While the fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's the King of glory." As an editor Froude was tolerant and catholic.

"On controverted points," he said, "I approve myself of the practice of the Reformation.

When St.Paul's Cross pulpit was occupied one Sunday by a Lutheran, the next by a Catholic, the next by a Calvinist, all sides had a hearing, and the preachers knew that they would be pulled up before the same audience for what they might say." His own literary judgments were rather conventional.

The mixture of classes in Clough's Bothie disturbed him.

The genius of Matthew Arnold he had recognised at once, but then Arnold was a classical, academic poet.