en I can go
where I please, and take with me all the occupations I am fit for.
Alas! it is oneself that one wants really to be rid of. If we did
not ourselves share in the passions and follies that are working
round us we should not be touched by them. I have made up my mind to
leave it all, at all events, as soon as Mr. Carlyle is gone; but the
enchantment which scenery, grand or beautiful, or which simple
country life promises at a distance, will never abide--let us be
where we will. It comes in moments like a revelation; like the faces
of those whom we have loved and lost; which pass before us, and we
stretch our hands to clasp them and they are gone. I came here
yesterday for two or three days. The house is full of the young
generation. They don't attract me .... Whatever their faults,
diffidence is not one of them. Macaulay's doctrine of the natural
superiority of each new generation to its predecessor seems most
heartily accepted and believed. The superb pictures in the house are
a silent protest against the cant of progress. You look into the
faces of the men and the women on the walls and can scarcely believe
they are the same race with us. I have sometimes thought 'the
numbers' of the elect have been really fulfilled, and that the rest
of us are left to gibber away an existence back into an apehood
which we now recognise as our real primitive type."

From the Molt, on the other hand, he wrote:

"It is near midnight. I have just come in from the terrace. The moon
is full over the sea, which is glittering as if it was molten gold.
The rocks and promontories stand out dear and ghost-like. There is
not a breath to rustle the leaves or to stir the painted wash upon
the shore. Men and men's doings, and their speeches and idle
excitement, seem all poor, transient, and contemptible. Sea and
rocks and moonlight looked just as they look to-night before Adam
sinned in Paradise. They remain--we come and go, hardly more
enduring than the moth that flutters in through the window, and we
are hardly of more consequence."

CHAPTER X

THE OXFORD PROFESSORSHIP

ON the 16th of March, 1892, Froude's old antagonist, Freeman, who
had been Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford since Stubbs's
elevation to the Episcopal Bench in 1884, died suddenly in Spain.
The Prime Minister, who was also Chancellor of the University,
offered the vacant Chair to Froude, and after some hesitation Froude
accepted it. The doubt was du