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Updated: May 8, 2025
James Anthony Froude was born at Dartington Rectory, the youngest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes, on April 23, 1818. His father was a clergyman of the old school, as much squire as parson.
Froude was the mistress of a happy home, the mother of many handsome sons and fair daughters. The two eldest, Hurrell and Robert, were especially striking, brilliant lads, popular at Eton, their father's companions in the hunting-field or on the moors. But in Dartington Rectory, with all its outward signs of prosperity and welfare, there were the seeds of death.
"My dear Lord Dartington, do not let us mistake each other. I live in the world like other women, but I am not altogether like them. Not another word of gallantry to me alone, as you value my friendship. In a crowded room pay me as many compliments as you like. It will flatter my vanity to have you in my train.
And now, just do me the favour to take these scissors and cut the dead leaves off that plant." Lord Dartington, to use a common phrase, "hummed and hawed." He looked, too, a little angry. An artful and shrewd politician, it was not Constance's wish to cool the devotion, though she might the attachment, of a single member of her husband's party.
Constance early saw the attentions and designs of Lord Dartington. There is one difficulty in repressing advances in great society one so easily becomes ridiculous by being a prude. But Constance dismissed Lord Dartington with great dexterity. This was the occasion: One of the apartments in Erpingham House communicated with a conservatory.
With a kind look but a look so superior, so queen-like, so free from the petty and coquettish condescension of the sex, that the gay lord wondered from that hour how he could ever have dreamed of Constance as of certain other ladies she stretched her hand to him. "We are friends, Lord Dartington? and now we know each other, we shall be so always."
Dartington Hall very well known to architects as the work of John Holland, Duke of Exeter, in the reign of Richard II passed by exchange to the Champernownes in the reign of Henry VIII, and was originally an enormous structure, inclosing two quadrangles.
Here she would receive such visitors as happened to be staying in the house, and subsequently reverential villagers, who appealed to her for aid or sympathy. Dartington Parsonage was in one sense more modern than Denbury, having been for the most part constructed by the Archdeacon himself.
Morley's English Men of Letters a critical and biographical sketch of Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress, as the work of a Dissenter, had been excluded from the Rectory at Dartington. But Froude was not long in supplying the deficiency for himself, and his literary appreciation of Bunyan's style was accompanied by a sincere sympathy with the Puritan part of his faith.
One of its frontages forms the side of a forecourt flanked by grandiose outbuildings estate offices, stables, and a great frescoed ballroom. Elsewhere round the house was a very untidy flower garden, which half the old women of the little town spent, so it seemed to me, most of their days in weeding herein reviving my recollections of Dartington Hall and Denbury.
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