argument and it would have led them wrong."

Concerning Kingsley's Socialism, especially as shown in Hypatia,
Froude was cold and critical. "It is by no means as yet clear to
me," he wrote about this time, "that all good people are Socialists,
and that therefore whoever sticks to the old thing is a bad fellow.
Whatever is has no end of claims on us. I have no doubt that we
could not get on without the devil. If it had not been so, he would
not have been. The ideas must be content to fight a long time before
they assimilate all the wholesome flesh in the universe, and we
cannot leave what works somehow for what only promises to work, and
has yet by no means largely realised that promise. I consider it a
bad sign in the thinkers among the Christian Socialists if they set
to cursing those who don't agree with them. The multitudes must, but
the thinkers should not. I cannot believe that if Clement of
Alexandria had been asked whether he candidly believed Tacitus was
damned because he was a heathen he would have said 'Yes.' Indeed, on
indifferent matters (supposing he had been alive in Tacitus's time),
I don't think he would have minded writing a leader in the Acta
Diurna, even though Tacitus followed on the other side!"

Oxford, and its old clothes, Froude had cast behind him. He had
never taken priest's orders, and the clerical disabilities imposed
upon him were not only cruel, but ridiculous. Shut out from the law,
he turned to literature, and became a regular reviewer. There was
not so much reviewing then as there is now, but it was better paid.
His services were soon in great request, for he wrote an
incomparable style.

The origin of Froude's style is not obscure. Too original to be an