April
23d, 1818, and died October 20th, 1894. His father was a clergyman,
and the son was sent to Westminster School and to Oriel College,
Oxford. In 1842 he became a fellow of Exeter, and two years later he
was ordained a deacon; an office which he did not formally lay down
until many years later, although his earliest publications, 'Shadows
of the Clouds' and 'Nemesis of Faith,' showed that he had come to
hold--and what perhaps is more to the point, dared to express,--views
hardly compatible with the character of a docile and unreasoning
neophyte.

These books were severely censured by the authorities, and cost
him--to the great benefit of the world--an appointment he had received
of teacher in Tasmania. He resigned his fellowship and took up the
profession of letters, writing much for Fraser and the Westminster,
and becoming for a short period the editor of the former. His _magnum
opus_ is his 'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat
of the Spanish Armada,' in twelve volumes, from 1856 to 1870. His
other principal publications are--'The English in Ireland in the
Eighteenth Century' (1874); 'Caesar' (1879); 'Bunyan' (1880); 'Thomas
Carlyle (first forty years of his life)' (1882); 'Life in London'
(1884); 'Short Studies on Great Subjects' (1882, four series); 'The
Two Chiefs of Dunboy' (1889); 'The English in the West Indies' (1889);
'The Divorce of Catharine of Aragon' (1892); 'The Life and Letters of
Erasmus' (1892); 'English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century' (1892); and
'The Council of Trent.' 'Shadows of the Clouds,' 'The Nemesis of
Faith,' and 'The Two Chiefs of Dunboy' are in the form of fiction; and
though they--especially the last--contain some charming descriptive
passages, and evince some of Froude's power of character sketching,
they serve on the whole to prove that he was not a novelist. The
fortunes of his group of people are of less absorbing interest to him
than questions of social and racial ethics. There is nothing more
annoying than to have an essayist stand behind a story-teller and
interrupt him from time to time with acute philosophical comments on
ultimate causes. The characters of Morty and Sylvester Sullivan are
admirably contrasted Celtic types, but both they and the English
Colonel Goring are a trifle stagy and stiff in their joints. The
murders of the two chiefs, Morty Sullivan and Colonel Goring, are
dramatically told; but Froude's deficient sense of humor, at least of
tha