aids, his wife and daughters dressed in the
homeliest manner. His name will be remembered for centuries as
having spent his wealth in the very best institutions on which a
country's prosperity depends. Our people spend their fortunes in
buying great landed estates to found and perpetuate their own
family. I wonder which name will last the longest, Mr. Cornell's or
Lord Overstone's." "There is no such thing," he says elsewhere, "as
founding a family, and those who save good fortunes have to give
them to the public when they die for want of a better use to put
them to."

With sincerely religious people, especially if they were
Evangelicals, Froude felt deep sympathy. Patronage of religion he
detested, most of all the form of it which prescribes religion for
other people. An American philosopher called, and told him that,
having failed to find a new creed, he thought the old superstitions
had better be kept up, Popery for choice. "This," remarks Froude,
"is what I call want of faith. If you can believe that what you are
convinced is a lie may nevertheless exert a wholesome moral
influence on people, and that, whether true or not, or rather though
certainly not true, it is good to be preserved and taken up with,
you are to all practical purposes an atheist."

While he was at Boston Froude saw a great fire, and his description
of it is hardly inferior to the best things in his best books. He
was staying with George Peabody, equally well known in England and
the United States as a philanthropist, "one of the sweetest and
gentlest of beings." "As we were sitting after dinner, the children
said there was a fire somewhere. They heard the alarm bell, and saw
a red light in the sky. Presently we saw flames. Mr. Peabody was
uneasy, and I walked out with him to see. Between the house here and
the town lies the Common or City Park. As we crossed this, the signs
became more ominous. We made our way into the principal street
through the crowd, and then, looking down a cross street full of
enormous warehouses, saw both sides of it in flames. The streets
were full of steam fire-engines, all roaring and playing, but the
houses were so high and large, and the volumes of fire so
prodigious, that their water-jets looked like so many squirts. As we
stood, we saw the fire grow. Block caught after block. I myself saw
one magnificent store catch at the lower windows. In a few seconds
the flame ran up storey after storey, spouting out at the