taught him to ride. It was already showing
itself in Hurrell. His own time could not, he thought, be long.
Meanwhile, he was subjected to petty humiliations, in which the
inventive genius of Hurrell may be traced. He was not, for instance,
permitted to have clothes from a tailor. Old garments were found in
the house, and made up for him in uncouth shapes by a woman in the
village. His father seldom spoke to him, and never said a kind word
to him. By way of keeping him quiet, he was set to copy out Barrow's
sermons. It is difficult to understand how the sternest
disciplinarian, being human, could have treated his own motherless
boy with such severity. The Archdeacon acted, no doubt, upon a
theory, the theory that sternness to children is the truest kindness
in the long run.

Well might Macaulay say that he would rather a boy should learn to
lisp all the bad words in the language than grow up without a
mother. Froude's interrupted studies were nothing compared to a
childhood without love, and there was nobody to make him feel the
meaning of the word. Fortunately, though his father was always at
home, his brother was much away, and he was a good deal left to
himself after Robert's death. Hurrell did not disdain to employ him
in translating John of Salisbury's letters for his own Life of Becket.
No more was heard of the tanner, who had perhaps been only a threat.
While he wandered in solitude through the woods, or by the river,
his health improved, he acquired a passion for nature, and in his
father's library, which was excellent, he began eagerly to read. He
devoured Sharon Turner's History of England, and the great work of
Gibbon. Shakespeare and Spenser introduced him to the region of the
spirit in its highest and deepest, its purest and noblest forms.
Unhappily he also fell in with Byron, the worst poet that can come
into the hands of a boy, and always retained for him an admiration
which would now be thought excessive. By these means he gained much.
He discovered what poetry was, what history was, and he learned also
the lesson that no one can teach, the hard lesson of self-reliance.

This was the period, as everybody knows, of the Oxford Movement, in
which Hurrell Froude acted as a pioneer. Hurrell's ideal was the
Church of the Middle Ages represented by Thomas Becket. In the
vacations he brought some of his Tractarian friends home with him,
and Anthony listened to their talk. Strange talk it seemed. They
found ou