We are shut off, in a Catholic retreat, from the worries and anxieties of the world." This is not the language of a man who ever suffered seriously from sea-sickness, and Froude's face had an open-air look which never suggested "the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library." But he was of course a laborious student, and nothing refreshed him like a voyage.

On the yacht of his old friend Lord Ducie, as Enthusiastic a sailor and fisherman as himself, he made several journeys to Norway, and caught plenty of big salmon.

He has done ample justice to these expeditions in the last volume of his essays, which contains The Spanish Story of the Armada.

A country where the mountains are impassable, and the fiords the only roads, just suited his taste.

It even inspired him with a poem, Rornsdal Fiord, which appeared in Blackwood for April, 1883, and it gave him health, which is not always, like poetry, a pure gift of nature.
The life of society, and of towns, never satisfied Froude.