in translating John of Salisbury's letters for his own Life of Becket.
No more was heard of the tanner, who had perhaps been only a threat.
While he wandered in solitude through the woods, or by the river,
his health improved, he acquired a passion for nature, and in his
father's library, which was excellent, he began eagerly to read. He
devoured Sharon Turner's History of England, and the great work of
Gibbon. Shakespeare and Spenser introduced him to the region of the
spirit in its highest and deepest, its purest and noblest forms.
Unhappily he also fell in with Byron, the worst poet that can come
into the hands of a boy, and always retained for him an admiration
which would now be thought excessive. By these means he gained much.
He discovered what poetry was, what history was, and he learned also
the lesson that no one can teach, the hard lesson of self-reliance.

This was the period, as everybody knows, of the Oxford Movement, in
which Hurrell Froude acted as a pioneer. Hurrell's ideal was the
Church of the Middle Ages represented by Thomas Becket. In the
vacations he brought some of his Tractarian friends home with him,
and Anthony listened to their talk. Strange talk it seemed. They
found out, these young men, that Dr. Arnold, one of the most
devoutly religious men who ever lived, was not a Christian. The
Reformation was an infamous rebellion against authority. Liberalism,
not the Pope, was antichrist. The Church was above the State, and
the supreme ruler of the world. Transubstantiation, which the
Archdeacon abhorred, was probably true. Hurrell Froude was a
brilliant talker, a consummate dialectician, and an ardent
proselytising controversialist. But his young listener knew a little
history, and perceived that, to put it mildly, there were gaps in
Hurrell's knowledge.