When they left the room after dinner he turned to a friend of mine, and said simply, "I think all these bigots ought to be burnt." Such deplorable intolerance was happily rare.

Less rare, perhaps, were his irresistible sense of the ludicrous and irrepressible tendency to sarcasm.

Of a famous clergyman he said, "At least they have not put him into a bishop's apron, the emblem of our first parents' shame." "What can education do for a man," he once asked, "except enable him to tell a lie in five ways instead of one ?" As a rule, Froude, like most good talkers, listened well, and responded readily.

If he had not Carlyle's rich, exuberant humour, he was also without the prophet's leaning to dogmatism and anathema.

Sardonic irony was his nearest approach to an offensive weapon, and even in that he was sparing.
But he had a look which seemed to say, "Don't offer me any theories, or creeds, or speculations, for I have tried them all." Perhaps I may be permitted in this connection to describe my one and only experience of Froude and his ways.