"I came home from the Cape, and almost lived on the way, with Mr. Froude; a mind which I am sure you would have appreciated and enjoyed as thoroughly as I did. I don't know if you are as warm an admirer of his writing as I am; to me there is no English prose equal to some passages of his; such, for instance, as that about the middle of the first chapter of his history—"For indeed a change was coming upon the world." It was rather a sad mind too, sometimes grand, sometimes pathetic and tender, usually cynical, but often relating with the highest appreciation and with wonderful beauty of language some gallant deed of one of his heroes of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. He seemed to have gone through every phase of thought, and come to the end "all is vanity." He himself used to say the interest of life to a thinking man was exhausted at thirty or thirty-five. After that there remained nothing but disappointment of earlier visions and hopes. Thank goodness I have not thought quite so fast! Sometimes there was something almost fearful in the gloom and utter disbelief and defiance of his mind."