The Life of Froude | Page 5

boy severely in the
presence of the approving Hurrell. Hurrell would have made an
excellent inquisitor. His brother always spoke of him as peculiarly
gifted in mind and in character; but he knew little of human nature, and
he doubtless fancied that in torturing Anthony's body he was helping
Anthony's soul. To alter two words in the fierce couplet of the satirist,
He said his duty, both to man and God, Required such conduct, which
seemed very odd.
Anthony was threatened, in the true inquisitorial spirit, with a series of
floggings, until he should confess what he had not done. At last,
however, he was set down as incorrigibly stupid, and given up as a bad
job. The Archdeacon arrived at the conclusion that his youngest son
was a fool, and might as well be apprenticed to a tanner. Having hoped
that he would be off his hands as a student of Christ Church at sixteen,
he was bitterly disappointed, and took no pains to conceal his
disappointment.
To Anthony himself it seemed a matter of indifference what became of
him, and a hopeless mystery why he had been brought into the world.
He had no friend. The consumption in the family was the boy's only
hope. His mother had died of it, and his brother Robert, who had been
kind to him, and taught him to ride. It was already showing itself in
Hurrell. His own time could not, he thought, be long. Meanwhile, he
was subjected to petty humiliations, in which the inventive genius of
Hurrell may be traced. He was not, for instance, permitted to have
clothes from a tailor. Old garments were found in the house, and made
up for him in uncouth shapes by a woman in the village. His father
seldom spoke to him, and never said a kind word to him. By way of
keeping him quiet, he was set to copy out Barrow's sermons. It is
difficult to understand how the sternest disciplinarian, being human,
could have treated his own motherless boy with such severity. The
Archdeacon acted, no doubt, upon a theory, the theory that sternness to
children is the truest kindness in the long run.
Well might Macaulay say that he would rather a boy should learn to
lisp all the bad words in the language than grow up without a mother.

Froude's interrupted studies were nothing compared to a childhood
without love, and there was nobody to make him feel the meaning of
the word. Fortunately, though his father was always at home, his
brother was much away, and he was a good deal left to himself after
Robert's death. Hurrell did not disdain to employ him in translating
John of Salisbury's letters for his own Life of Becket. No more was
heard of the tanner, who had perhaps been only a threat. While he
wandered in solitude through the woods, or by the river, his health
improved, he acquired a passion for nature, and in his father's library,
which was excellent, he began eagerly to read. He devoured Sharon
Turner's History of England, and the great work of Gibbon.
Shakespeare and Spenser introduced him to the region of the spirit in
its highest and deepest, its purest and noblest forms. Unhappily he also
fell in with Byron, the worst poet that can come into the hands of a boy,
and always retained for him an admiration which would now be
thought excessive. By these means he gained much. He discovered
what poetry was, what history was, and he learned also the lesson that
no one can teach, the hard lesson of self-reliance.
This was the period, as everybody knows, of the Oxford Movement, in
which Hurrell Froude acted as a pioneer. Hurrell's ideal was the Church
of the Middle Ages represented by Thomas Becket. In the vacations he
brought some of his Tractarian friends home with him, and Anthony
listened to their talk. Strange talk it seemed. They found out, these
young men, that Dr. Arnold, one of the most devoutly religious men
who ever lived, was not a Christian. The Reformation was an infamous
rebellion against authority. Liberalism, not the Pope, was antichrist.
The Church was above the State, and the supreme ruler of the world.
Transubstantiation, which the Archdeacon abhorred, was probably true.
Hurrell Froude was a brilliant talker, a consummate dialectician, and an
ardent proselytising controversialist. But his young listener knew a
little history, and perceived that, to put it mildly, there were gaps in
Hurrell's knowledge.
When he heard that the Huguenots were despicable, that Charles I. was
a saint, that the Old Pretender was James III., that the Revolution of
1688 was a crime, and that the Non-jurors were the true confessors of

the English Church, it did not seem to square with his reading,