The Life of Froude | Page 2

well as a parson, a high and dry Churchman, an active
magistrate, a zealous Tory, with a solid and unclerical income of two or
three thousand a year. He was a personage in the county, as well as a
dignitary of the Church. Every one in Devonshire knew the name of
Froude, if only from "Parson Froude," no credit to his cloth, who
appears as Parson Chowne in Blackmore's once popular novel, The
Maid of Sker. But the Archdeacon was a man of blameless life, and not
in the least like Parson Froude. A hard rider and passionately fond of
hunting, he was a good judge of a horse and usually the best mounted
man in the field. One of his exploits as an undergraduate was to jump
the turnpike gate on the Abingdon road with pennies under his seat,
between his knees and the saddle, and between his feet and the stirrups,
without dropping one.
Although he had been rather extravagant and something of a dandy, he
was able to say that he could account for every sixpence he spent after
the age of twenty-one. On leaving Oxford he settled down to the life of
a country parson with conscientious thoroughness, and was reputed the
best magistrate in the South Hams. Farming his own glebe, as he did,
with skill and knowledge, perpetually occupied, as he was, with clerical
or secular business, he found the Church of England, not then disturbed
by any wave of enthusiasm, at once necessary and sufficient to his
religious sense. His horror of Nonconformists was such that he would
not have a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress in his house. He upheld the
Bishop and all established institutions, believing that the way to heaven
was to turn to the right and go straight on. There were many such
clergymen in his day.
In appearance he was a cold, hard, stern man, despising sentiment,
reticent and self-restrained. But beneath the surface there lay deep
emotions and an aesthetic sense, of which his drawings were the only
outward sign. To these sketches he himself attached no value. "You can
buy better at the nearest shop for sixpence," he would say, if he heard
them praised. Yet good judges of art compared them with the early

sketches of Turner, and Ruskin afterwards gave them enthusiastic
praise. Mr. Froude had married, when quite a young man, Margaret
Spedding, the daughter of an old college friend, from Armathwaite in
Cumberland. Her nephew is known as the prince of Baconian scholars
and the J. S. of Tennyson's poem. She was a woman of great beauty,
deeply religious, belonging to a family more strongly given to letters
and to science than the Froudes, whose tastes were rather for the active
life of sport and adventure. One can imagine the Froudes of the
sixteenth century manning the ships of Queen Bess and sailing with
Frobisher or Drake. For many years Mrs. Froude was the mistress of a
happy home, the mother of many handsome sons and fair daughters.
The two eldest, Hurrell and Robert, were especially striking, brilliant
lads, popular at Eton, their father's 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