time, and were crude enough in a literary sense to deserve their suppression. The heterodox opinions which he avows have long ceased to possess the charm or the offence of novelty. The books have still an autobiographical interest. Froude protested against an identification of himself with the hero of the later book,[1] and it seems to be even more unfair (though the attempt has been made) to identify him with the hero of the first. That young man has been driven by the brutality of a public school and the harsh treatment of an unsympathetic father to become a liar and a sneak; and I do not suppose that Froude meant to confess that he deserved such epithets. He is, of course, using his own experience, and the young man in question has like himself been employed by Newman to write on the Lives of the Saints, and has been led presumably to the same reflections. He wonders that so keen an observer should have exposed him to so dangerous an ordeal. It has brought him into terrible perplexity. He still 'loves and honours and learns of Newman'; but he also 'loves and honours and learns of Carlyle.' He despises the miserable Anglo-Protestantism as a 'wretched enemy of all
- ↑ Preface to the second edition of the Nemesis of Faith.
