letters to his sermons and the papers he prepared for publication. In
his sermons his manner of writing is severe and restrained even to
dryness. If they startle it is by the force and searching point of an
idea, not by any strength of words. The style is chastened, simple,
calm, with the most careful avoidance of over-statement or anything
rhetorical. And so in his papers, his mode of argument, forcible and
cogent as it is, avoids all appearance of exaggeration or even
illustrative expansion; it is all muscle and sinew; it is modelled on
the argumentative style of Bishop Butler, and still more, of William
Law. No one could suppose from these papers Froude's fiery impetuosity,
or the frank daring of his disrespectful vocabulary. Those who can read
between the lines can trace the grave irony which clung everywhere to
his deep earnestness.

There was yet another side of Froude's character which was little
thought of by his critics, or recognised by all his friends. With all
his keenness of judgment and all his readiness for conflict, some who
knew him best were impressed by the melancholy which hung over his life,
and which, though he ignored it, they could detect. It is remembered
still by Cardinal Newman. "I thought," wrote Mr. Isaac Williams, "that
knowing him, I better understood Hamlet, a person most natural, but so
original as to be unlike any one else, hiding depth of delicate thought
in apparent extravagances. _Hamlet_, and the _Georgics_ of Virgil, he
used to say, he should have bound together." "Isaac Williams," wrote Mr.
Copeland, "mentioned to me a remark made on Froude by S. Wilberforce in
his early days: 'They talk of Froude's fun, but somehow I cannot be in a
room with him alone for ten minutes without feeling so intensely
melancholy, that I do not know what to do with myself. At Brightstone,
in my Eden days, he was with me, and I was overwhelmed with the deep
sense which possessed him of yearning which nothing could satisfy and of