"He had a very high standard of right and wrong. He hated all shams, religious, literary, political. The casuistry of the rhetorician, the sophistical make-believe of the worldly ecclesiastic, he could not abide. In public as in private they were abhorrent to him. But while he had a passionate scorn of meanness and truckling, he had an equally passionate reverence for truth, as he understood it, whatever guise it assumed. The mask might be sometimes as impassive as Disraeli's; but behind it was an almost tremulous sensitiveness—a tenderness easily wounded. His presence was striking and impressive,—coal-black eyes, wonderfully lustrous and luminous ("eyes full of genius—the glow from within,"—as Dr John Brown wrote); coal-black hair, only latterly streaked with grey; massive features strongly lined,—massive yet mobile, and capable of the subtlest play of expression. For myself I can say without any reserve that he was, upon the whole, the most interesting man I have ever known."
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Historians from EnglandNovelists from EnglandExistentialistsUniversity of Oxford facultyEditors from England
Original Language: English
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John Skelton, The Table-Talk of Shirley (1895), p. 121
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Anthony_Froude
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James Anthony Froude
James Anthony Froude (April 23 1818 – October 20 1894) was a controversial English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine.
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