iplomacy, or any victory in war, and this fact
explains apparently inconsistent admiration of Peel, who though a
Parliamentary statesman, had accomplished a solid achievement for
the benefit of the people. Carlyle in his own writings is an almost
insoluble enigma. To have given the true solution is the supreme
merit of Froude.*

--
* John Nichol, a name still dear in Scotland, formerly Professor
of Literature at the University of Glasgow, who wrote on Carlyle
for Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters in 1892, says in his preface:
"Every critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligation to Mr. Froude
as every critic of Byron to Moore, or of Scott to Lockhart .... I must
here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the
persistent, often virulent, attach directed against a loyal friend,
betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith, and the defective reticence
that often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But
Mr. Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on Sir Walter Scott,
requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with the
most ample authority; that the restrictions under which he was first
entrusted with the MSS. of the Reminiscences and the Letters and
Memorials (annotated by Carlyle himself as if for publication) were
withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached
a practical injunction to communicate the whole."
--

CHAPTER IX

BOOKS AND TRAVEL

The two passions of Froude's life were Devonshire and the sea.
"Summer has come at last," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley from Salcombe
in the middle of September, "after two months of rain and storm. The
fields from which the wrecks of the harvest were scraped up mined
and sprouting now lie basking in stillest sunshine, as if wind and
rain had never been heard of. The coast is extremely beautiful, and
I, in addition to the charms of the place, hear my native tongue
spoken and sung in the churches in undiminished purity." Carlyle
often kept him in London when he would much rather have been
elsewhere. But, wherever he was, he had a ready pen, and his
thoughts naturally clothed themselves in a literary garb. His
enjoyment of books, especially old books, was intense. Reading,
however, is idle work, and idleness was impossible to Froude. On his
return from South Africa, where everything was being done which he
thought least wise, he took up a classical subject, and began to
write a book about Caesa