--to use one of his
own images. He told me that the book was not clear, that 'he got no
good of it'--in fact, that it was 'a failure.' It may be a failure,
but 'want of clearness' is certainly not the cause. I fancy he
wanted something else which he did not find, and he would not give
himself the trouble to examine what he did find."

Froude contributed in 1880 to Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters a
critical and biographical sketch of Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress,
as the work of a Dissenter, had been excluded from the Rectory at
Dartington. But Froude was not long in supplying the deficiency for
himself, and his literary appreciation of Bunyan's style was
accompanied by a sincere sympathy with the Puritan part of his
faith. All religious people, he thought, might find common ground in
Bunyan, a man who lived for religion, and for nothing else. Yet even
here Froude's Erastianism, and respect for authority, come into
play. He gravely defends Bunyan's imprisonment in Bedford gaol,
which lasted, with some intermissions, from 1660 to 1672, as
necessary to enforce respect for the law. That such a man as Charles
Stuart should have had power to punish such a man as John Bunyan for
preaching the word of God is a strange comment on the nature of a
Christian country. But it cannot be denied that Charles and his
judges, Sir Matthew Hale among them, provided the leisure to which
we owe the best religious allegories in the language. Nor can it be
said that Froude's apology for the confinement Bunyan is so
repugnant to reason and justice as Gibbon's apology for the
martyrdom of Cyprian.

The General Election of 1880 was regarded by Froude with mixed
feelings.

"I am glad," he wrote to Lady Derby on the 9th of April, 1880, "that
there is to be an end of 'glory and gunpowder,' but my feelings
about Gladstone remain where they were. When you came into power in
1874, I dreamed of a revival of real Conservatism which under wiser
guiding might and would have lasted to the end of the century. This
is gone--gone for ever. The old England of order and rational
government is past and will not return. Now I should like to see a
moderate triumvirate--Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, and your
husband, with a Cabinet which they could control. This too may
easily be among the impossibilities, but I am sure that at the
bottom of its heart the country wants quiet, and a Liberal
revolutionary sensationalism will be just as distasteful to
reas