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
down-hearted about Oxford: not so I. I quite look to coming back in
a very few years."
The Archdeacon, conceiving that the best remedy for free thought was
short commons, stopped his son's allowance. Froude would have been
alone in the world, if the brave and generous Kingsley had not come
to his assistance. Like a true Christian, he invited Froude to his
house, and made him at home there. To appreciate the magnanimity of
this offer we must consider that Kinglsey was himself suspected of
being a heretic, and that his prominent association with Froude
brought him letters of remonstrance by every post. He said nothing
about them, and Froude, in perfect ignorance of what he was
inflicting upon his host, stayed two months with him at Ilfracombe
and Lynmouth. Yet Kingsley did not, and could not, agree with
Froude. He was a resolved, serious Christian, and never dreamt of
giving up his ministry. He did not in the least agree with Froude,
who made no impression upon him in argument. He acted from kindness,
and respect for integrity.
Froude, however, could not stay permanently with the Kingsleys. His
father would have nothing to do with him, and in his son's opinion
was right to leave him with the consequences of his own errors. But
the outcry against him had been so violent and excessive as to
provoke a reaction. Froude might be an "infidel," he was not a
criminal, and in resigning his Fellowship he had shown more honesty
than prudence. His position excited the sympathy of influential
persons. Crabb Robinson, though an entire stranger to him, wrote a
public protest against Froude's treatment. Other men, not less
distinguished, went farther. Chevalier Bunsen, the Prussian
Minister, Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, and others
whose names he never knew, subscribed a considerable sum of money
for maintaining the unpopular writer at a German university while he
made a serious study of theological science. But he had had enough
of theology, and the munificent offer was declined, though Bunsen
harangued him enthusiastically for five hours in Carlton Gardens on
the exquisite adaptation of Evangelical doctrines to the human soul,
until Froude began to suspect that they must have originated in the
soul itself.
At this time a greater change than the loss of his Fellowship came
upon Froude. While staying with the Kingsleys at Ilfracombe, he met
Mrs. Kingsley's sister, Charlotte Grenfell, the Argemone of Yeast, a
lady of somewhat wilful, yet most brilliant spirit, with a small
fortune of her own. Miss Grenfell had joined the Church of Rome two
years before, and at that time thought of entering a convent. This
idea was extremely distasteful to her sister and her sister's
husband. Their favourite remedy for feminine caprice was marriage,
and they soon had the satisfaction of seeing Miss Grenfell become
Mrs. Froude. There were some difficulties in the way, for Froude's
prospects were by no means assured, and Mrs. Kingsley felt
occasional scruples. But Froude had confidence in himself, and when
his mind was made up he would not look back.
"You remember," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley, in 1849, "I warned you
that I intended to take my own way in life, doing (as I always have
done) in all important matters just what I should think good, at
whatever risk of consequences, and taking no other person's opinion
when it crossed with my own. Now in this matter I feel certain that
the way to save Charlotte most pain is to shorten the struggle, and
that will be best done by being short, peremptory, and decided in
allowing no dictation and no interference .... Charlotte herself is
really magnificent. Every letter shows me larger nobleness of heart.
You cannot go back now, Mrs. Kingsley."
Mrs. Kingsley did not go back, and Froude had his way. Before the
wedding, however, another and a novel experience awaited him. His
misfortunes aroused the interest of a rich manufacturer at
Manchester, Mr. Darbishire, who offered him a resident tutorship,
and would have taken him into his own firm, even, as it would seem,
into his own family, if he had desired to become a man of business,
and to live in a smoky town. But Froude was engaged to be married,
and had a passionate love of the country. His keen, clear, rapid
intelligence would probably have served him well in commercial
affairs when once he had learnt to understand them. He was reserved
for a very different destiny, and he gratefully declined Mr.
Darbishire's offer. Nevertheless, his stay at Manchester as private
tutor had some share in his mental development. He made acquaintance
with interesting persons, such as Harriet Martineau, Geraldine
Jewsbury, Mrs. Gaskell, and William Edward Forster, then known as a
young Quaker who had devoted himself, in the true Quaker spirit of
self-sacrifice, to relieving the sufferers from the Irish famine.
Besides Manchester friends, Froude imbibed Manchester principles. He
had been half inclined to sympathise with the socialism of Louis
Blanc and other French revolutionists. Manchester cured him. He
adopted the creed of individualism, private enterprise, no
interference by Government, and free trade. In these matters he did
not, at that time, go with Carlyle, as in ecclesiastical matters he
had not gone with Newman. His mind was intensely practical, though
in personal questions of self-interest he was careless, and even
indifferent. Henceforth he abandoned speculation, as well
philosophical as theological, and reverted to the historical studies
of his youth. Philosophy at Oxford in those days meant Plato,
Aristotle, and Bishop Butler. Froude was a good Greek scholar, and
he had the true Oxford reverence for Butler. But he had not gone
deeper into philosophy than his examinations and his pupils
required. He liked positive results, and metaphysicians always
suggested to him the movements of a squirrel in a cage.
The alternative to business was literature. Biographies of literary
men, said Carlyle, are the most wretched documents in human history,
except the Newgate Calendar. But Carlyle said many things he did not
believe, and this was probably one of them. The truth is, that the
literary profession, like the commercial, requires some little
capital with which to set out, and Froude received this with his
wife. Besides it he had brilliant talents, unflagging industry, and
powers of writing such as have seldom been given to any of the sons
of men. While at Manchester he composed The Cat's Pilgrimage, the
earliest of his Short Studies in date. The moral of this fanciful
fable is very like the moral of Candide.
The discontented cat, tired of her monotonously comfortable place on
the hearthrug, goes out into the world, and gets nothing more than
experience for her pains. She finds the other animals occupied with
their own concerns, and enjoying life because they do not go beyond
them. Not a very elevating paper, perhaps, but better than The
Nemesis of Faith, and Froude's last word on the subjects that had
tormented his youth.
He recoiled from materialism, finding that it offered no explanation
of the universe. Faith in God he had never entirely lost, and on
that he founded his henceforth unshaken belief in the providential
government of the world. Whatever might be the origin of the
Christian religion, it furnished the best guide of life; and
spiritual truth, as Bunsen said, was independent of history. He had
no sort of sympathy with those who rejected belief in Christianity
altogether, still less with those who abandoned Theism. Although he
could not be a minister of the Church, he was content to be a
member, understanding the Church to be what he was brought up to
think it, the national organ of religion, a Protestant, evangelical
establishment under the authority of the law and the supremacy of
the Crown.
Froude returned to Manchester immediately after his marriage, but
his wife did not like the place nor the people. They looked about
for a country home, and were fortunate enough to find the most
enchanting spot in North Wales. Plas Gwynant, the shining place,
stands on a rising ground surrounded by woods, at the foot of
Snowdon, between Capel Curig and Beddgelert. Beyond the lawn and
meadow is Dinas Lake. A cherry orchard stood close to the house
door, and a torrent poured through a rocky ravine in the grounds,
falling into a pool below. A mile up the valley was the glittering
lake, Lyn Gwynant, with a boat and plenty of fishing. Good shooting
was also within reach.
To this ideal home Froude came with his wife in the summer of 1850.
Here began a new life of cloudless happiness and perfect peace. His
spiritual difficulties fell away from him, and he found that the
Church in which he had been born was comprehensive enough for him,
as for others. He was not called upon to solve problems which had
baffled the subtlest intellects, and would baffle them till the end
of time. Religion could be made practical, and not until its
practical lessons had been exhausted was it necessary to go farther
afield. "Do the duty that lies nearest you," said Goethe, who knew
art and science, literature and life, as few men have known them.
Froude was never idle, and never at a loss for amusement. Although
he wrote regularly, and his love of reading was a passion, he had
the keenest enjoyment of sport and expeditions, of country air and
sights and sounds, of natural beauty and physical exercise. It was
impossible to be dull in his company, for he was the prince of
conversers, drawing out as much as he gave. No wonder that there
were numerous visitors at Plas Gwynant. He was the best and warmest
of friends. In London he would always lay aside his work for the day
to entertain one of his contemporaries at Oxford, and at Plas
Gwynant they found a hospitable welcome. He would fish with them, or
shoot with them, or boat with them, or walk with them, discussing
every subject under heaven. Perhaps the most valued of his guests
was Clough, who had then written most of his poetry, and projected
new enterprises, not knowing how short his life would be.
Besides Clough, Matthew Arnold came to Plas Gwynant, and Charles
Kingsley, and John Conington, the Oxford Professor of Latin, and Max
Muller, the great philologist. A letter to Max Muller, dated the
25th of June, 1851, gives a pleasant picture of existence there.
"I shall be so glad to see you in July. Come and stay as long as
work will let you, and you can endure our hospitality. We are poor,
and so are not living at a high rate. I can't give you any wine,
because I haven't a drop in the house, and you must bring your own
cigars, as I am come down to pipes. But to set against that, you
shall have the best dinner in Wales every day--fresh trout, Welsh
mutton, as much bitter ale as you can drink; a bedroom and a little
sitting-room joining it all for your own self, and the most
beautiful look-out from the window that I have ever seen. You may
vary your retirement. You may change your rooms for the flower-
garden, which is an island in the river, or for the edge of the
waterfall, the music of which will every night lull you to sleep.
Last of all, you will have the society of myself, and of my wife,
and, what ought to weigh with you too, you will give us the great
pleasure of yours."
Clough neither fished, nor shot, nor boated, but as a walking
companion there was no one, in Froude's opinion, to be put above
him. For fishing he gave pre-eminence to Kingsley, and together they
carried up their coracles to waters higher than ordinary boats could
reach. Kingsley was ardent in all forms of sport, and an enthusiast
for Maurician theology, holding, as he said, that it had pleased God
to show him and Maurice things which He had concealed from Carlyle.
He had concealed them also from Froude, who regarded Carlyle as his
teacher, feeling that he owed him his emancipation from clerical
bonds.
Froude and Kingsley did not agree either in theology or in politics.
"I meant to say," Froude wrote to his wife's brother-in-law in 1851,
"that the philosophical necessity of the Incarnation as a fact must
have been as cogent to the earliest thinkers as to ourselves. If we
may say it must have been, they might say so. And they might, and
indeed must, have concluded, each at their several date, that the
highest historical person known to them must have been the Incarnate
God; so that unless the Incarnation was the first fact in human
history, there must have been a time when they would have used the
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
imitator, he was in his handling of English an apt pupil of Newman.
There is the same ease, the same grace, the same lightness of
elastic strength. Froude, like Newman, can pass from racy,
colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each
other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our
grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full. His vocabulary
was large and various. He was familiar with every device of
rhetoric. He could play with every pipe in the language, and sound
what stop he pleased. Oxford men used to talk very much in those
days, and have talked more or less ever since, about the Oriel
style. Perhaps the best example of it is Church, the accomplished
Dean of St. Paul's. Church does not rival Newman and Froude at their
best. But he never, as they sometimes do, falls into loose and
slipshod writing. He was the fine flower of the old Oxford
education, growing in hedged gardens, sheltered from the winds of
heaven, such as Catullus painted in everlasting colours long
centuries ago. Froude was a man of the world, who knew the classics,
and the minds of men, and cities, and governments, and the various
races which make up the medley of the universe. He wrote for the
multitude who read books for relaxation, who want to have their
facts clearly stated, and their thinking done for them. He satisfied
all their requirements, and yet he expressed himself with the
natural eloquence of a fastidious scholar. Lucky indeed were the
editors who could obtain the services of such a reviewer, and he was
fortunate in being able to recommend with power the poetry of his
friend, Matthew Arnold.*
--
* His recommendation was entirely sincere. "Matt. A.'s Sohrab and
Rustum," he wrote to Clough, "is to my taste all but perfect."
--
Although Froude enjoyed with avidity the conversation of his chosen
friends, he was not satisfied with intellectual epicureanism. He was
resolved to make for himself a name, to leave behind him some not
unworthy memorial. The history of the Reformation attracted him
strongly. If an historian is a man of science, or a mere chronicler,
then certainly Froude was not an historian. He made no claim to be
impartial. He held that the Oxford Movement was not only endangering
the National Church, but injuring the national character and
corrupting men's knowledge of the past. He believed in the
Reformation first as an historic fact, and secondly as a beneficent
revolt of the laity against clerical dominion. He denied that since
the Reformation there had been one Catholic Church, and as an
Englishman he asserted in the language of the Articles that the
Bishop of Rome had no jurisdiction within this realm of England. He
wanted to vindicate the reformers, and to prove that in the struggle
against Papal Supremacy English patriots took the side of the king.
He was roused to indignation by slanders against the character of
Elizabeth; and he held, as almost every one now holds, that the
attempt to make an innocent saint of Mary Stuart was futile. Even
More and Fisher he refused to accept as candidates for the crown of
martyrdom. They were both excellent men. More was, in some respects,
a great man. They were certainly far more virtuous than the king who
put them to death. But they were executed for treason, not for
heresy, and to clear their memory it is necessary to show that they
had no part in conspiring with a foreign Power against their lawful
sovereign. That Power, the Church of Rome, a Power till 1870, Froude
cordially hated. He regarded it as an obstacle to progress, an enemy
of freedom, an enslaver of the intellect and the soul. The English
Catholics of his own time were mild, honourable, and loyal. Although
they had been relieved of their disabilities, they had no power.
Froude's reading and reflection led him to infer that when the
Church was powerful it aimed a deadly blow at English independence,
and that Henry VIII., with all his moral failings, was entitled to
the credit of averting it. These opinions were not new. They were
held by most people when Froude was a boy. It was from Oxford that
an attack upon them came, and from Oxford came also, in the person
of Froude, their champion.
Froude's historical work took at first the form of essays, chiefly
in The Westminster Review and Fraser's Magazine. The Rolls Series of
State Papers had not then begun, and the reign of Henry was
imperfectly understood. Froude was especially attracted by the age
of Elizabeth, who admired her father as a monarch, whatever she may
have thought of him as a man. It was an age of mighty dramatists, of
divine poets, of statesmen wise and magnanimous, if not great, of
seamen who made England, not Spain, the ruler of the seas. It was
with the seamen that Froude began. His essay on England's Forgotten
Worthies, which appeared in The Westminster Review for 1852, was
suggested by a new, and very bad, edition of Hakluyt. It inspired
Kingsley with the idea of his historical novel, Westward Ho! and
Tennyson drew from it, many years later, the story of his noble
poem, The Revenge. The eloquence is splendid, and the patriotic
fervour stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet. The cruelties
of the Spaniards in South America, perpetrated in the name of Holy
Church, are described with unflinching fidelity and unsparing truth.
For instance, four hundred French Huguenots were massacred in cold
blood by Spaniards, who invaded their settlement in Florida at a
time when France was at peace with Spain. These Protestants were
flayed alive, and, to show that it was done in the cause of
religion, an inscription was suspended over their bodies, "Not as
Frenchmen, but as heretics." Even at this distance of time it is
satisfactory to reflect that these defenders of the faith were not
left to the slow judgment of God. A French privateer, Dominique de
Gourges, whose name deserves to be held in honour and remembrance,
sailed from Rochelle, collected a body of American Indians, swooped
down upon the Spanish forts, and hanged their pious inmates,
wretches not less guilty than the authors of St. Bartholomew, with
the appropriate legend, "Not as Spaniards, but as murderers." "It
was at such a time," says Froude, "and to take their part amidst
such scenes as these, that the English navigators appeared along the
shores of South America as the armed soldiers of the Reformation,
and as the avengers of humanity." Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh, Davis,
Grenville, are bright names in the annals of British seamanship. But
they were not merely staunch patriots, and loyal subjects of the
great Queen; they were pioneers of civil and religious freedom from
the most grievous yoke and most intolerable bondage that had ever
oppressed mankind.
In The Westminster for 1853 appeared Froude's essay on the Book of
Job, which may be taken as his final expression of theological
belief. Henceforward he turned from theology to history, from
speculation to fact. Even his friendship for Frederic Maurice could
not rouse him to any great interest in the latter's expulsion from
King's College. "As thinkers," he wrote to Clough on the 22nd of
November, 1853, "Maurice, and still more the Mauricians, appear to
me the most hopelessly imbecile that any section of the world have
been driven to believe in. I am glad you liked Job, though my
writing it was a mere accident, and I am not likely to do more of
the kind. I am going to stick to the History in spite of your
discouragement, and I believe I shall make something of it. At
any rate one has substantial stuff between one's fingers to be moulding
at, and not those slime and sea sand ladders to the moon 'opinion.'"
Froude pursued his studies, reading all the collections of original
documents in Strype and other chroniclers. Why, he asked himself
should Henry, this bloody and ferocious tyrant, have been so popular
in his own lifetime? Parliament, judges, juries, all the articulate
classes of the community, why had they stood by him? No doubt he
could dissolve Parliament, and dismiss the judges. But to submit
without a struggle, without even protest or remonstrance, was not
like Englishmen, before or since. When Erasmus visited England he
found that the laity were the best read and the best behaved in
Europe, while the clergy were gluttonous, profligate, and
avaricious. No historian ever prepared himself more thoroughly for
his task than Froude. Sir Francis Palgrave, the Deputy Keeper of the
Records under Sir John Romilly, offered to let him see the
unpublished documents in the Chapter House at Westminster which
dealt with the later years of Wolsey's Government, and to the action
of Parliament after the Cardinal' s fall. He examined them
thoroughly, and accepted Parker's proposal that he should write the
history of the period. But he had to leave Plas Gwynant. The London
Library, which Carlyle had founded, sufficed for contributions to
magazines. History was a more serious affair, and it was necessary
for him to be, if not in London, at least near a railway. He
returned to his native county, and took a house at Babbicombe, from
which, after three years, he moved to Bideford. He made frequent
visits to London, where he was the guest of his publisher, John
Parker, at whose table he met Arthur Helps, John and Richard Doyle,
Cornewall Lewis, Richard Trench, then Dean of Westminster, and Henry
Thomas Buckle, once famous as a scientific historian. He called on
the Carlyles at their house in Chelsea, and began an intimacy only
broken by death. Carlyle himself was an excellent adviser in
Froude's peculiar field. He had the same Puritan leanings, the same
sympathy with the Reformation, the same hostility to ecclesiastical
interference with secular affairs, unless, as in the case of John
Knox, the interference was directed against Rome. Froude considered
him not unlike Knox in humour, keenness of intellect, integrity, and
daring. History was the one form of literature outside Goethe and
Burns for which he really cared. He had translated Wilhelm Meister
in 1824, and it was probably at his suggestion that Froude
translated Elective Affinities for Bohn's Library in 1850. Scottish
history and Scottish character Carlyle knew as he knew his Bible.
His assistance and encouragement, which were freely given, proved
invaluable to Froude.
Froude settled steadily down to work, dividing his time between
London and Devonshire. Shooting and fishing had for the time to be
dropped. For recreation he joined an archery club, where, as James
Spedding told him, you were always sure of your game. In after life
Froude, who never bore malice, used to say that his father had been
right in leaving him to his own resources, and that the necessity of
providing for himself was, in his instance, as in so many others,
the foundation of his career. He owed much to his publisher, John
Parker, who was liberal, generous, and confiding. Publishers, like
mothers-in-law, have got a bad name from bad jokes. Parker, by
trusting Froude, and relieving him from anxiety while he wrote,
smoothed the way for a memorable contribution to English history
which after many vicissitudes has now an established place as a work
of genius and research.
The principles on which he worked are explained in a contribution to
the volume of Oxford Essays for the year 1855. The subject of this
brilliant though forgotten paper is the best means of teaching
English history, and the author's judgments upon modern historians
are peculiar. Hume and Hallam, the latter of whom was still living,
are indiscriminately condemned. Macaulay, whose first two volumes
were already famous, is ignored. The Oxford examiners are severely
censured for prescribing Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors as
authoritative, and Carlyle's Cromwell, a collection of materials
rather than a book, is pronounced to be the one good modern history,
though Froude denounces, with friendly candour, Carlyle's
"distempered antagonism to the prevailing fashions of the age." The
most characteristic part of this essay, however, is that which
recommends the Statutes, with their preambles, as the best text-
book, and the following passage would be confidently assigned by
most critics to the History itself:
"Who now questions, to mention an extreme instance, that Anne
Boleyn's death was the result of the licentious caprice of Henry?
and yet her own father, the Earl of Wiltshire, her uncle, the Duke
of Norfolk, the hero of Flodden Field, the Privy Council, the House
of Lords, the Archbishop and Bishopsm, the House of Commons, the
Grand Jury of Middlesex, and three other juries, assented without,
as far as we know, an opposing voice, to the proofs of her guilt,
and approved of the execution of the sentence against her."
Froude was not, however, so much absorbed in the work of his life
that he could not form and express strong opinions upon the great
events passing around him. His view of the Russian war and of the
French alliance was set forth with much plainness of speech in a
letter to Max Muller:*
"I felt in the autumn (and you were angry at me for saying so) that
the very worst thing which could happen for Europe would be the
success of the policy with which France and England were managing
things. Happily the gods were against it too, as now, after having
between us wasted sixty millions of money and fifty thousand human
lives, we are beginning to discover. But I have no hope that things
will go right, or that men will think reasonably, until they have
first exhausted every mode of human folly. I still think Louis
Napoleon the d--d'est rascal in Europe (for which again you will be
angry with me), and that his reception the other day in London will
hereafter appear in history as simply the most shameful episode in
the English annals. Thinking this, you will not consider my opinion
good for anything, and therefore I need not inflict it upon you.
Humbugs, however, will explode in the present state of the
atmosphere, and the Austrian humbug, for instance, is at last, God
be praised for it, exploding. John Bull, I suppose, will work
himself into a fine fever about that; but he will think none the
worse of the old ladies in Downing Street who are made fools of: and
will be none the better disposed to listen to people who told him
all along how it would be. However, in the penal fatuity which has
taken possession of our big bow-wow people, and in even the general
folly, I see great ground for comfort to quiet people like myself;
and if I live fifteen years, I still hope I shall see a Republic
among us."
--
* April 30th, 1855.
--
Froude's Republicanism did not last. His opinion of Louis Napoleon
never altered.