rking men come
out best. The worst show is made by idle and luxurious grandees.
Authors occupy a middle position, and in Froude's own books "chapter
after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean as if no
compositor had ever laboured in setting type for it. Pale and
illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had
secretly prided myself. A few passages, however, survived here and
there at long intervals. They were those on which I had laboured
least and had almost forgotten, or those, as I observed in one or
two instances, which had been selected for special reprobation in
the weekly journals." The hit at The Saturday Review is amusing
enough, and Froude goes on to plead successfully that though he may
have been ignorant, prejudiced, or careless, no charge of dishonesty
could be established against him. Apart from his own personal case,
the allegory means little more than the gospel of work which is the
noblest part in the teaching of Carlyle. Titled personages come off
badly, and the most ridiculous figure in the motley throng is an
Archbishop. Not much sympathy is shown with any one, except with a
widow who hopes to rejoin her husband, and sympathy is all that
Froude can give her.

Of Froude's friendships much has been said. They were numerous, and
drawn from very different classes. Beginning at Oxford, they increased
rather than diminished throughout his life, notwithstanding the gaps
which death inevitably and inexorably made. To one Fellow of Exeter
who stood by him in his troubles, George Butler, afterwards Canon of
Winchester, he remained always attached. Dean Stanley throughout life
he loved, and another clerical friend, Cowley Powles. Of the many
persons who felt Clough's early death as an irreparable calamity there
was hardly one who felt it more than Froude. His affectionate
reverence for Newman was proof against a mental and moral antagonism
which could not be bridged. After Kingsley's death he wrote, from the
Molt, to Mrs. Kingsley: "Dearest Fanny,--You tell me not to write, so
I will say nothing beyond telling you how deeply I am affected by your
thought of me. The old times are as fresh in my mind as in yours. You
and Charles were the best and truest friends I ever had. We shall soon
be all together again. God bless you now and in eternity.

"Your affectionate. J. A. FROUDE."

"Cowley Powles is here. It was he who first took me to Eversley."

It was when he came to London that Frou