"I never," he wrote to Max Muller,+ "I never gave a lecture on an historical subject without a fortnight or three weeks of preparation, and to undertake to deliver forty-two such lectures in six months would be to undertake an impossibility.

If the University is to get any good out of me, I must work in my own way." He did not, however, work in his own way, and the University got a great deal of good out of him all the same.
-- * The house is now, oddly enough, a Catholic convent.
+ April 18th, 1892.
-- Lord Salisbury, in making Froude the offer, spoke apologetically of the stipend as small, but added that the work would be light.

The accomplished Chancellor was imperfectly informed.

The stipend was small enough: the work was extremely hard for a man of seventy-four.
Froude's conscientiousness in preparation was almost excessive.
Every lecture was written out twice from notes for improvement of style and matter.

His audiences were naturally large, for not since the days Mr.Goldwin Smith, who resigned in 1866, had anything like Froude's lectures been heard at Oxford.