‘… With regard to Mr. Froude’s treatment of his brother’s writings, I see that what I have said has pained Mr. Froude. I am so far sorry for it; but I do not admit that I said anything beyond fair criticism. I know that the friends of Mr. R. H. Froude were deeply pained by what Mr. J. A. Froude wrote in his Life and Times of Thomas Becket. I cannot say that I was pained, because I never knew Mr. R. H. Froude. He was, to me, neither a friend nor a kinsman, nor a man in whom I had any personal or party interest. But as a student of twelfth-century history, I do owe him a certain measure of thanks as a pioneer in one of my subjects of study. Therefore, if not pained, like his personal friends, I was indignant: because I thought that he was unworthily treated, and that the treatment was the more unworthy because it came from the hands of his own brother. When I spoke of “stabs in the dark,” I meant that the victim (I must use the word) was in the dark. Very few of Mr. Froude’s readers would know that it was his own brother of whom Mr. Froude was speaking, in a way which, brother or no brother, I hold to be wholly undeserved.
‘But if any impartial judge thinks that I ought not to have mentioned the fact of the kindred between the two writers, I regret having done so.’
From ‘The Remains of the Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of Oriel’ [edited by the Rev. John Henry Newman and the Rev. John Keble]. London: Rivingtons, 1838. 2 vols.
‘[Richard Hurrell Froude] was the eldest son of the Venerable Robert H[urrell] Froude, Archdeacon of Totnes, and was born, and died, in the Parsonage House of Dartington, in the county of Devon. He was born in 1803, on the Feast of the Annunciation; and he died of consumption, on the 28th of February, 1836, when he was nearly thirty-three, after an illness of four years and a half. He was educated at Eton and Oxford,
having previously had the great advantage, while at Ottery Free School, of living in the family of the Rev. George Coleridge. He went to Eton in 1816, and came into residence as a Commoner of Oriel College in the spring of 1821. In 1824 he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts, after having obtained, on his examination, high, though not the highest honours, both in the Literæ Humaniores and the Disciplinæ Mathematicæ et Physicæ. At Easter, 1826, he was elected Fellow of his College, and, in 1827, was admitted to his M.A. degree. The same year he accepted the office of Tutor, which he held till 1830. In December, 1828, he received Deacon’s Orders, and the year after, Priest’s, from the last and present Bishops of Oxford.[379] The disorder which terminated his life first showed itself in the summer of 1831; the winter of 1832, and the following spring, he passed in the south of Europe; and the two next winters, and the year between them (1834), in the West Indies. The illness which immediately preceded his death lasted but a few weeks.
‘He left behind him a considerable collection of writings, none prepared for publication: of which the following two volumes form a part. The Journal, with which the first commences, and which is continued in the Appendix, reaches from the beginning of 1826, when he was nearly twenty-three, to the spring of 1828. The Occasional Thoughts are carried on to 1829. The Essay on Fiction was written when he was twenty-three; the Sermons, from 1829 to 1833, when he was between twenty-five and thirty.[380] His Letters begin in 1823, when he was twenty, and are carried down to within a month of his death.
‘Those on whom the task has fallen of preparing these various writings for publication, have found it matter of great anxiety to acquit themselves so as to satisfy the claims of duty, which they felt pressing on them in distinct, and, sometimes, apparently opposite directions.
‘Some apology may seem requisite, in the first place, for the very magnitude of the collection: as though authority were
being claimed, in a preposterous way, for the opinions of one undistinguished either by station or by known literary eminence.