y of England. His subjects were really
English. Erasmus knew England thoroughly, and would have been an
Englishman if he could. The Council of Trent failed to check the
Reformation, and England without the Reformation would have been a
different country, if not a province of Spain. Froude's lectures
were events, landmarks in the intellectual life of Oxford, and the
young men who came to him for advice went away not merely with dry
facts, but with fructifying ideas. Distasteful as modern
Parliamentary politics were to him, the position of the British
Empire in the world was the dominant fact in his mind, and he
regarded Oxford as a training-ground of imperial statesmanship.

He was not made to run in harness, or to act as a coach for the
schools. "The teaching business at Oxford," he wrote to Skelton,
after his last term, "goes at high pressure--in itself utterly
absurd, and unsuited altogether to an old stager like myself. The
undergraduates come about me in large numbers, and I have asserted
in some sense my own freedom; but one cannot escape the tyranny of
the system."* This is severe, though not perhaps severer than the
Inaugural Lecture of Professor Firth. To a critic from the outside
it seems that Boards of Studies should have power to relax their own
rules, and that the utmost possible relaxation should have been
granted in the case of Froude. A famous historian of seventy-four,
if qualified to be a Professor at all, must be capable of managing
his own work so that it may be most useful and efficient. The
restrictions of which Froude, not alone, complained are really
incompatible with Regius Professorships, or at least with the
patronage of the Crown. They imply that the teaching branch of the
University is to be entirely controlled by expert specialists on the
spot. A Regius Professor is a national institution, a public man,
not like a college tutor, who has purely local functions to
discharge. That is a point on which Freeman would have agreed with
Froude, and Stubbs would have agreed with both of them. Froude's
success in spite of limitations does not show that they were wise,
but that genius surmounts obstacles and breaks the barriers which
seek to impede it. "To my sorrow I am popular," he said, "and my
room is crowded. I know not who they are, and have no means of
knowing. So it is not satisfactory. I must alter things somehow.

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* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 222.
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I can't yet tell how." The opportu