rectory. A stern, self-contained,
reticent man, he never, in word of deed, confessed his affection for his
youngest son. He was a good horseman, and was passionately fond of open-air
exercises and especially of hunting. His one accomplishment was drawing,
and his sketches in after years earned the praise of Ruskin.

Cast in the same mould, but fashioned by different circumstances, the
archdeacon's eldest son, Richard Hurrell Froude, was a man of greater
intellectual brilliance and even more masterful character. He was one of
the pioneers of the Oxford Movement, and it was only his early death that
deposed him from his place of equality with Newman and Keble and Pusey.
Anthony was a sickly child, and from his earliest years lacked the loving
care of a mother. He was brought up with Spartan severity by his father and
his aunt. The most venial self-indulgence was regarded as criminal. From
the age of three he was inured to hardship by being ducked every morning in
a trough of ice-cold water. Hurrell Froude felt no tenderness for the
ailing lad. Once, in order to rouse a manly spirit in his little brother,
he took him by the heels, plunged him like another Achilles into a stream,
and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom. Froude has been accused,
and not without justice, of not feeling a proper aversion to acts of
cruelty. The horrible Boiling Act of Henry VIII. excites neither disgust
nor hatred in him; and he makes smooth excuses for the illegal tortures of
the rack and the screw which were inflicted on prisoners by Elizabeth and
her ministers. He had himself been reared in a hardy school; he had been
trained to be indifferent to pain. It may well be that his callousness in
speaking of Tudor cruelties is to be traced to the influences that
surrounded his loveless childhood and youth.

Hurrell Froude was the idol of his younger brothers. He was a man of
brilliant parts, and a born leader of men. His hatred of Radicals and
Dissenters transcended even his father's dislike of them. His conception of
the Church differed widely from that in which the archdeacon had been
reared. To him a clergyman was a priest who belonged to a sacerdotal caste,
and who ought not "to merge himself in the body of the nation." To him the
Reformation was an infamous crime, and Henry VIII. was worse than the
Bluebeard of the nursery. His hero was Thomas a Becket. He wrote a sketch
of his life and career, which he did not live to finish. His fri