the King of glory?" had been given out as the anthem. While the
fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the
rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's the King of glory."

As an editor Froude was tolerant and catholic. "On controverted
points," he said, "I approve myself of the practice of the
Reformation. When St. Paul's Cross pulpit was occupied one Sunday by
a Lutheran, the next by a Catholic, the next by a Calvinist, all
sides had a hearing, and the preachers knew that they would be
pulled up before the same audience for what they might say." His own
literary judgments were rather conventional. The mixture of classes
in Clough's Bothie disturbed him. The genius of Matthew Arnold he
had recognised at once, but then Arnold was a classical, academic
poet. About Tennyson he agreed with the rest of the world, while
Tennyson, who was a personal friend, paid him the great compliment
of taking from him the subject of a poem and the material of a play.
His prejudice against Browning's style, much as he liked Browning
himself, was hard to overcome, and on this point he had a serious
difference with his friend Skelton. "Browning's verse!" he exclaims.
"With intellect, thought, power, grace, all the charms in detail
which poetry should have, it rings after all like a bell of lead."
This was in 1863, when Browning had published Men and Women, and
Dramatic Lyrics. However, he admitted Skelton's article on the other
side, and added, with magnificent candour, that "to this generation
Browning's poetry is as uninteresting as Shakespeare's Sonnets were
to the last century." The most fervent Browningite could have said
no more than that. To Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads Froude was
conspicuously fair. There was much in them which offended his
Puritanism, but he was disgusted with the virulence of the critics,
and he allowed Skelton to write in Fraser a qualified apology.