The Commonplace Book of Richard Hilles (Fraser's Magazine, 1858)
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INTRODUCTION

Froude had this merit--a merit he shared with Huxley alone of
His contemporaries--that he imposed his convictions. He fought
against resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent
animosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yet
too strong for that surface to reject him. This combative and
aggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it was
permanent and never suffered a final defeat should arrest any
one who may make a general survey of the last generation in letters.

It was a period with a vice of its own which yet remains to be
detected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another
fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the
past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of
these affected the Victorian era. It was pure--though tainted
with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violence
in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had this
grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily)
that thought was restrained upon every side. Never in the history
of European letters was it so difficult for a man to say
what he would and to be heard. A sort of cohesive public spirit
(which was but one aspect of the admirable homogeneity of the
nation) glued and immobilised all individual expression. One
could float imprisoned as in a stream of thick substance: one