companions in the hunting-field or on the moors. But in Dartington Rectory, with all its outward signs of prosperity and welfare, there were the seeds of death. Before Anthony Froude, the youngest of eight, was three years old, his mother died of a decline, and within a few years the same illness proved fatal to five of her children. The whole aspect of life at Dartington was changed. The Archdeacon retired into himself and nursed his grief in silence, melancholy, isolated, austere.

This irreparable calamity was made by circumstances doubly calamitous. Though destined to survive all his brothers and sisters, Anthony was a weak, sickly child, not considered never heard the mention of his mother's name, or was the Archdeacon himself capable of showing any tenderness whatever. In place of a mother the little boy had an aunt, who applied to him principles of Spartan severity. At the mature age of three he was ducked every morning at a trough, to harden him, in the ice-cold water from a spring, and whenever he was naughty he was whipped. It may have been from this unpleasant discipline that he derived the contempt for self-indulgence, and the indifference to pain, which distinguished him in after life. On the other hand, he was allowed to read what he liked, and devoured Grimm's Tales, The Seven Champions of Christendom, and The Arabian Nights. He was an imaginative and reflective child, full of the wonder in which philosophy begins.

The boy felt from the first the romantic beauty of his home. Dartington Rectory, some two miles from Totnes, is surrounded by woods which overhang precipitously the clear waters of the River Dart. Dartington Hall, which stood near the rectory, is one of the oldest houses in England, originally built before the Conquest, and completed with great magnificence in the reign of Richard II. The vast banqueting-room was, in the nineteenth century, a ruin, and open to the sky. The remains of the old quadrangle were a treasure to local antiquaries, and the whole place was full of charm for an imaginative boy. Mr. Champernowne, the owner, was an intimate friend of the Archdeacon, to whom he left the guardianship of his children, so that the Froudes were as much at home in their squire's house as in the parsonage itself. Although most of his brothers and sisters were too old to be his companions, the group in which his first years were passed was an unusually spirited and vivacious one. Newman, who was one of Hurrell's visitors from Oxford, has described the young girls "blooming and in high spirits," full of gaiety and charm.*

— * Newman's Letters and Correspondence, ii. 73. —

The Froudes were a remarkable family. They had strong characters and decided tastes, but they had not their father's conventionality and preference for the high roads of life. They were devoted to sport, and at the same time abounded in mental vigour. All the brothers had the gift of drawing. John, though forced into a lawyer's office, would if left to himself have become an artist by profession. The nearest to Anthony in age was William, afterwards widely celebrated as a naval engineer. Then came Robert, the most attractive of the boys. A splendid athlete, compared by Anthony with a Greek statue, he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. The influence of his genial kindness was never forgotten by his youngest brother; but there was a stronger and more dominating personality of which the effect was less beneficial to a sensitive and nervous child.

Richard Hurrell Froude is regarded by High Churchmen as an originator of the Oxford Movement, and he impressed all his contemporaries by the brilliancy of his gifts. Dean Church went so far as to compare him with Pascal. But his ideas of bringing up children were naturally crude, and his treatment of Anthony was more harsh than wise. His early character as seen at home is described by his mother in a letter written a year before her death, when he was seventeen. Fond as she was of him and proud of his brilliant promise, she did not know what to make of him, so wayward was he and inconsiderately selfish. "I am in a wretched state of health," the poor lady explained, "and quiet is important to my recovery and quite essential to my comfort, yet he disturbs it for what he calls 'funny tormenting,' without the slightest feeling, twenty times a day. At one time he kept one of his brothers screaming, from a sort of teasing play, for near an hour under my window. At another he acted a wolf to his baby brother, whom he had promised never to frighten again."*

— * Guiney's Hurrell Froude, p. 8. —

Anthony was the baby brother, and though this form of teasing was soon given up, the temper which dictated it remained. Hurrell, it should be said, inflicted severe discipline upon himself to curb his own refractory nature. In applying the same to his little brother he showed that he did not understand the difference between Anthony's character and his own. But lack of insight and want of sympathy were among Hurrell's acknowledged defects.

Conceiving that the child wanted spirit, Hurrell once took him up by the heels, and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom of a stream. Another time he threw him into deep water out of a boat to make him manly. But he was not satisfied by inspiring physical terror. Invoking the aid of the preternatural, he taught his brother that the hollow behind the house was haunted by a monstrous and malevolent phantom, to which, in the plenitude of his imagination, he gave the name of Peningre. Gradually the child discovered that Peningre was an illusion, and began to suspect that other ideas of Hurrell's might be illusions too. Superstition is the parent of scepticism from the cradle to the gave. At the same time his own faculty of invention was rather stimulated than repressed. He was encouraged in telling, as children will, imaginative stories of things which never occurred.

In spite of ghosts and muddy water Anthony worshipped Hurrell, a born leader of men, who had a fascination for his brothers and sisters, though not perhaps of the most wholesome kind. The Archdeacon himself had no crotchets. He was a religious man, to whom religion meant duty rather than dogma, a light to the feet, and a lantern for the path. A Tory and a Churchman, he was yet a moderate Tory and a moderate Churchman; prudent, sensible, a man of the world. To Hurrell Dissenters were rogues and idiots, a Liberal was half an infidel, a Radical was, at least in intention, a thief. From the effect of this nonsense Anthony was saved for a time by his first school. At the age of nine he was sent to Buckfastleigh, five miles up the River Dart, where Mr. Lowndes, the rector and patron of the living, took boarders and taught them, mostly Devonshire boys. Buckfastleigh was not a bad school for the period. There was plenty of caning, but no bullying, and Latin was well taught. Froude was a gentle, amiable child, "such a very good-tempered little fellow that, in spite of his sawneyness, he is sure to be liked," as his eldest brother wrote in 1828. He suffered at this time from an internal weakness, which made games impossible. His passion, which he never lost, was for Greek, and especially for Homer. With a precocity which Mill or Macaulay might have envied, he had read both the Iliad and the Odyssey twice before he was eleven. The standard of accuracy at Buckfastleigh was not high, and Froude's scholarship was inexact. What he learnt there was to enjoy Homer, to feel on friendly terms with the Greeks and Trojans, at ease with the everlasting wanderer in the best story-book composed by man. Anthony's holidays were not altogether happy. He was made to work instead of amusing himself, and forced into an unwholesome precocity. Then at eleven he was sent to Westminster.

In 1830 the