his very rare copy of the funeral sermon preached by
Mr. Froude at Torquay.

October 30, 1905.

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

IN reading biographies I always skip the genealogical details. To
be born obscure and to die famous has been described as the acme of
human felicity. However that may be, whether fame has anything to do
with happiness or no, it is a man himself, and not his ancestors,
whose life deserves, if it does deserve, to be written. Such was
Froude's own opinion, and it is the opinion of most sensible people.
Few, indeed, are the families which contain more than one remarkable
figure, and this is the rock upon which the hereditary principle
always in practice breaks. For human lineage is not subject to the
scientific tests which alone could give it solid value as positive
or negative evidence. There is nothing to show from what source,
other than the ultimate source of every good and perfect gift,
Froude derived his brilliant and splendid powers. He was a gentleman,
and he did not care to find or make for himself a pedigree. He knew
that the Froudes had been settled in Devonshire time out of mind as
yeomen with small estates, and that one of them, to whom his own
father always referred with contempt, had bought from the Heralds'
College what Gibbon calls the most useless of all coats, a coat
of arms. Froude's grandfather did a more sensible thing by marrying
an heiress, a Devonshire heiress, Miss Hurrell, and thereby doubling
his possessions. Although he died before he was five-and-twenty, he
left four children behind him, and his only son was the
historian's father.

James Anthony Froude, known as Anthony to those who called him by
his Christian name, was born at Dartington, two miles from Totnes,
on St. George's Day, Shakespeare's birthday, the 23rd of April,
1818. His father, who had taken a pass degree at Oxford, and had
then taken orders, was by that time Rector of Dartington and
Archdeacon of Totnes. Archdeacon Froude belonged to a type of
clergyman now almost extinct in the Church of England, though with
strong idiosyncrasies of his own. Orthodox without being spiritual,
he was a landowner as 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
credi