he common
rooms, and every variety of perambulators in the parks. London hours
had been adopted, and the society, though by no means frivolous or
ostentatious, was anything rather than monastic. At Oxford, as in
London, Froude was almost always the best talker in the room. He had
travelled, not so much in Europe as in America and the more distant
parts of the British Empire. He had read almost everything, and
known almost every one. His boyish enthusiasm for deeds of adventure
was not abated. He believed in soldiers and sailors, especially
sailors. Creeds, Parliaments, and constitutions did not greatly
attract or keenly interest him. Old as he was by the almanac, he
retained the buoyant freshness of youth, and loved watching the
eights on the river as much as any undergraduate. The chapel
services, especially at Magdalen, brought back old times and tastes.
As Professor of History he became a Fellow of Oriel, where he had
been a commoner in the thick of the Oxford Movement. If the
Tractarian tutors could have heard the conversation of their
successors, they would have been astonished and perplexed. Even the
Essayists and Reviewers would have been inclined to wish that some
things could be taken for granted. Modern Oxford was not altogether
congenial to Froude. While he could not be called orthodox, he
detested materialism, and felt sympathy, if not agreement, with
Evangelical Protestants. Like Bacon, he would rather believe all the
legends of the Talmud than that this universal frame was without a
mind.

Of the questions which absorbed High Churchmen he said, "One might
as well be interested in the amours of the heathen gods." On the
other hand, he had no sympathy with the new school of specialists,
the devotees of original research. He believed in education as a
training of the mental faculties, and thought that undergraduates
should learn to use their own minds. "I can see what books the boys
have read," he observed, after examining for the Arnold Prize, "but
I cannot see that they make any use of what they have read. They
seem to have power of assimilation." The study of authorities at
first hand, to which he had given so much of his own time, he
regarded as the work of a few, and as occupation for later years. The
faculty of thinking, and the art of writing, could not be learned
too soon.

Few indeed were the old friends who remained at Oxford to welcome
him back. Max Muller was the most intimate of them, and amo