the illustrious history-makers, the statesmen and warriors. of bygone centuries? Undoubtedly this does not appear in itself a very high function, nor, on the other hand, dare we claim a very exalted superiority as the vivacious delineator of the period he claims to portray for the historian who passes, so to speak, the events of the past through the mould of his own personality, with all its shortcomings and prejudices, its human likes and dislikes. Whatever additional interest is obtained by this 'personal 'equation,' this infiltration into the past of a certain proportion of the individual essence-of a Froude or Carlyle, it is dearly purchased by the subordination of TIME, with its overpowering greatness, to its puny human recorders-the subjection of an historical painting to the pigments and brushes by which it was achieved.

Froude's labours during the composition of his 'History' were diversified by various essays and reviews. One, which attracted a good deal of attention, was his Essay on the Book ' of Job,' which was afterwards republished in a separate form. In common with others of his short essays, especially with the series of letters or papers above quoted, on the Counter'Reformation at Oxford, this has a peculiar attraction, as indicating the religious questions and problems which had for Froude a most fascinating interest throughout the whole of his life. These occasional essays were afterwards collected and published in four volumes, which contain some of the finest passages in his writings, and the most important contributions to his intellectual, political, and religious creed. We need not, however, stay to consider them here. On the most important of them-those that touch his religious creed-we shall have something further to say when we come to his Erasmus,' when his determinations on such subjects will have the greater weight, as contained, and thereby specially emphasised, in the last-written work of his life.

Another branch of literary activity for which his broad, diversified scholarship, his keen sensitiveness in all such attributes as style and expression, his large acquaintance with modern languages and the literatures pertaining to each, well qualified him, was his editorship, whether as chief or subordinate, of periodicals. Thus, he took charge of Fraser's well-known monthly from about 1860 to 1872. All who had acquaintance with him in this capacity-and the writer of these lines may boast himself to be of the number will bear willing testimony to his unfailing courtesy, his

sympathetic consideration for young beginners, his scrupulous care to point out defects in style, especially in pruning down or wholly eliminating grandiose expressions, ill-chosen flowers of rhetoric, &c., and to cultivate a chaste, simple, dignified style. As to the object of the magazine, the editor's aim was to make it as much as possible an organ for novel and profound thought, with as much diversity and light matter interspersed as might help its forward movement; though whether in practice the magazine was so overweighted with gravity, philosophical and literary, that, like the wheels of Pharaoh's chariot, their ruling spirit drave 'them heavily,' is a suggestion that has been made, albeit we have no right to make it.

A lecturing-tour in the United States, which he took in 1872, may be taken as the commencement of that foreign and colonial moiety of Froude's career as an English literary statesman which at one time excited such a lively interest among his countrymen. The fame of his History,' his essays, and his other literary works, had preceded him, and his tour was on the whole completely successful. He possessed, indeed, most of the qualities of the accomplished lecturer. Besides a deportment of earnest and philosophical gravity, a clear, resonant voice, a distinct emphatic utterance, a dramatic power of expression, conjoined with quiet but appropriate gesture, gave to his graphic periods and picturesque descriptions just that chaste emphasis that best suited them. The exciting element, however, was supplied in this first lecturing-tour in greater quantity than was needed by Froude's controversy with Father Burke, who took umbrage against the anti-Irish-it would be better to describe it as anti-Fenian-tone which marked the lecturer's political views.

We may regard it as a recognition of general historical principles, that had become more and more markedly conservative, that in 1874 Lord Carnarvon gave him his first colonial appointment by sending him to South Africa to inquire into the causes of the Kaffir insurrection. This mission, followed by other expeditions and journeys to Australia, the West Indies, and other colonial possessions, led to the publication of a short series of works on the colonies, marvellous for their picturesque power, but significant no less for the occasionally erratic and perverted criticism of English colonial statesmanship. To be classed with these, though preceding them in point of date, as equal in graphic and descriptive power, as well as in an untrust

worthy estimate of the implicated policy of English statesmen and responsible ministers, was his English in Ireland,' published in 1874.

Of Froude's life-long friendship with Carlyle, and its outcome when he became in due time the literary executor of the prophet of Chelsea, we need here say nothing. Froude's conception of biography had, it is true, long been before his countrymen. Already his gallery of historical portraits had been fairly filled by kings and queens, statesmen and authors, drawn from a large circuit of history and literature, both sacred and profane. His readers had long ago got to recognise the sensational characteristics and processes of the scene-painter-the loud, vivid colouring the likeness whose striking properties were insured by exaggerating features already too prominent-but they had not quite realised what the effect of this historical caricaturing would be on a contemporary portrait. The centuries that intervened between Henry VIII. with his companion portraits of the History of England' gallery and the present day did not exist in the case of Carlyle, and hence the sensationalism that length of years might have subdued assumed a grotesque and repulsive aspect. Those who possessed sufficient insight into the historian's methods were therefore not astonished when they came to read his 'Life of Carlyle;' but the general public, who had no such keenness of perception or faculty of generalisation as to formulate a theory of historical method, were proportionably grieved and scandalised at Froude's Gallery of Carlylean Portraits,' and the commotion it created caused a considerable literary uproar in society.

We have purposely deferred until we could bring it into juxtaposition with the last work of his life-his Erasmus,' that of all his remaining writings to which it bears the greatest resemblance-his monograph on Cæsar. In many respects, especially as regards plan and method, the Cæsar' prepares the way for the great teacher of the Renaissance. In both works the task Professor Froude set before himself appears to be, exceptis excipiendis, as nearly as possible alike. In both cases the characters to whose literary reconstruction and development the Professor had devoted no small measure of time had been invested with an outline which was partly a halo, partly an indistinct fog or mist of enveloping glamour. It was his aim to dissipate the partly mystical, partly glorified gloom by which each character was obscured, and to make each stand forth in its own due

proportion and outline in the true light of historical criticism. Not the least important part of his scheme was the careful observation of the mode by which each illustrious character was evolved and matured, modelled and shaped, by the formative circumstances of their respective ages. Erasmus, as the more perfect life and career, and wielding intellectual and spiritual forces, was, of course, the completer object of observation, while the career of Cæsar, cut off so prematurely, could only show the effect of physical and material prowess. At any rate, both were companion portraits, and the shortcomings of one were rendered perfect by a careful scrutiny of the redundant merits of the other.

We now come to the most remarkable event in what we must always regard as Professor Froude's most remarkable career-almost, it seems, as a kind of dénouement in a somewhat involved fiction. Some fifty years had elapsed since his dismissal from his Exeter College Fellowship, and the interval of non-academic energy had been fairly well crowded with a long list of histories and lectures, proving equally Froude's combined talent and industry. Hence, on the death of Professor Freeman in 1892, all eyes were turned to Froude for a worthy successor. The popular expectation proved to be justified, and he was appointed Regius Professor of History in the University from which he had been compelled to take an immediate and peremptory leave that was equivalent to a rude and ignominious dismissal.

Not often do we meet with a more signal illustration of the changes effected by the whirligig of Time.' Though not unique in the history of a university whose teaching, in opposition to the march of modern progress, has mostly been either stagnant or retrograde, the illustration of new wine proving too potent for the old outworn bottles did not happen with such frequency as not to arrest attention. Not long before occurred another instance where the stone which the traditional builders of English science and erudition had rejected was elevated to the head of the corner. The emotion of the Regius Professor and his audience must have been of a strange but readily imaginable kind when he stood up to address them for his inaugural lecture. Among those seated before him were not a few who could recall the sensation made in the University by the publication by the new radical Fellow of Exeter College of the mischievous 'Nemesis of Faith' and the curious exemplification of the title that occurred when the traditional belief of the University

asserted its claim to punish those denied it. It is true that his subsequent writings appeared to show that his maturer creed was not so rash or, at least, was not so rashly expressed, as in his youthful treatment of the question of Faith versus Reason; still, there was no small divergence left between the faith of the young Froude and the majority of university professors and heads of colleges who joined together to hound him from the protecting shelter and bosom of his Alma Mater. The passionate rhetoric of the Nemesis' had now settled down to a cool, steadfast belief in the principles and conclusions of that mode of Old Testament criticism. Moreover, another Regius Professor had recently set forth theories of the position of the Old Testament Scriptures that far exceeded the notorious preface to the Nemesis of Faith,' so that, if the young radical thinker had moved forward a few steps on the modern exegetical road that assimilated the books of the Bible to those of classical and other ancient literatures, the University, by its authorised teachers, had hurried on the same course, not slowly and cautiously, but by leaps and bounds.

The choice of a theme for the Regius Professor's first course of historical lectures was naturally the object of no small speculation when it was announced there was no difficulty in appreciating its singular appropriateness. Professor Froude was now an old man, but those who were most conversant with his inner life were aware how completely the general direction of that life pursued the indications of its earliest erratic course. Thus his Erasmus' was the matured fruit of long years of thought, of historical and religious speculation on the general subject of religious freedom, and on the particular theme of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.

It would, indeed, have been difficult to suggest a name that better fitted the strange and peculiar exigency of the occasion than that of the great Rotterdam scholar. The illustrious name and noble career covered that period of English and Continental history in which Froude had manifested the greatest interest, on which he had lavished most thoroughly and persistently his historical researches. Erasmus further symbolised for him the scholarship of the Renaissance that aspect of religious freedom which is satisfied with a non-dogmatic search for truth, which is suspicious of an orthodoxy based on religious dogma, and of a religious progress that is attained by adding to dogmas superfluously enigmatic others that induce an even still greater strain on