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But what the internal life of the Church was, what should be its teaching and organic system, and what was the standard and proof of these, Whately had left unsaid. And this outline Froude filled up. Thus to the great question, What is the Church? he gave without hesitation, and gave to the end, the same answer that Anglicans gave and are giving still.
So Catholics and conservatives are never tired of denouncing Henry VIII. and the French revolutionists. I somehow believe, in spite of Froude, that Henry VIII. was a tyrant; and eulogies upon the reign of terror generally convince me that a greater set of scoundrels seldom came to the surface, than the perpetrators of those enormities. But then the real inference is, to my mind, very different.
After his retirement his health fluctuated. He visited Froude at Salcombe in June, and was able to enjoy sailing. He afterwards went to Homburg, and in the autumn was able to walk as well as drive about Anaverna. The intellect was becoming eclipsed, and he was less and less able to leave his chair.
May you live to see it, Antony, before the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its beauty. Your loving old G.P. Born in Devon at the same time within a year as Ruskin, James Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same sanguine and poetical characteristics.
The Historical School at Oxford had been trained to believe that Stubbs was the great historian, that Freeman was his prophet, and that Froude was not an historian at all. Lord Salisbury of course knew better, for it was at Hatfield that some of Froude's most thorough historical work had been done.
Yet are these latter the people whom the classic Mr. Froude wishes to be immolated, root and branch, in all their highest and dearest interests, in order to secure the maintenance of "old traditions" which, he tells us, guaranteed for the dominant cuticle the sacrifice of the happiness of down-trodden thousands!
That the man who wrote these sentences at the close of a book with which they are quite in keeping should have been reviled as a traitor to Carlyle's memory is strange indeed. To Froude it was incredible. Conscious of regarding Carlyle as the greatest moral and intellectual force of his time, he could not have been more astonished if he had been charged with picking a pocket.
An exclusively Protestant, Parliament was accompanied by such toleration as the Catholics had enjoyed under Charles II. The infamous law against the Irish trade in wool and the episcopal persecution of Nonconformists, were condemned in just and forcible terms by Froude. Episcopal shortcomings seldom escaped his vigilant eye.
Froude could have hit on a more unpalatable mode, or a mode more likely to clash with the prevailing tendencies of American opinion, of defending English rule in Ireland than the argument that, Englishmen being stronger and wiser than Irishmen, Irishmen ought to submit to have themselves governed on English ideas whether they like it or not.
Froude was not, however, so much absorbed in the work of his life that he could not form and express strong opinions upon the great events passing around him. His view of the Russian war and of the French alliance was set forth with much plainness of speech in a letter to Max Muller:*
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