CHAPTER III.
LIBERTY Froude's position was now, from a worldly point of view, deplorable.
For the antagonism of High Churchmen he was of course prepared.
"Never mind," he wrote to Clough of The Nemesis, "if the Puseyites hate it; they must fear it, and it will work in the mind they have made sick." But he was also assailed in the Protestant press as an awful example of what the Oxford Movement might engender.

His book was denounced on all sides, even by freethinkers, who regarded it as a reproach to their cause.

The professors of University College, London, had appointed him to a mastership at Hobart Town in Australia, for which he applied the year before in the hope that change of scene might help to re-settle his mind.

On reading the attacks in the newspapers they pusillanimously asked him to withdraw, and he withdrew.

A letter to Clough, dated the 6th of March, 1849, explains his intellectual and material position at this time in a vivid and striking manner.
"I admire Matt.