He went out shooting with his brothers long before he could himself shoot.

For his first two years at Oxford he had done little except ride, and boat, and play tennis.

At Plas Gwynant he was as much out of doors as in, and even to the last his physical enjoyment of an expedition in the open air was intense.

Yet this was the same man who could sit patiently down at Simancas in a room full of dusty, disorderly documents, ill written in a foreign tongue, and patiently decipher them all.

If a healthy mind in a healthy body be, as the Roman satirist says, the greatest of blessings, Froude was certainly blessed.