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Yet even here, Froude could not refrain from quoting the sardonic comment of the English ambassador at Edinburgh: Knox behaved, said Randolph, "as though he were of God's privy council." It is certain, at least, that other reformers, who were not greatly inferior to Knox in capacity, and not at all in piety and honesty, have not met the same generous treatment at his hands.

'Kingsley's At Last had revived his interest in them; and though Kingsley had long been dead, his memory was fresh among all who knew him. The diary which Froude kept during this journey has been preserved, and I am enabled to make a few extracts from it.

Gosse esteems it so highly, he might procure a pot of glue and adorn his vermiform appendix with a few peacock feathers, else take lessons in posturing from the turkey- gobbler or editor of the Houston Post. Had Carlyle been born a long-eared ass, he might have been fully approved if not altogether appreciated by Gosse, Froude and other "critic flies."

Froude has brought out with wonderful power and beauty the character which in Carlyle was above and beyond all the gifts of his mind. If he was a severe critic of others, he was a still sterner judge of himself. It would have been easy for him to make money by writing what people wanted to read. He was determined that if they read anything of his, they should read what would do them good.

In the hearts of thousands of noble young people Carlyle's memory was cherished like that of some dear saint; and it was terrible to find that the strong prophet had been penetrated by such a virus of malice. Carlyle met all the best men and women in England; but the only ones whom he did not disparage were Tennyson, the Duke of Wellington, Mr. Froude, and Emerson.

Mr. Froude is pathetically eloquent on the colour question. He tells of the wide gulf between the two colours we suppose it is as wide as exists between his white horse and his black horse. Seriously, however, does not this kind of talk savour only too much of the slave-pen and the auction-block of the rice-swamp and the cotton-field; of the sugar-plantation and the driver's lash?

But, as Froude says, "it was effective, it was perplexing, it was deadly." Drake and Howard did not wish to come to closer quarters with their formidable foes; a near embrace of those heavy galleons, fully manned with brave men, might soon have brought disaster; the struggle would have been too unequal. It is the art of the weaker to be elusive.

Froude had a fitful and uncertain admiration for Disraeli. Gladstone he never liked or trusted, and did not take the trouble to understand. He had been brought up to despise oratory, he had caught from Carlyle a horror of democracy, he disliked the Anglo-Catholic party in the Church of England, and Gladstone's financial genius was out of his line.

Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impulse; then Newman took up the work, and the impulse henceforward, and the direction, were his. Doubtless, many thought and felt like them about the perils which beset the Church and religion.

Froude judged Burghley, as he judged Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, by the standards of political integrity and personal honour. The secret of Froude's influence and the source of his power is that beneath the attraction of his personality and the seductiveness of his writing there lay a bedrock of principle which could never be moved.