predict an eclipse? That is Froude's answer to Buckle, in the form
of a question.

"Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he
lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the
feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had
grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was
to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as Napoleon's,
are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made
the greatest progress are the arts of destruction." It is difficult
to see the atheism in all this, but the common sense is plain
enough. Froude belonged to the school of literary historians, such
as were Thucydides and Tacitus, Gibbon and Finlay, not to the school
of Buckle, or, as we should now say, of Professor Bury.

In 1865 Froude removed from Clifton Place, Hyde Park, to Onslow
Gardens in South Kensington, where he lived for the next quarter of
a century. In 1868 the students of St. Andrews chose him to be Lord
Rector of the University, and on the 23rd of March, 1869, he
delivered his Inaugural Address on Education, which compared the
plain living and high thinking of the Scottish Universities with the
expensive and luxurious idleness that he remembered at Oxford.
Froude was delighted with the compliment the students had paid him,
and they were equally charmed with their Rector. In fact, his visit
to St. Andrews produced in 1869 a suggestion that he should become
the Parliamentary representative of that University and of
Edinburgh. But the injustice of the law as it then stood
disqualified him as a candidate. His deacon's orders, the shadowy
remnant of a mistaken choice, stood in his way. Next year, in 1870,
Bouverie's Act passed, and Froude was one of the first to take