and thin, but whose sharpness is the sharpness of conviction
and of a striving determination to achieve conviction in others
---or if he fails in that, at least to leave an enemy smarting.
Everywhere you have up and down his prose those short
parentheses, those side sentences, which are strokes of offence.
Thus on page 199, "We hear---or we used to hear when the
High Church party were more formidable than they are," &c.;
or again, on page 210, "The Bishop of Natal" (Colenso)
has done such and such things, "coupled with certain
arithmetical calculations far which he has a special aptitude."
There are dozens of these in every book he wrote. They
wounded, and were intended to wound.

His intellect may therefore be compared, as I have compared
it, to an instrument or a weapon of steel, to a chisel
or a sword. It was hard, polished, keen, stronger than what
it bit into, and of its nature enduring. This was the first of
the characters that gave him his secure place in English
letters.

The second is his universality--the word is not over-exact,
but I can find no other. I mean that Froude was the exact
opposite of the sciolist and was even other than the student.
He was kneaded right into his own time and his own people.
The arena in which he fought was small, the ideas he combated
were few. He was not universal as those are universal
who appeal to any man in any country. But he was eager
upon these problems which his contemporaries wrangled over.
He was in tune with, even when he directly opposed, the
class from which he sprang, the mass of well-to-do Protestant