"You can buy better at the nearest shop for sixpence," he would say, if he heard them praised.

Yet good judges of art compared them with the early sketches of Turner, and Ruskin afterwards gave them enthusiastic praise.

Mr.Froude had married, when quite a young man, Margaret Spedding, the daughter of an old college friend, from Armathwaite in Cumberland.

Her nephew is known as the prince of Baconian scholars and the J.S.of Tennyson's poem.

She was a woman of great beauty, deeply religious, belonging to a family more strongly given to letters and to science than the Froudes, whose tastes were rather for the active life of sport and adventure.