reader. Froude gave to the Protestant cause the same sort
of distinction which Newman had given to the Oxford Movement.
Newman's University sermons are neither learned nor profound. Yet
the preacher's mastery of the English language in all its rich and
manifold resources has, and must always have, an irresistible charm.
The mantle of Newman had fallen on Froude, and Froude had also the
indefatigable diligence of the born historian. None of his mistakes
were due to carelessness. They proceeded rather from the multitude
of the documents he studied and the self-reliance which led him to
dispense with all external aid. He had of course friendly reviewers,
such as William Bodham Donne; afterwards Examiner of Plays, in
Fraser, and Charles Kingsley in Macmillan. Kingsley, however, though
Lord Palmerston made him Professor of Modern History at Cambridge,
was not altogether the best ally for an historian. It was in
defending Froude that Kingsley made his unfortunate attack upon
Newman, which led to his own discomfiture in the first Preface to
the Apologia. Froude was unable to support his champion's irrelevant
and unlucky onslaught. Newman's casuistry was a fair subject for
criticism; his personal integrity should have been above suspicion,
and Kingsley's insinuations against it only recoiled upon himself.
No one, as his History shows, could do ampler justice to individual
Catholics than Froude, and his feelings for Newman were never
altered, either by disagreement or by time.

The first part of the History had just been finished when a sudden
bereavement altered the whole course of Froude's life. On the 21st
of April, 1860, Mrs. Froude died. Her religious opinions had been
very different from her husband's. She had always leant towards the
Church of Rome, though after her marriage she did not conform to it.
He was probably under Mrs. Froude's influence when he wrote his
Essay on the Philosophy of Catholicism in 1851, reprinted in the
first series of Short Studies, which does not strike one as at all
characteristic of him, and is certainly quite different from his
noble discourse on the Book of Job, published two years later. Mrs.
Froude never cared for London, and had always lived in the country.
After her death Froude took for the first time a London house, and
settled himself with his children in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park.

Later in the same year died his publisher, John Parker the younger,
of a painful and distressin