liar saying that men's characters and habits are formed
in the earliest years of their lives. Froude was by profession and
by choice a man of letters. He loved writing, and whatever he read,
or heard, or saw, turned itself without effort into literary shape.
The occupations and amusements of his life can be traced in his
Short Studies. But he had not been reared in a literary atmosphere.
He had been brought up among horses and dogs, with grooms and
keepers, on the moors and the sea. He describes it himself as "the
old wild scratch way, when the keeper was the rabbit-catcher, and
sporting was enjoyed more for the adventure than for the bag." He
never lost his love of sport, and he gave his own son the same training
he had himself. Even in his last illness he liked the young
man to go out shooting, and always asked what sport he had had. His
own father had been a country gentleman, as well as a clergyman, and
his brothers, while their health lasted, all rode to hounds. He
himself never forgot how he had been put by Robert on a horse
without a saddle, and thrown seventeen times in one afternoon
without hurting himself on the soft Devonshire grass. He went out
shooting with his brothers long before he could himself shoot. For
his first two years at Oxford he had done little except ride, and
boat, and play tennis. At Plas Gwynant he was as much out of doors
as in, and even to the last his physical enjoyment of an expedition
in the open air was intense. Yet this was the same man who could sit
patiently down at Simancas in a room full of dusty, disorderly
documents, ill written in a foreign tongue, and patiently decipher
them all. If a healthy mind in a healthy body be, as the Roman
satirist says, the greatest of blessings, Froude was certainly
blessed. The hardness of his frame, and the soundness of his nerves,
gave him the imperturbable temper which Marlborough is said to have
valued more than money itself. Of money Froude was always careful,
and he was most judicious in his investments. He held the Puritan
view of luxury as a thing bad in itself, and the parent of evil,
relaxing the moral fibre. The sternness of temperament he had
inherited from his father was concealed by an easy, sociable
disposition, inclined to make the best of the present, but it was
always there. In the struggle between Knox and Mary Stuart all his
sympathies are with Knox, who had the root of the matter in him,
Calvinism and the moral law. Few imagin