The Life of Froude | Page 3

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