Closely allied with all this is the question of his so unceremonious dealing with men and things. As we are reminded by his Editors, most of it was impersonal enough, for his mind was set on principles only. ‘I allow hatred is an imperfect state, but I think it is just young people that it becomes’: is a remark from his remembered talk. ‘The most difficult virtue to attain,’ he went on, ‘seems to me the looking on wanton oppressors as mere machines, without feeling any personal resentment.’ This is akin to a curious axiom of Hazlitt’s, which would exonerate almost any cynic and sluggard, that ‘to think ill of mankind, and not to wish them ill, is perhaps the highest genius and virtue.’ Many adherents, unblessed with imagination, of Froude’s own party, might be brought to bay by his Common Room pronouncement that ‘the cultivation of right principles has a tendency to make men dull and stupid.’ (His friend Thomas Mozley goes even farther in the impious generalisation, and accuses Evangelical goodness, ‘mixed with poverty and a certain amount of literary or religious ambition,’ of producing ‘an unpleasant effect on the skin!’) These endearments were, as was but just, not confined by Froude to the elect. He was a hard hitter also against individuals non-Jacobite and non-Apostolical; he made ninepins of living and dead, great and small. On this faculty, however, he was very far from priding himself. No one could be more keenly aware of his sharp tongue than he. Given events as he saw them, and his naked eye to transpierce them, and his store of natural animation fostered in a home atmosphere which was at all times highly charged with criticism, and we have some explanation of his merciless proficiency in adverbs and adjectives, applied impartially to the Bishop Jewels of a past age, or the undergraduates of his own. From the first, he had felt this smartness of speech to be his pitfall. His journals are full of self-accusations, prayers, and resolutions on the subject. ‘To-day, when ―――― called on me, I was forced to watch myself at every turn, for fear of saying something irreligious or uncharitable.’ … ‘I have again been talking freely of people.’ … ‘Not to go out of my way to say disrespectful things … not to say satirical things either in people’s presence or behind their backs, or to take pleasure in exposing them when they seem absurd, or to answer them ill-naturedly when they have said offensive things.’ … ‘I said I thought ―――― an ass, when there was not the least occasion for me to express my sentiments about him. And yet I, so severe on the follies, and so bitter against the slightest injuries I get from others, am now presenting myself before my great Father to ask for mercy on my most foul sins, and forgiveness for my most incessant injuries. “How shall I be delivered from the body of this death!”… I see nothing for it but not to talk at all, and let myself be reckoned stupid and glumpy: and this I will do.