LIBERTY

Froude's position was now, from a worldly point of view, deplorable.
For the antagonism of High Churchmen he was of course prepared.
"Never mind," he wrote to Clough of The Nemesis, "if the Puseyites
hate it; they must fear it, and it will work in the mind they have
made sick." But he was also assailed in the Protestant press as an
awful example of what the Oxford Movement might engender. His book
was denounced on all sides, even by freethinkers, who regarded it as
a reproach to their cause. The professors of University College,
London, had appointed him to a mastership at Hobart Town in
Australia, for which he applied the year before in the hope that
change of scene might help to re-settle his mind. On reading the
attacks in the newspapers they pusillanimously asked him to
withdraw, and he withdrew. A letter to Clough, dated the 6th of
March, 1849, explains his intellectual and material position at this
time in a vivid and striking manner.

"I admire Matt. to a very great extent, only I don't see what
business he has to parade his calmness, and lecture us on
resignation, when he has never known what a storm is, and doesn't
know what to resign himself to. I think he only knows the shady side
of nature out of books. Still I think his versifying, and generally
his aesthetic power is quite wonderful .... On the whole he shapes
better than you, I think, but you have marble to cut out, and he has
only clay .... Do you think that if the Council do ask me to give up
I might fairly ask Lord Brougham as their President to get me helped
instead to ever so poor an honest living in the Colonies? I can't
turn hack writer, and I must have something fixed to do. Congreve is