The Froudes were a remarkable family. They had strong characters
and decided tastes, but they had not their father's conventionality
and preference for the high roads of life. They were devoted to sport,
and at the same time abounded in mental vigour. All the brothers had
the gift of drawing. John, though forced into a lawyer's office,
would if left to himself have become an artist by profession. The
nearest to Anthony in age was William, afterwards widely celebrated
as a naval engineer. Then came Robert, the most attractive of the
boys. A splendid athlete, compared by Anthony with a Greek statue,
he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses
were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died
he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. The influence of
his genial kindness was never forgotten by his youngest brother; but
there was a stronger and more dominating personality of which the
effect was less beneficial to a sensitive and nervous child.

Richard Hurrell Froude is regarded by High Churchmen as an
originator of the Oxford Movement, and he impressed all his
contemporaries by the brilliancy of his gifts. Dean Church went so
far as to compare him with Pascal. But his ideas of bringing up
children were naturally crude, and his treatment of Anthony was more
harsh than wise. His early character as seen at home is described by
his mother in a letter written a year before her death, when he was
seventeen. Fond as she was of him and proud of his brilliant
promise, she did not know what to make of him, so wayward was he and
inconsiderately selfish. "I am in a wretched state of health," the
poor lady explained, "and quiet is important to my recovery and
quite essential to my comfort, yet he disturbs it for what he calls
'funny tormenting,' without the slightest feeling, twenty times a
day. At one time he kept one of his brothers screaming, from a sort