested Australian Federation, which received a good deal of support, though it led to nothing at the time. On one point Froude seems always to have met with Sympathy.
To her it was idle rhetoric and verbiage. He had taken away her dogmatic beliefs, and had nothing to put in their place. Her "pale, drawn, suffering face" haunted Froude in his dreams. In 1862 Mrs. Carlyle's health broke down, and for a year her case seemed desperate. Her doctor sent her away to St. Leonard's, and in no long time she apparently recovered.
But Randolph was with Mary during the whole expedition, and his despatches are better evidence than the fables of Buchanan and the surmises of Knox and Mr. Froude. Huntly had been out of favour ever since Lord James obtained the coveted Earldom of Moray in January, and he was thought to be opposed to Mary's visit to Elizabeth. Since January, the Queen had been bent on a northern progress.
He submitted so peacefully that she relented; called him back, and, discovering his name, apologised for her wrath. I cannot fix the dates, but during these years Fitzjames gradually came to be very intimate with her husband. Froude and he were often companions of the old gentleman on some of his walks, though Fitzjames's opportunities were limited by his many engagements.
That is a fair and unprejudiced estimate of Froude as he appeared to a trained observer who took neither side in the dispute. Many Irishmen shook hands with him, and thanked him for his plain speaking. Bret Harte told him that even those who dissented most widely from his opinions admired his "grit."
I have known those who thought Grey a nobler Gracchus and a more practical Gordon; and I have known those who thought him a mean copy of Dryden's Achitophel. His island-retreat, where Froude described him as a kind of evangelical Cincinnatus, seemed to others merely the convenient lurking-place of a political rogue-elephant.
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