By his commentators he is incessantly quoted: the ‘party of the second part,’ whoever may be writing, successfully holds the stage. It is always instructive to watch reflections of so simple and boyish, yet powerful a personality, on the complex surface of literary interpretation. We count Hurrell Froude’s a long-forgotten name; yet during the sixty-eight years since he died, more serious students than would seem at first thought likely, have felt for this fighting recluse true attraction, or the equally legitimate attraction of repulsion; and their number bids fair to increase. ‘Even as a broken mirror, which the glass In every fragment multiplies, and makes A thousand images of one that was, The same; and still the more, the more it breaks.’ The apprehension of all he was, if not the whole truth about him, should be, in this synod of philosophical friends and deeply interested foes, no difficult thing to win and hold. It may not be usual to treat a man of genius like an unglossed manuscript, and to set him forth impartially with all his variants. As dear Izaak says in his innocent-seeming irony, this is, perhaps, to impale him ‘as if you loved him.’ But a free hearing is good law and good art; diverging guesses, contrasted points of view, exercised by the competent, have their uses, especially in England; and some natures and motives bear analysis gallantly well. The reason, at bottom, for so catholic a treatment of Hurrell Froude, is that Hurrell Froude, with his singular detachment and sound humour, would not have disclaimed it: that is, if he had come to know that posterity would fain hear of him again. And there is but one conclusion to be drawn from the spirited discussions about him. As M. Henri Malo was pleased to write, not so long ago, of his historic hero: ‘_En somme, quelle que soit l’opinion que l’on ait sur son compte, c’est une figure!_’[3] The sole purpose of this unconventional yet homogeneous volume is to show Froude, the mind and the man, in his inferential completeness, and without primary reference to that application of his best-cherished principles which meant so much then, and which means so much now. Without primary reference, we say: yet to part him by one hair’s breadth from the Oxford Movement, who would, and who could? A book which aims at being not a disquisition, not even a biography, but simply a convenient rearrangement of obvious data for the study of a temperament, may plead its own voluntary poverty as a general extenuation. In the matter not of exegesis but of mere quantity, no reader will complain of too little! The chronology of many of the footnotes has been compiled from the _Alumni Oxonienses_, the _Registrum Orielense_, and the _Dictionary of National Biography_. In a book of this nature, appealing chiefly to those who know by heart the golden commonplaces of the educated world, it has not been thought pertinent to ‘overset’ or verify the classical quotations.