others, that the Church could be reformed better from within than from without.

But there were few doctrines of the Church that he could honestly teach, and the straightforward course was to abandon the clerical profession. Nowadays a man in Froude's plight would only have to sign a paper, and he would be free. But before 1870 orders, even deacon's orders, were indelible. Neither a priest nor a deacon could sit in Parliament, or enter any other learned profession. Froude was in great difficulty and distress. He consulted his friends Arthur Stanley, Matthew Arnold, and Arthur Clough. Clough, though a layman, felt the same perplexity as himself. As a Fellow and Tutor of Oriel he had signed the Articles. Now that he no longer believed in them, ought he not to live up his appointments? The Provost, Dr. Hawkins, induced him to pause and reflect. Meanwhile he published a volume of poetry, including the celebrated Bothie, about which Froude wrote to him:

"I was for ever falling upon lines which gave me uneasy twitchings; e.g. the end of the love scene:

"And he fell at her feet, and buried his face in her apron.

"I daresay the head would fall there, but what an image! It chimes in with your notion of the attractiveness of the working business. But our undisciplined ears have divided the ideas too long to bear to have them so abruptly shaken together. Love is an idle sort of a god, and comes in other hours than the working ones; at least I have always found it so. I don't think of it in my working time, and when I see a person I do love working (at whatever it may be), I have quite another set of thoughts about her. . . It would do excellently well for married affection, for it is the element in which it lives. But I don't think young love gets born then. I only speak for myself, and from a very limited experience. As to the story, I don't the least object to it on The Spectator's ground. I think it could not have been done in prose. Verse was wanted to give it dignity. But if we find it trivial, the fault is in our own varnished selves. We have been polished up so bright that we forget the stuff we are made of."

Clough was in politics a Republican, and sympathised ardently with the French Revolution of 1848. So did Charles Kingsley, a Cambridge man, who was at that time on a visit to Exeter. But Kingsley, though a disciple of Carlyle, was also a hard-working clergyman, who held that the masses could be regenerated by Christian Socialism. Froude had no faith in Socialism, nor in Christianity as the Church understood it. In this year, 1848, Emerson also came to Oxford, and dined with Clough at Oriel, where they thought him like Newman. Froude was already an admirer of Emerson's essays, and laid his case before the American moralist. Emerson gave him, as might have been expected, no practical advice, but recommended him to read the Vedas. Nothing mattered much to Emerson, who took the opportunity to give a lecture in London on the Spiritual Unity of all Animated Beings. Froude attended it, and there first saw Carlyle, who burst, characteristically enough, into a shout of laughter at the close. Carlyle loved Emerson; but the Emersonian philosophy was to him like any other form of old clothes, only rather more grotesque than most.

In the Long Vacation of 1848 Froude went alone to Ireland for the third time, and shut himself up at Killarney. From Killarney he wrote a long account of himself to Clough:

"KILLARNEY, July 15, 1848.

"I came over here where for the present I am all day in the woods and on the lake and retire at night into an unpleasant hotel, where I am sitting up writing this and waiting with the rest of the household rather anxiously for the arrival of a fresh wedded pair. Next week I move off across the lake to a sort of lodge of Lord Kenmare, where I have persuaded an old lady to take me into the family. I am going to live with them, and I am going to have her ladyship's own boudoir to scribble in. It is a wild place enough with porridge and potatoes to eat, varied with what fish I may provide for myself and arbutus berries if it comes to starving. The noble lord has been away for some years. They will put a deal table into the said boudoir for me, and if living under a noble roof has charms for me I have that at least to console myself with. I can't tell about your coming. There may be a rising in September, and you may be tempted to turn rebel, you know; and I don't know whether you like porridge, or whether a straw bed is to your—not 'taste,' touch is better, I suppose. It is perfectly beautiful here, or it would be if it wasn't for the swarm of people about one that are for ever insisting on one's saying so. Between hotel-keeper and carmen and boatmen and guides that describe to my honour the scenery, and young girls that insist on my honour taking a taste of the goats' milk, and a thousand other creatures that insist on boring me and being paid for it, I am really thankful every night when I get to my room and find all the pieces of me safe in their places. However, I shall do very well when I get to my lodge, and in the meantime I am contented to do ill. I have hopes of these young paddies after all. I think they will have a fight for it, or else their landlords will bully the Government into strong measures as they call them—and then will finally disgust whatever there is left of doubtful loyalty in the country into open unloyalty, and they will win without fighting. There is the most genuine hatred of the Irish landlords everywhere that I can remember to have heard expressed of persons or things. My landlady that is to be next week told me she believed it was God's doing. If God wished the people should be stirred up to fight, then it was all right they should do it; and if He didn't will, why surely then there would be no fighting at all. I am not sure it could have been expressed better. I have heard horrid stories in detail of the famine. They are getting historical now, and the people can look back at them and tell them quietly. It is very lucky for us that we are let to get off for the most part with generalities, and the knowledge of details is left to those who suffer them. I think if it was not so we should all go mad or shoot ourselves.

"The echoes of English politics which come over here are very sickening: even The Spectator exasperates me with its d—d cold- water cure for all enthusiasm. When I see these beautiful mountain glens, I quite long to build myself a little den in the middle of them, and say good-bye to the world, with all its lies and its selfishness, till other times. I have still one great consolation here, and that is the rage and fury of the sqireens at the poor rates; six and sixpence in the pound with an estate mortgaged right up to high-water mark and the year's income anticipated is not the very most delightful prospect possible.

"The crows are very fat and very plenty. They sit on the roadside and look at you with a kind of right of property. There are no beggars—at least, professional ones. They were all starved-dead, gone where at least I suppose the means of subsistence will be found for them. There is no begging or starving, I believe, in the two divisions of Kingdom Come. I see in The Spectator the undergraduates were energetically loyal at Commemoration—nice boys—and the dons have been snubbed about Guizot. Is there a chance for M—-? Poor fellow, he is craving to be married, and ceteris paribus I suppose humanity allows it to be a claim, though John Mill doesn't. My wedding party have not arrived. It is impossible not to feel a kindly interest in them. At the bottom of all the agitation a wedding sets going in us all there is lying, I think a kind of misgiving, a secret pity for the fate of the poor rose which is picked now and must forthwith wither; and our boisterous jollification is but an awkward barely successful effort at concealing it. Well, good-bye. I hardly