early sketches of Turner, and Ruskin afterwards gave them
enthusiastic praise. Mr. Froude had married, when quite a young man,
Margaret Spedding, the daughter of an old college friend, from
Armathwaite in Cumberland. Her nephew is known as the prince of
Baconian scholars and the J. S. of Tennyson's poem. She was a woman
of great beauty, deeply religious, belonging to a family more
strongly given to letters and to science than the Froudes, whose
tastes were rather for the active life of sport and adventure. One
can imagine the Froudes of the sixteenth century manning the ships
of Queen Bess and sailing with Frobisher or Drake. For many years
Mrs. Froude was the mistress of a happy home, the mother of many
handsome sons and fair daughters. The two eldest, Hurrell and
Robert, were especially striking, brilliant lads, popular at Eton,
their father's companions in the hunting-field or on the moors. But
in Dartington Rectory, with all its outward signs of prosperity and
welfare, there were the seeds of death. Before Anthony Froude, the
youngest of eight, was three years old, his mother died of a
decline, and within a few years the same illness proved fatal to
five of her children. The whole aspect of life at Dartington was
changed. The Archdeacon retired into himself and nursed his grief in
silence, melancholy, isolated, austere.

This irreparable calamity was made by circumstances doubly
calamitous. Though destined to survive all his brothers and sisters,
Anthony was a weak, sickly child, not considered never heard the
mention of his mother's name, or was the Archdeacon himself capable
of showing any tenderness whatever. In place of a mother the little
boy had an aunt, who applied to him principles of Spartan severity.
At the mature age of three he was ducked every morning at a trough,
to harden him, in the ice-cold water from a spring, and whenever he