"
[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.]
CHAPTER V
CHEYNE ROW
[1842-1853]
The bold venture of coming to London with a lean purse, few friends,
and little fame had succeeded: but it had been a terrible risk, and the
struggle had left scars behind it. To this period of his life we may
apply Carlyle's words,--made use of by himself at a later date,--"The
battle was over and we were sore wounded." It is as a maimed knight
of modern chivalry, who sounded the _reveil_ for an onslaught on the
citadels of sham, rather than as a prophet of the future that his name is
likely to endure in the history of English thought. He has also a place
with Scott amongst the recreators of bygone ages, but he regarded their
annals less as pictures than as lesson-books. His aim was that expressed
by Tennyson to "steal fire from fountains of the past," but his design
was to admonish rather than "to glorify the present." This is the avowed
object of the second of his distinctly political works, which following
on the track of the first, _Charlism_, and written in a similar spirit,
takes higher artistic rank. _Past and Present_, suggested by a visit to
the poorhouse of St. Ives and by reading the chronicle of _Jocelin de
Brakelond_, was undertaken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a
greater work,--the duty he felt laid upon him to say some thing that
should bear directly on the welfare of the people, especially of the poor
around him.
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