--
* Guiney's Hurrell Froude, p. 8.
--

Anthony was the baby brother, and though this form of teasing was
soon given up, the temper which dictated it remained. Hurrell, it
should be said, inflicted severe discipline upon himself to curb his
own refractory nature. In applying the same to his little brother he
showed that he did not understand the difference between Anthony's
character and his own. But lack of insight and want of sympathy were
among Hurrell's acknowledged defects.

Conceiving that the child wanted spirit, Hurrell once took him up by
the heels, and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom of a
stream. Another time he threw him into deep water out of a boat to
make him manly. But he was not satisfied by inspiring physical
terror. Invoking the aid of the preternatural, he taught his brother
that the hollow behind the house was haunted by a monstrous and
malevolent phantom, to which, in the plenitude of his imagination,
he gave the name of Peningre. Gradually the child discovered that
Peningre was an illusion, and began to suspect that other ideas of
Hurrell's might be illusions too. Superstition is the parent of
scepticism from the cradle to the gave. At the same time his own
faculty of invention was rather stimulated than repressed. He was
encouraged in telling, as children will, imaginative stories of
things which never occurred.

In spite of ghosts and muddy water Anthony worshipped Hurrell, a
born leader of men, who had a fascination for his brothers and
sisters, though not perhaps of the most wholesome kind. The
Archdeacon himself had no crotchets. He was a religious man, to whom
religion meant duty rather than dogma, a light to the feet, and a
lantern for the path. A Tory and a Churchman, he was yet a moderate
Tory and a moderate Churchman; prudent, sensible, a man of the
world. To Hurrell Dissenters were rogues and idiots, a Liberal was
half an infidel, a Radical was, at least in intention, a thief. From
the effect of this nonsense Anthony was saved for a time by his
first school. At the age of nine he was sent to Buckfastleigh, five
miles up the River Dart, where Mr. Lowndes, the rector and patron of
the living, took boarders and taught them, mostly Devonshire boys.
Buckfastleigh was not a bad school for the period. There was plenty
of caning, but no bullying, and Latin was well taught. Froude was a
gentle, amiable child, "such a very good-tempered little fellow
that, in spite of his sawney