birthplace. He was at the Hadleigh meeting, in July 1833, when the
foundations of the movement were laid; he went abroad that winter, and
was not much in England afterwards. It was through correspondence that
he kept up his intercourse with his friends.

Thus he was early cut off from direct and personal action on the course
which things took. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that his
influence on the line taken and on the minds of others was
inconsiderable. It would be more true to say that with one exception no
one was more responsible for the impulse which led to the movement; no
one had more to do with shaping its distinct aims and its moral spirit
and character in its first stage; no one was more daring and more clear,
as far as he saw, in what he was prepared for. There was no one to whom
his friends so much looked up with admiration and enthusiasm. There was
no "wasted shade"[19] in Hurrell Froude's disabled, prematurely
shortened life.

Like Henry Martyn he was made by strong and even merciless
self-discipline over a strong and for a long time refractory nature. He
was a man of great gifts, with much that was most attractive and noble;
but joined with this them was originally in his character a vein of
perversity and mischief, always in danger of breaking out, and with
which he kept up a long and painful struggle. His inmost thought and
knowledge of himself have been laid bare in the papers which his friends
published after his death. He was in the habit of probing his motives to
the bottom, and of recording without mercy what he thought his
self-deceits and affectations. The religious world of the day made merry
over his methods of self-discipline; but whatever may be said of them,
and such things are not easy to judge of, one thing is manifest, that
they were true and sincere efforts to conquer what he thought evil in