might have been cleared up by an autobiography. Some light is given in his account of the 'Oxford Counter Reformation.'[1] His father, he tells us, represented the old order: he was landowner and parson, a hard rider in his youth, and qualified in the opinion of his parishioners to 'lay a ghost' or try a poacher. He was a typical product of a quiet period of 'moral health' when doctrinal controversy had gone to sleep, but people found in religion a light upon the path of duty. We are generally told that the period was one of spiritual torpor and neglect of duty. Froude perhaps, like other people, saw the days of his youth through a beautifying haze; but it is rather odd to find him proceeding to a panegyric upon the state of things which was the outcome of that eighteenth century so steadily denounced by most followers of either Newman or Carlyle. The Oxford Movement, he says, broke up this idyllic state of things; and but for it, he declares, 'scepticism might have continued a harmless speculation of a few philosophers.' Newman and his followers had turned the world upside down. That looks like saying that the earthquake was caused by the first people whom it frightened out of their wits. But, with-
- ↑ Short Studies, vol. iv.
