THE Author of the Volumes now presented to the Christian reader, was the eldest son of the Venerable Robert H. Froude, Archdeacon of Totness, and was born and died in the Parsonage House of Dartington, in the county of Devon. He was born in 1803, on the Feast of the Annunciation; and he died of consumption, on the 28th of February, 1836, when he was nearly thirty-three, after an illness of four years and a half. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, having previously had the great advantage, while at Ottery Free School, of living in the family of the Rev. George Coleridge. He went to Eton in 1816, and came into residence as a commoner of Oriel College, in the spring of 1821. In 1824 he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts, after having obtained on his examination, high, though not the highest honours, both in the Litera Humaniores and the Disciplinæ Mathematicæ et Physicæ. At Easter, 1826, he was elected Fellow of his College, and, in 1827, was admitted to his M. A. degree. The same year he accepted the office of Tutor, which he held till 1830. In December, 1828, he received Deacon's orders, and the year after Priest's, from the last and present Bishops of Oxford. The disorder which terminated his life first showed itself in the summer of 1831; the winter of 1832, and the following spring, he passed in the south of Europe; and the two next winters, and the year between them (1834), in the West Indies. The illness which immediately preceded his death lasted but a few weeks. He left behind him a considerable collection of writings, none prepared for publication; of which the following two volumes form a part. The Journal, with which the first commences, and which is continued in the Appendix, reaches from the beginning of 1826, when he was nearly twenty-three, to the spring of 1828. The Occasional Thoughts are carried on to 1829. The Essay on Fiction was written when he was twenty-three; the Sermons from 1829 to 1833, when he was between twenty-five and thirty. His Letters begin in 1823, when he was 10 twenty, and are carried down to within a month of his death. Those on whom the task has fallen of preparing these various writings for publication, have found it matter of great anxiety to acquit themselves so as to satisfy the claims of duty, which they felt pressing on them in distinct, and, sometimes, apparently opposite directions. Some apology may seem requisite, in the first place, for the very magnitude of the collection; as though authority were being claimed, in a preposterous way, for the opinions of one undistinguished either by station or by known literary eminence. That apology, it is believed, will be found in the truth and extreme importance of the views to the developement of which the whole is meant to be subservient; and also in the instruction derivable from a full exhibition of the Author's character as a witness to those views. This is the plea, which it is desired to bring prominently forward; nothing short of this, it is felt, would justify such ample and unreserved disclosures: neither originality of thought, nor engaging imagery, nor captivating touches of character and turns of expression. |