r, a dreamy, poetical High Churchman, devoted to Wordsworth
and Keble, failed to understand his character or to give him an
interest in his work, and a sixth year was added to the lost five.

During this year his brother Hurrell died, and the tragic extinction
of that commanding spirit seemed a presage of his own early doom.
Two of his sisters, both lately married, died within a few months of
Hurrell, and of each other. The Archdeacon, incapable of expressing
emotion, became more reserved than ever, and scarcely spoke at all.
Sadly was he disappointed in his children. Most of them went out of
the world long before him. Not one of them distinguished himself in
those regular professional courses which alone he understood as
success. Hurrell joined ardently, while his life was spared, in the
effort to counteract the Reformation and Romanise the Church of
England. William, though he became a naval architect of the highest
possible distinction, and performed invaluable services for his
country, worked on his own account, and made his own experiments in
his own fashion. Anthony, too, took his line, and went his way,
whither his genius led him, indifferent to the opinion of the world.
His had been a strange childhood, not without its redeeming
features. Left to himself, seeing his brothers and sisters die
around him, expecting soon to follow them, the boy grew up stern,
hardy, and self-reliant. He was by no means a bookworm. He had
learned to ride in the best mode, by falling off, and had acquired a
passion for fishing which lasted as long as his life. There were few
better yachtsmen in England than Froude, and he could manage a boat
as well as any sailor in his native county. His religious education,
as he always said himself, was thoroughly wholesome and sound,
consisting of morality and the Bible. Sympathy no doubt he missed,
and he used to regard the early death of his brother Robert as the
loss of his best friend. For his father's character he had a
profound admiration as an embodiment of all the manly virtues,
stoical rather than Christian, never mawkish nor effeminate.

CHAPTER II

OXFORD

Westminster, it will have been seen, did less than nothing for
Froude. His progress there was no progress at all, but a movement
backwards, physical and mental deterioration. He recovered himself
at home, his father's coldness and unkindness notwithstanding. But
it was not until he went to Oxford that his real intellectual life