‘A preface of twenty-two pages betrays the Editors’ anxiety to repel a twofold charge: one against themselves, the other against their deceased friend…. When one whose noble and public proofs of great virtue far outweigh the errors of youth, or whose public reputation makes his example, when evil, a warning; and when repentant, a reparation and an encouragement,――when one, in short, like St. Augustine, boldly but humbly reveals to the eyes of the Church the wretchedness of his early sinful life, we admire, in awe, the strange manifestation of a sublime spirit of Christian virtue, and we bless the Divine Wisdom that hath caused it to be vouchsafed to us. But the struggles of one who has not compensated his weaknesses by any noble results, who withdraws from our sight a combatant, and not a victor; who only presents us the spectacle of a frail nature, such as we all may have, wrestling with daily and anxious trials, and not overcoming them; (these, too, not spontaneously exhibited, but transferred from the closet to the public arena)――have neither the grandeur nor the instruction of the other lesson. Still, there may be reasons unknown to us who are not in the secrets of the party, to justify, certainly in their own eyes, this sacrifice of private feeling to a sense of public utility…. [The Editors] would have materially strengthened their reasoning by the following passage in [Mr. Froude’s] Letters to Friends: “There was a passage in a letter I have just received from my father, which made me feel so infinitely dismal that I must write to you about it. He says you have written to him to learn something about me, and to ask what to do with my money. It really made me feel as if I was dead, and you were sweeping up my remains: and by the by, if I were dead, why should I be cut off from the privilege of helping on the Good Cause? I don’t know what money I have left,――little enough, I suspect; but whatever it was, I am superstitious enough to think that any good it could do _in honorem Dei et sacrosanctæ matris ecclesiæ_, would have done something, too, _in salutem animæ meæ_.” From these words, it appears that the author did contemplate his power of doing good to the cause wherein he was so ardently engaged, even after his death.