storical research thought him shallow and superficial.

The period during which Froude was studying the reign of Elizabeth
must be pronounced the happiest of his life. He was a born
historian, and loved research. He had opportunities of acquiring
knowledge opened to no one before, and it concerned those events
which above all others attracted him. His second wife was the most
sympathetic of companions, thoroughly understanding all his moods.
She was fond of society, and induced him to frequent it. Froude was
disinclined to go out in the evening, and would, if he had been left
to himself, have stayed at home. He wrote to Lady Salisbury: "I must
trust to your kindness to make allowance for my old-fashioned ways.
I am so much engaged in the week that I give my Sunday evenings to
my children, and never go out." But when he was in company he talked
better than almost any one else, and he had a magnetic power of
fascination which men as well as women often found quite
irresistible. Living in London, he saw people of all sorts, and the
puritan sternness which lay at the root of his character was
concealed by the cynical humour which gave zest to his conversation.
He had not forgotten his native county, and in 1863 he took a house
at Salcombe on the southern coast of Devonshire. Ringrone, which he
rented from Lord Kingsale, is a beautiful spot, now a hotel, then
remote from railways, and an ideal refuge for a student. "We have a
sea like the Mediterranean," he tells Skelton, "and estuaries
beautiful as Loch Fyne, the green water washing our garden wall, and
boats and mackerel." Froude worked there, however, besides yachting,
fishing, and shooting.

In 1864, for instance, he "floundered all the summer among the
extinct mine-shafts of Scotch politics--the most damnable set of
pitfalls mortal man was ever set to blunder through in the dark."
His study opened on the garden, from which the sea-view is one of
the finest in England. Froude loved Devonshire folk, and enjoyed
talking to them in their own dialect, or smoking with them on the
shore. He was particularly fond of the indignant expostulation of a
poor woman whose husband had been injured by his own chopper, and
obliged in consequence to keep his bed. If, she said, it had been "a
visitation of Providence, or the like of that there," he would have
borne it patiently. "But to come upon a man in the wood-house" was
not in the fitness of things. Froude's favourite places of wors