was in all mouths. His old college perceived that he was a credit,
not a disgrace to it, and the Rector of Exeter* courteously invited
him to replace his name on the books. The Committee of the Athenaeum
elected him an honorary member of the Club. Even the Archdeacon, now
a very old man, discovered at last that his youngest son was an
honour to the name of Froude. He knew something of ecclesiastical
history, and he understood that the character of Henry, which
certainly left much to be desired, might have been blackened of set
purpose by ecclesiastical historians. Froude's reputation was made.
The reviewers, most of whom knew nothing about the subject, could
not hurt him. He had followed his bent, and chosen his vocation
well. The gift of narrative was his, and he had had thoughts of
turning novelist. But to write a novel, or at least a successful
novel, was a thing he could never do. He had not the spirit of
romance. If there was anything romantic in him, it was love of
England, and of the sea. From the ocean rovers of Elizabeth to the
colonial path-finders of his own day, he delighted in men who
carried the name and fame of England to distant places of the earth.
He was an advocate rather than a judge. He held so strongly the
correctness of his own views, and the importance of having a right
judgment in all things, that he sometimes gave undue prominence to
the facts which supported his theory. It was only fair and
reasonable that critics should draw attention to this characteristic
of Froude as an historian. That he deliberately falsified history is
a baseless delusion. A sterner moralist, a more strenuous worker, it
would have been difficult to find. An artist he could not help
being, for it was in the blood. Once his fingers grasped the pen,
they began instinctively to draw a picture. He was not, like Macaulay,
a rhetorician. He had inherited from his father a contempt for
oratory, and he did not speak well in public. But when he had studied