His magnetic personality drew from people whatever they had, while his ease of manner made them feel at home.

It was perhaps because he never pretended to know anything that only scholars realised how much he knew, and that he seemed to be not so much a man of letters as a man of the world.

Of all the friends he made in later life there was not one that he valued more highly than Lord Wolseley.

"I have been staying," he wrote to his daughter, from South Africa, "with Sir Garnet Wolseley and his brilliant staff.

It was worth a voyage to South Africa to make so intimate an acquaintance with him." After his second return from the Cape, when his social life in London was taken up again, with his eldest daughter in her step- mother's place, there were added to the military and naval officers he had met, the Irish Protestants, who regarded him as their champion, and the wide circle of his ordinary associates, an Africander contingent, made up of all parties in that troubled area.
There were, in fact, few phases of human life with which Froude was not familiar, from Devonshire fishermen to Cabinet Ministers.
Although he knew and admired Mr.Chamberlain, his greatest political friends were Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby, with whom he almost invariably agreed.