Biographies
IN reading biographies I always skip the genealogical details. To be born obscure and to die famous has been described as the acme of human felicity. However that may be, whether fame has anything to do with happiness or no, it is a man himself, and not his ancestors, whose li...
"It has not yet become superfluous to insist," said the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge on the 26th of January, 1903, "that history is a scienc...
5. Chapter 5Froude's reputation as an historian was seriously damaged for a time by the persistent attacks of The Saturday Review. It is difficult for the present generation to understand t...
6. Chapter 6Froude had made history the business of his life, and he had no sooner completed his History of England than he turned his attention to the sister people. The Irish chapters in...
8. Chapter 8When James Spedding introduced Froude to Carlyle he made unconsciously an epoch in English literature. For though Froude was incapable of merging himself in another man, as Sped...
9. Chapter 9The two passions of Froude's life were Devonshire and the sea. "Summer has come at last," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley from Salcombe in the middle of September, "after two months o...
7. Chapter 7Before Froude had written the last chapter of The English in Ireland he was visited by the greatest sorrow of his life. Mrs. Froude died suddenly in February, 1874. It had been...
11. Chapter 11He lectures on Erasmus were not public; they were delivered in Froude's private house at Cherwell Edge, and attended only by members of the University reading for the Modern His...
10. Chapter 10ON the 16th of March, 1892, Froude's old antagonist, Freeman, who had been Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford since Stubbs's elevation to the Episcopal Bench in 1884,...
2. Chapter 2Westminster, it will have been seen, did less than nothing for Froude. His progress there was no progress at all, but a movement backwards, physical and mental deterioration. He...
3. Chapter 3Froude's position was now, from a worldly point of view, deplorable. For the antagonism of High Churchmen he was of course prepared. "Never mind," he wrote to Clough of The Neme...
1. Chapter 1IN reading biographies I always skip the genealogical details. To be born obscure and to die famous has been described as the acme of human felicity. However that may be, whethe...