The Project Gutenberg EBook of Froude's Essays in Literature and History, by
James Froude

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Title: Froude's Essays in Literature and History
With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc

Author: James Froude

Commentator: Hilaire Belloc

Release Date: April 28, 2006 [EBook #18276]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROUDE'S ESSAYS ***

Produced by Michael Madden

Essays on History and Literature

By James Anthony Froude

London: J. M. Dent & Co.,
1906
____

Contents

Arnold's Poems (Westminster Review, 1854)

Words about Oxford (Fraser's Magazine, 1850)

England's Forgotten Worthies (Westminster Review, 1852)

The Book of Job (Westminster Review, 1853)

The Lives of the Saints (Eclectic Review, 1852)

The Dissolution of the Monasteries (Fraser's Magazine, 1857)

The Philosophy of Christianity (The Leader, 1851)

A Plea for the Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties
(Fraser's Magazine, 1863)

Spinoza (Westminster Review, 1855)

Reynard the Fox (Fraser's Magazine, 1852)

The Commonplace Book of Richard Hilles (Fraser's Magazine, 1858)
____

INTRODUCTION

Froude had this merit--a merit he shared with Huxley alone of
His contemporaries--that he imposed his convictions. He fought
against resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent
animosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yet
too strong for that surface to reject him. This combative and
aggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it was
permanent and never suffered a final defeat should arrest any
one who may make a general survey of the last generation in letters.

It was a period with a vice of its own which yet remains to be
detected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another
fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the
past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of
these affected the Victorian era. It was pure--though tainted
with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violence
in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had this
grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily)
that thought was