ngenuity in and injuring everything that is
noble and good, and so systematic a preference for what is mean and
paltry, that I am not surprised at a young fellow dashing his heels
into the face of it .... When there is any kind of true genius, we
have no right to drive it mad. We must deal with it wisely, justly,
fairly."*

--
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 137.
--

Froude was an excellent editor; appreciative, discriminating, and
alert. He prided himself on Carlyle's approval, though perhaps
Carlyle was not the best judge of such things. His energy was
multifarious. Besides his History and his magazine, he found time
for a stray lecture at odd times, and he could always reckon upon a
good audience. His discourse at the Royal Institution in February,
1864, on "The Science of History," for which he was "called an
atheist," is in the main a criticism of Buckle, the one really
scientific historian. According to Buckle, the history of mankind
was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the
past that made the impossibility of predicting the future. Great men
were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle
more erratic in their behaviour. Political economy was history in
little, illustrating the regularity of human, like all other
natural, forces. But can we predict historical events, as we can
predict an eclipse? That is Froude's answer to Buckle, in the form
of a question.

"Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he
lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the
feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had
grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was
to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as Napoleon's,
are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made
the greatest progress are the arts of destruction." It is difficult
to see the atheism in all this, but the common sense is plain
enough. Froude belonged to the school of literary historians, such
as were Thucydides and Tacitus, Gibbon and Finlay, not to the school
of Buckle, or, as we should now say, of Professor Bury.

In 1865 Froude removed from Clifton Place, Hyde Park, to Onslow
Gardens in South Kensington, where he lived for the next quarter of
a century. In 1868 the students of St. Andrews chose him to be Lord
Rector of the University, and on the 23rd of March, 1869, he
delivered his Inaugural Address on Educati