Louise Imogen Guiney

WITH SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1904

CARI
COMMILITIS
ACTA
HONORI
ET NOMINI
J·H·N·
IN PACE

THE epistolary matter in the first section of this volume is drawn from material already in print: chiefly from Part I. of The Remains of the Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of Oriel, published by the Rivingtons in 1838, and, incidentally, from John Henry Newman: Letters and Correspondence to 1845, published by the Longmans in 1890: from one notable work, that is to say, which is wholly forgotten, and from another yet recent, of great and unique interest, which has not yet won its full public appreciation. For the unrestricted use of the desired extracts from these books, the Editor’s grateful thanks are due equally to the representatives of the elder branch of the Froude family, and to Cardinal Newman’s literary executor.

The liberal selection from Hurrell Froude’s Letters which appeared in the Remains is invalidated, to modern curiosity, by manifold suppressions and omissions necessary for private reasons then in force. Some clue, however, is to be found, if it be looked for, towards the identification of those to whom his correspondence was addressed. The Editors of the Remains silently adopted, for the Letters, the same system of differentiation as they had already employed, two years before, in regard to the authorship of the collected poems in Lyra Apostolica: that is to say, in both books ? stands for Keble, d for Newman, e for Robert Wilberforce, and ? for Isaac Williams. As Hurrell Froude’s own contributions to the Lyra had appeared over the signature , it was easy to surmise that Beta in the Remains might refer to his brothers or sisters, and Alpha, by a sort of primacy, to his father: as is certainly the case. But it was more difficult, for instance, to identify ? as Mr. Frederic Rogers, or ? as the Rev. John Frederick Christie: for to these there was no key but that of internal evidence of an elusive sort. The Greek alphabet, in the Remains, served only as a heading to marshal the recipients of the Letters written by Froude; proper names figuring in the course of the Letters were almost in every instance replaced by a blank. The verification of these names will perhaps be accepted, though not all are based on a manuscript reading;[1] and of course no blank has been filled experimentally without due indication of that process. Nor has effort been made, at any point, to fill out sentences, or gaps of any kind, save those caused by the suppression of proper names. This line of procedure, and, indeed, the entire scheme of the rifacciamento, stands subject first and last to the circumstance that the Editor has had no access to the great mass of dated and classified manuscript correspondence now at Edgbaston. As it was impossible to collate the Froude-Newman Letters with the originals, there appeared something supererogatory in reprinting any of the others in their complete form, or including unpublished addenda most kindly placed at the Editor’s disposal, when an exception had to be ruled in regard to the most interesting and most important material of all. Unfortunately, moreover, Froude’s letters to his father, the Archdeacon, to Robert Wilberforce and to Isaac Williams, have perished; and those to Mr. Keble, if existent, had not been recovered by his grandnephew, the Rev. George C. Keble, at the time when this volume went to press. A few letters have been pieced together by comparison of passages, as they stand in the Remains, and in the Newman Correspondence, issued a half-century later. Examination of the fac-simile page of the amusing letter from Barbados, written on December 26, 1834, and of its counterpart in the text here given, copied from that of the Remains, will show that some de-editing might be called for, under the right conditions, in the matter of Hurrell Froude’s edited correspondence. It will be seen, on the whole, that neither close study nor long acquaintance with the subject could keep the reprinting, as it pressed forward, from degenerating into more or less of a game of guesswork. Yet exclusions and limitations may cast a befitting half-light upon used literature of long ago, which was in itself elliptical, and tends to create new ellipses, inasmuch as its purpose now is to throw stress less on historic or theological issues than on human character. Many given data, or few, yield pretty much the same residuum when the personality which reigns over them is as rich and strong as Hurrell Froude’s. Says one of the most penetrating of modern writers:

‘The art of biography has accustomed those who read to expect … as the word implies, the portrayal of a life, of a process: the record of the growth and unfolding of a soul and character. This it is which interests the subjective temper of our days…. Our mind has learnt that its choicest food need not be sought from afar, but lies scattered with the wild flowers by the wayside, and that nothing is so extraordinary as the ordinary. Thus we have come to care less for a full inventory of the events which make up a man’s life, or for the striking nature of those events in themselves, than for such a judicious selection and setting of them as shall best bring out and explain that individuality which is our main interest. We care less for what a man does and more for what he is; and it is mainly as a key to what he is that we study the circumstances which act upon him, and the conduct by which he reacts upon them.’[2] A selection and setting to explain individuality: such is the aim, such (it is to be feared) is only very partially the achievement, of this book.

Concerning its second section a few remarks may be called for. That section actually had, from the first, in the Editor’s intention, the right of way. It is quite independent, not called into auxiliary play as a mere illustrative collection of piÈces justificatives. Many of these essays and reviews have authority; a few have great literary beauty; the Editor’s work, which could not vie with them, has borrowed almost nothing from them, and thus preserved two integrities. Although limits of space forbade the reproduction of any one chapter of appreciable length quite in its entirety, yet there existed no reason, but only the whim of artistic choice, for the inclusion or exclusion of one part of any paper at the cost of another part. The process of making excerpts, at best, has something of disagreeableness and of danger. Where that process cannot be avoided, it is well, at least, if its lever be not a preconceived theory. An Editor not of Froude’s own religious communion should scruple all the more to interfere in any wise with the witnesses. Such lines or pages as are here scored out are not inaccessible in their original forms. It will be seen that they are not deleted to favour any special plea, but are either somewhat irrelevant to the subject in hand, or a repetition of facts and impressions more succinctly stated in other accompanying papers. Where aught of moment is involved, the fullest and clearest expression of it is in every case allowed to carry the field: e.g., Dean Church’s apologetics concerning Froude’s so-called ‘Romanising’ will be found more satisfactory to the uneasy than the paler defence in the first Preface to the Remains. A broad selective principle has ruled the Editor also in minor matters: e.g., a poem of Froude’s own, imbedded in the text of an early review by Lord Blachford, or a poem of his great friend’s imbedded in an analysis by Mr. R. H. Hutton, are, though coveted, left where they are, and are not transferred to the main narrative sketch. A slight overlapping, as it were, is inevitable: what is super-serviceable sometimes serves more than one pen. Nothing written in English about Hurrell Froude which has colour and individuality, has been altogether passed by, though the present scheme is not in the least bibliographical. On the whole, there is set forth a richly varied testimony: comment buttressed on comment, sometimes, and contradiction against contradiction. Everything about the man calls for criticism, and gets it: his private examen of conscience, his verses, his letters, his traditional sayings, his ecclesiastical theory and religious practice; everything, in fact, except his dreaded arguments. These are conspicuously let alone by those who disapprove of them. They lurk, however, beyond the borders of parley, and they constitute the aggressiveness of one, who but for insistence on them, and whatever they imply, was essentially courteous and gentle. By his commentators he is incessantly quoted: the ‘party of the second part,’ whoever may be writing, successfully holds the stage. It is always instructive to watch reflections of so simple and boyish, yet powerful a personality, on the complex surface of literary interpretation. We count Hurrell Froude’s a long-forgotten name; yet during the sixty-eight years since he died, more serious students than would seem at first thought likely, have felt for this fighting recluse true attraction, or the equally legitimate attraction of repulsion; and their number bids fair to increase.

‘Even as a broken mirror, which the glass

In every fragment multiplies, and makes

A thousand images of one that was,

The same; and still the more, the more it breaks.’

The apprehension of all he was, if not the whole truth about him, should be, in this synod of philosophical friends and deeply interested foes, no difficult thing to win and hold.

It may not be usual to treat a man of genius like an unglossed manuscript, and to set him forth impartially with all his variants. As dear Izaak says in his innocent-seeming irony, this is, perhaps, to impale him ‘as if you loved him.’ But a free hearing is good law and good art; diverging guesses, contrasted points of view, exercised by the competent, have their uses, especially in England; and some natures and motives bear analysis gallantly well. The reason, at bottom, for so catholic a treatment of Hurrell Froude, is that Hurrell Froude, with his singular detachment and sound humour, would not have disclaimed it: that is, if he had come to know that posterity would fain hear of him again. And there is but one conclusion to be drawn from the spirited discussions about him. As M. Henri Malo was pleased to write, not so long ago, of his historic hero: ‘En somme, quelle que soit l’opinion que l’on ait sur son compte, c’est une figure!’[3]

The sole purpose of this unconventional yet homogeneous volume is to show Froude, the mind and the man, in his inferential completeness, and without primary reference to that application of his best-cherished principles which meant so much then, and which means so much now. Without primary reference, we say: yet to part him by one hair’s breadth from the Oxford Movement, who would, and who could? A book which aims at being not a disquisition, not even a biography, but simply a convenient rearrangement of obvious data for the study of a temperament, may plead its own voluntary poverty as a general extenuation. In the matter not of exegesis but of mere quantity, no reader will complain of too little!

The chronology of many of the footnotes has been compiled from the Alumni Oxonienses, the Registrum Orielense, and the Dictionary of National Biography. In a book of this nature, appealing chiefly to those who know by heart the golden commonplaces of the educated world, it has not been thought pertinent to ‘overset’ or verify the classical quotations.

Something may be added concerning the illustrations. William Brockedon, before he was famous, once started to paint a life-size head in oil of Hurrell, then aged about eleven. It was left unfinished, and is now in the possession of the young sitter’s namesake and nephew, R. H. Froude, Esq., of Bernstein, Newton Abbot, by whose kindness a half-tone ‘restoration’ of it serves as frontispiece to this book. Outside a casual pencil sketch, it is the only portrait at present known of Hurrell Froude; nor has it ever before been reproduced, save once as a small scratchy characterless detail of a Keble College panorama. The painting was unfortunately abandoned while in its half-chaotic condition: eyebrows and ears are but barely indicated; the entire background, the collar, a portion of the hair growing so wilfully on the large shapely head, remarkable then and always for its even convexity, are a mere disordered wash; and it was difficult to follow, and to fix by process after process, a vision of the beautiful boy, with his melancholy and his racial fire. No idealisation, as need hardly be said, has been attempted. Patience and sincerity, brought to a rather discouraging task, have succeeded, in some measure, in recapturing an imperfect image, and in having it recognised (so far as a man can be recognised in a child), with gratified pleasure, by the one or two known to the Editor who are the enviable rememberers of Hurrell Froude. The reduction of the original head to an almost miniature size justified itself at once in the disappearance of many blemishes. The print from which the block was made is an outcome of the photographic skill and artistic feeling, now historic in England and beyond it, of Mr. Frederick Hollyer. The ‘casual pencil sketch’ just mentioned figures also in this book, and has in even higher degree the preciousness of a unique thing: for the reproduction is made directly from an unaltered original in a portfolio of 1832. Students of that period in England will recall Miss Maria Giberne, the ‘Queen of Tractaria,’ the animated, romantic, and loyal friend of the Newmans, who followed her art with long devotion, and became, later, Sister Maria Pia in the Visitation Convent at Autun, where she died at a great age. Of her, in her early prime, one who knew her well wrote:

‘[Maria Giberne] was always a most excellent talker and narrator, but her great power lay in the portraits she did in chalks. At a very short sitting, and even from memory, she would draw a portrait which was at least perfectly and undeniably true. I have heard her drawings criticised, and her drapery called conventional, but her faces, to my apprehension, were proof against all criticism. Perhaps they are better in outline than when filled up and tinted…. Her interest in the whole [Tractarian] circle was insatiable, and there was hardly anything she would not do and dare for a sight of one she had not yet seen.’[4]

Given, therefore, Miss Giberne’s ardour in the matter, and her frequently-recurring opportunities as a visitor, it would seem almost certain that she would not have let slip any chance of portraying so noticeable a luminary as Hurrell Froude, often absent, like herself, from Oxford, during 1831-1833, and away from it almost altogether afterwards. Her discovered sketch-books, preserved in the hands of relatives and friends, yield, so far, but a single page in which Froude appears. She groups and labels him with other conspirators’ at a historic moment,[5] in the one Oxford Common Room which ‘stank of logic.’ Something in the too quiescent gesture of the graceful person ‘on the box,’ as well as in the nature of the circumstance, make one suspect that the whole was drawn not on the spot, nor from memory, but from hearsay at the time. Were such the case, the implication would be that Miss Giberne had a good prior knowledge of Froude’s face and figure, and even that she was not committing these to paper for the first time. This little drawing is the property of her nephew, George Pearson, Esq., of Manchester; it is owing to his courtesy and kindness that it is here made public.

The picture of Dartington Parsonage, the antique house in the vale three miles from Totnes, Devonshire, where Hurrell Froude was born, and where he died, is from a larger water-colour drawing by Arthur Holdsworth Froude, in the possession of his sister, the Baroness Anatole von HÜgel. The Parsonage, in its mediÆval simplicity, was first sketched by Archdeacon Froude, then the newly-appointed Rector, in 1799; this sketch yet exists on a fly-leaf of the Parish records. He at once rebuilt the whole west wing, planted shrubs and vines, and drained away the pond; but there were no other alterations until after his death and the removal of the family in 1859-60, when his grandson Arthur drew the house from memory. Even now, the porch, and everything to the right of it, upstairs and down, is practically the very same as in Hurrell’s time; elsewhere the gables have disappeared, and the tourelle has changed its place. The Parish Church (of fourteenth century work, like the Hall) is from an old negative by Messrs. Brinley and Son, of Totnes. This view from the south-west shows the low railing over the Froude vault, which lay in the angle of the porch, next the wall. The Church being taken down in 1878, the strong plain Tower was left alone and intact, standing sentinel over the dead; and the large slab shown in the foreground of the modern photograph, covering the burial-place of Hurrell Froude and of his kindred, is as it looks to-day. The print of Oriel College great quadrangle is from a photograph copyrighted many years ago by Messrs. Henry W. Taunt and Co., of Oxford, and here used by their permission. The inner top tier of three windows next the angle of the Chapel marks the rooms occupied by Froude. They are on the second floor of Staircase No. 3, the door being at the right hand as one mounts the stairs. The beautiful Porch and the whole front have since been renovated, and the tall bold Regnante Carolo again runs around the ruined open stone-work parapet, shown in our illustration, which an Oriel man of the Thirties saw every day as he went in and out of Hall.

It remains only to thank the family of William Froude, Esq., and the Rev. Charles Martin, the present Rector of Dartington; the Rev. G. Kenworthy, Vicar of Bassenthwaite, whose generosity and knowledge have supplied the Editor with many biographical data of the Spedding family; the Rev. T. Herbert Bindley for authentic information about Codrington College; the Rev. J. Christie for much painstaking friendliness, and the use of a page of one of the Theta letters for a fac-simile; the Rev. G. A. Williams, and several other kind correspondents of Tractarian lineage, who have patiently answered inquiries. Lastly, a more intimate acknowledgment is especially due to the Rev. W. H. Carey, of SS. Michael and All Angels, Woolwich; for chiefly through the sense of his steady encouragement, based on an enthusiasm for Hurrell Froude, the Editor’s task, more than once interrupted and laid by, was pushed on to its completion.

Oxford, October, 1904

I

SOME MEMORANDA OF HIS LIFE
AND OF HIS IDEALS

FAC-SIMILE SIGNATURE FROM A LETTER OF HURRELL FROUDE TO HIS FRIEND GEORGE DUDLEY RYDER ESQ., (AFTERWARDS REV.), 1832.

(By the kind permission Of the Rev. H. I. D. Ryder, D.D., of the Oratory.)

HURRELL FROUDE

I

SOME MEMORANDA OF HIS LIFE AND HIS IDEALS

THE persons who most compel our interest in this world are not often the great, exemplars of what we call intellectual eminence: they are rather the men and the women of genius. On that ground they win the eye. Vital and unexhausted spirits, under no subjection to results, can afford, if they choose, to die anonymous; and never having established a pact with their times, nor with Time at all, they are contemporary backward and forward as far as thought can reach. Of this strangely numerous company in England, though he be but

stands Newman’s early friend, Richard Hurrell Froude, the lost Pleiad of the Oxford Movement. Akin to some others, names earlier and later, ‘which carry a perfume in the mention,’ he left little to prove and approve himself. Such as he, in the pageant of eternity, are not the tallest harvesters with the most recognisable sheaves. Like Crichton and Falkland and Pergolesi, like Arthur Hallam and Henri Perreyve, he is known to history as it were by a smiling semi-private hint, or a sort of May-orchard coronal which the wind has no power to scatter, rather than by virtue of any personal innings in the complex game of life. He was a mere man of genius. His inheritance was richly varied: of mental currents possible in one cross-bred island, there could hardly be a more spirited blend. ‘The thinkers of the West,’ as an analytic pen has lately written,[6] ‘reveal a certain practical sagacity, a determination to see things clearly, a hatred of cant and shams, a certain “positive” tendency which is one of the notes of purely English thought.’ Exact in the wider application, the sentence has an almost startling appropriateness when it is narrowed down to fit the one ‘thinker of the West’ (not in Mr. Ellis’s lists) with whom these pages deal. Never to maunder, never to mince matters, never to pet an illusion, never to lay down arms while there are ‘cant and shams’ to fight,—all that is very Devonian; and Hurrell Froude, true at every point, was true Devon in this. His ancestral Speddings, on the other hand, had imagination and a love of letters, and were ironic and opinionative after another fashion. They had also, for generation after generation, as an unexpected corollary, a strong turn for science, and even for mechanical science, as the less bookish Froudes, to offset their hard common sense, were restless and romantic lovers of the open air and of the sea. The shy, critical, solitary, but ardent and adventurous character which belonged not only to our particular Fellow of Oriel, but in some measure to all his nearest kindred, seems to have been inherited equally from the contrasted streams which ran in their blood. All Hurrell’s religiousness, all his poetry and fire and penetrative thought, came straight from his beautiful and highly intelligent mother, whom he lost just as he really came to know her, and whom he worshipped during the rest of his life. His stature, colour, and expression, as also his delicacy of constitution, he received through her.

The Speddings were Anglo-Irish, migrating during the sixteenth century to Scotland, then, early in James II.’s time, to Cumberland. John Spedding and his wife Margaret were seated at Armathwaite Hall, in Bassenthwaite parish, Keswick, when their second daughter Margaret, afterwards Mrs. Froude, was born in 1774. Her elder sister Mary, her brothers John, James, Anthony, and William (in order of their age), comprised with her, her father’s family; and she was but seven when he died. Armathwaite Hall was left in the hands of trustees, who so wasted it that when John Spedding, the son, came of age he found his patrimony gone, and resolved to leave the country to join the army, then in the thick of the Peninsular War. Meanwhile, four miles away, at the head of Bassenthwaite Lake lay Mirehouse, the owner of which was Thomas Story, Esquire, a bachelor, attached to his Spedding neighbours. In the most opportune and romantic way, he made young John Spedding his heir, just in time to prevent his self-imposed exile, and in 1802 died, and was succeeded by him in the estate. It was thus that the Speddings, who had occupied Armathwaite Hall for over a century, came ultimately to live at the other end of the Lake. John Spedding married Miss Sarah Gibson of Newcastle. They lived to old age, and had a numerous issue. James Spedding, the distinguished scholar, the intimate friend of Tennyson, and leader of the famous Cambridge set ‘The Apostles,’ known afterwards in the world of letters as the vindicator of Bacon, was their third son. He spent most of his life (1808-1881) at Mirehouse, and is buried not far away, in the old churchyard of Bassenthwaite. He and his knew all the Froudes well; visits were constantly interchanged; and it was he who introduced James Anthony Froude, his cousin, and brother-in-law at one remove, as it were, to Carlyle. For James Spedding’s eldest brother, Thomas Story Spedding, married his cousin Phillis Froude, the second daughter of the household at Dartington.

To revert to the elder generation—Margaret Spedding, her own mother’s namesake, born, as we have seen, in 1774, was dearly loved at home for seven and twenty years; at that somewhat mature age (as it was considered in 1802), she married the Rev. Robert Hurrell Froude, Rector of Dartington in Devonshire. His own people were not less interesting, and even more ancient, than hers. Hurrells, an armigerous family, and Froudes, rising yeomen from Kent, had struck deep and wide roots in Devon soil at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. The second of these was probably a place-name, though there are those who derive it from the Icelandic frod, wise, not from the likelier Celtic ffrwd, a rushing stream.[7] We find the race numerous and active, and settled chiefly about Kingston, and about Modbury, where in the year of Culloden, Richard Hurrell, gentleman, was married to Mistress Phillis[8] Collings. Their daughter, Phillis Hurrell, became the wife of Robert ffroud of Walkhampton, third son of John, to whom descended the Modbury manors of Edmerston and Gutsford; these two lived at Aveton Giffard, and are buried there in the Parish Church, where their monuments still exist. ‘Robert ffroud Armiger’ died young, four years after his marriage, which had for issue one son, and three daughters. Phillis the widow, a person of strong character, lived on for sixty-six years longer, and saw the grave opened, or opening, for nearly all her brilliant and fated grandchildren. Her babes, left fatherless in 1770, were Mary, Margaret, and Elizabeth; her son Robert Hurrell was a posthumous child. The latter was to rise to more than local eminence, known throughout an exceptionally long life as Rector of Dartington, and from 1820 on, as Archdeacon of Totnes in the diocese of Exeter.[9] He matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, in January 1788, aged seventeen, and in due course, in 1795, proceeded Master of Arts. He came from Denbury, of which he was already Incumbent, to his new parish of Dartington, in 1799. Many children were born in Dartington Parsonage to him and to Margaret Spedding his wife, of whom Richard Hurrell Froude, named for his paternal grandfather Richard Hurrell of Modbury, was the eldest. His birth was on March 25, 1803. Certain critics who disliked the aroma, real or imaginary, of the Oxford Movement, seemed to harbour, in after years, a special grudge against Hurrell for his Marian circumstances. It was, as it were, piling offence on offence that he entered the world on the Feast of the Annunciation, and consciously, votively belonged to the College of S. Mary at Oxford. He was privately baptized at home, and with his next brother, carried up the hill to be received in the ancient Church at the Hall gates (again S. Mary’s), on the 17th of April, 1805. Hurrell seems to have been from the first a stormy sort of child, handsome, and odd, and adored by his relatives. Like the young Persians in their national prime, he learned ‘to ride, and to speak truth.’ He was sent early to the Free School at Ottery S. Mary, where he lived in his master’s house. This was the Rev. George May Coleridge, nephew of that poet who has made classic the lovely neighbourhood to all readers of English. He survived until 1847, dear to all the Froudes. (Perhaps it is not generally known that Mr. James Anthony Froude, then in deacon’s orders, was responsible for Mr. Coleridge’s funeral sermon at S. Mary Church, Torquay.) Hurrell was as happy at his first School as a dreamy rebel boy always subject to moods and to home-sickness could well be. Everything was done, at any rate, to keep him happy. His own memories of the green village, with its great minster and its bright stream, seem to have been pleasant ones. A lady who was but a young child during his last months at Dartington recalls his frank smile at drawing in a lottery a picture of Ottery Church, which she had coveted, lotteries not being abhorred then, as now, by Christian folk. Had the winner known of the little girl’s envy, he would certainly have parted with his treasure on the spot; for he was a born de-collector. Hurrell began, almost as soon as he could hold a pen, to draw well, and to write agreeable letters. At thirteen he was sent to Eton. A year or two before, that is, in or about 1814, he sat for his portrait to that lovable interesting man and capable artist, William Brockedon, Archdeacon Froude’s particular protÉgÉ and most grateful friend.[10] It may have been begun as one of many thank-offerings; for some reason, it was left unfinished. Brockedon was a patient person, by all accounts. Perhaps wild little Master Froude, for all his innocent looks, may have been, in the immortal words of Pet Marjorie, ‘whot human nature cant indure.’ The Archdeacon, too, was critical, and thought his friend happiest in sketch-work, and that to finish, with him, was, sometimes, to over-refine. Who could have foreseen that the abandoned canvas was long to take on unique accidental value to persons then unborn who should be interested in his sitter? For though that childish sitter was to live over a score of years longer, and endear himself to men of a certain school of thought for ever, there was no discoverable hand but William Brockedon’s to tell them how he looked. There was not known until the other day a single other portrait, not so much as a silhouette, of a draughtsman associated with so many, both at home and at College, who could draw.

The boy, with his half-indolent, half-clairvoyant way of studying, and his high spirits in and out-of-doors, got on fairly well at Eton,[11] though his years there seem to have made no great impress on his mind and character. He developed, perhaps, too slowly, and too much by instinct and intuition, to be much harmed or helped by a Public School. Winthrop Mackworth Praed was one of his memorable contemporaries there; Edward Bouverie Pusey, though in an upper Form, was another.[12] Like Pusey, Hurrell had a talisman and a safeguard in the love of a pious mother. The extreme natural sympathy between them was heightened by the boy’s fickle health, and his unconscious appeal for continued care. One experience of early invalidism and its results, lasting for some time, drew from Margaret Froude an oblique comment or protest which is enough to make one love and admire her womanliness. She drew up a letter to an imaginary correspondent, which was really intended for her tall son himself. It sounds wholly like a page from the Spectator, in Steele’s tenderest whimsical vein; and it would be an ungenerous lad (her Hurrell certainly knew not how to be ungenerous) who would not be touched by the genuine foreboding sorrow breathing through it. Whether it was ever actually left in his way is doubtful; a passage in his Journal may imply that he knew nothing of it until after her death. Its date lies early in 1820.

‘Sir,—I have a son who is giving me a good deal of uneasiness at this time, from causes which I persuade myself are not altogether common; and having used my best judgment about him for seventeen years, I at last begin to think it incompetent to the case, and apply to you for advice. From his very birth his temper has been peculiar: pleasing, intelligent, and attaching, when his mind was undisturbed, and he was in the company of people who treated him reasonably and kindly; but exceedingly impatient under vexatious circumstances; very much disposed to find his own amusement in teasing and vexing others; and almost entirely incorrigible when it was necessary to reprove him. I never could find a successful mode of treating him. Harshness made him obstinate and gloomy; calm and long displeasure made him stupid and sullen; and kind patience had not sufficient power over his feelings to force him to govern himself. His disposition to worry made his appearance the perpetual signal for noise and disturbance among his brothers and sisters; and this it was impossible to stop, though a taste for quiet, and constant weak health, made it to me almost insupportable. After a statement of such great faults, it may seem an inconsistency to say that he nevertheless still bore about him strong marks of a promising character. In all points of substantial principle his feelings were just and high. He had (for his age) an unusually deep feeling of admiration for everything which was good and noble; his relish was lively, and his taste good, for all the pleasures of the imagination; and he was also quite conscious of his own faults, and, untempted, had a just dislike to them. On these grounds I built my hope that his reason would gradually correct his temper, and do that for him which his friends could not accomplish. Such a hope was necessary to my peace of mind; for I will not say that he was dearer to me than my other children, but he was my first child, and certainly he could not be dearer. This expectation has been realised, gradually, though very slowly. The education his father chose for him agreed with him; his mind expanded and sweetened; and even some more material faults (which had grown out of circumstances uniting with his temper) entirely disappeared. His promising virtues became my most delightful hopes, and his company my greatest pleasure. At this time he had a dangerous illness, which he bore most admirably. The consequences of it obliged him to leave his School, submit for many months to the most troublesome restraints, and to be debarred from all the amusements and pleasures of his age, though he felt, at the same time, quite competent to them. All this he bore not only with patience and compliance, but with a cheerful sweetness which endeared him to all around him. He returned home for the confirmation of his health, and he appeared to me all I could desire. His manners were tender and kind, his conversation highly pleasing, and his occupations manly and rational. The promising parts of his character, like Aaron’s rod, appeared to have swallowed up all the rest, and to have left us nothing but his health to wish for.—After such an account, imagine the pain I must feel on being forced to acknowledge that the ease and indulgence of home is bringing on a relapse into his former habits. I view it with sincere alarm as well as grief, as he must remain here many many months, and a strong return to ill-conduct, at his age, I do not think would ever be recovered. I will mention some facts, to show that my fears are not too forward. He has a near relation, who has attended him through his illness with extraordinary tenderness, and who never made a difference between night and day, if she could give him the smallest comfort, to whom he is very troublesome, and not always respectful. He told her, in an argument, the other day, that “she lied, and knew she did,” without (I am ashamed to say) the smallest apology. I am in a wretched state of health, and quiet is important to my recovery, and quite essential to my comfort; yet he disturbs it, for what he calls “funny tormenting,” without the slightest feeling, twenty times a day. At one time he kept one of his brothers screaming, from a sort of teasing play, for near an hour under my window. At another, he acted a wolf to his baby brother, whom he had promised never to frighten again. All this worry has been kept up upon a day when I have been particularly unwell. He also knows at the same time very well, that if his head does but ache, it is not only my occupation, but that of the whole family, to put an end to everything which can annoy him.

‘You will readily see, dear Sir, that our situation is very difficult and very distressing. He is too old for any correction but that of his own reason; and how to influence that, I know not! Your advice will greatly oblige

‘A very anxious parent,
‘M. F.

‘P.S.—I have complained to him seriously of this day, and I thought he must have been hurt; but I am sorry to say that he has whistled almost ever since.’

The kind relative, who was so ungraciously repaid for her goodness, was his aunt Miss Mary Spedding, the eldest of all her family, devoted to her only sister Margaret, and to that sister’s memory; the baby brother, who must have conceived of the wolf as a perseveringly disagreeable animal, was James Anthony Froude, then nearly two years old. A year later, on February 16, 1821, Margaret Froude breathed her lovely soul away, and was laid to rest next the south porch of Dartington Church, where her children’s feet passed in and out on Sunday mornings over the flagstones, between the first spring flowers. ‘The Froudes were eight in family,’ wrote Isaac Williams, on a happy visit long after. On the morrow of their bereavement, this was the junior roll-call in Robert Froude’s desolate Parsonage:

Richard Hurrell, aged not quite eighteen.
Robert Hurrell, aged sixteen years, ten months.
John Spedding, just fourteen.
Margaret, aged twelve years, nine months.
Phillis Jane, nearly eleven and a half.
William, aged ten years, three months.
Mary Isabella, not quite seven and a half.
James Anthony, under three.

Hurrell Froude was admitted Commoner by the University of Oxford and matriculated at Oriel College, within a few weeks of his mother’s death, on April 13, 1821. His delicate health had kept him back: his father and his brothers all matriculated at seventeen. Robert Froude, ‘Bob,’ was then entering upon his Sixth Form at Eton. Little Margaret began at once, under guidance, her tender and long continued task of comforting her father and mothering the motherless. She found no time to seek her own happiness, till her marriage in 1844,[13] when only her father and herself, William and Anthony, survived. John Spedding Froude died in 1841, thirty-four years old, and, like his two elder brothers, unmarried. Of Phillis, William, Mary, and (James) Anthony, Hurrell’s own annals will have more to say. Beside one of the leafy winding roads of Dartington rose afterwards a little grey almshouse, and over the doorway a stone tablet with this inscription:

‘Impensis Mariae Spedding
pia recordatione sororis suae
Margaretae Froude
haec domus
in perpetuam eleemosynam
extructa est.
Agellum circumjacentem in
eosdem usus erogavit
Henricus Champernowne.

A.D. MDCCCXXXV.’

It must have been building during the last year of Hurrell’s life, and no doubt with his ‘very managing sort of mind’ he worked into it some of his rather primitive Gothic theories. There still is the home which Mary Spedding’s love built, where age and poverty have privacy and peace, and roses at every window, and thankful sweet remembrance of human kindness, as in the ancient time.

Away from home, and without his mother, Hurrell fell silent enough; and his sadness would have hurt and corroded him, had it not been for the exquisite friendship which sprang up between him and his tutor at Oriel. That tutor was John Keble. It is pleasant to think of these two, with their spiritual foreheads and strong chins, in that fashionable Georgian College full of decanters and gold tufts, and ‘rows in quad.’ No one in all England whom Hurrell Froude in his youth was likely to know could have so fostered in him, even by his unconscious presence, whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. According to Mr. J. A. Froude’s Short Studies account, there was no very high level of supernatural religion at Dartington Parsonage. ‘My father,’ he says, ‘was a High Churchman of the old school. The Church itself he regarded as part of the Constitution, and the Prayer-Book as an Act of Parliament which only folly or disloyalty could quarrel with.’ This theory perfectly harmonised with the wonted order and general practice fixed for a century before. The Royal Arms, flanked by the lamentable monuments of all the local gentry, dominated the chancel; the Squire’s pew had its fat cushions, and a stove in the middle, and was walled away from any view of the ignored Communion-table chastely covered with green baize; plebeian hats were piled in the Font, and there was a ‘national custom of bending forward in Church,’ as an almost too fond concession to Christian etiquette. Truthful observers have given us the whole catalogue in print; and it has been corroborated on every side within living memory. The finer spirits who did not turn infidel must have felt all this ugliness to be dreary and hideous enough, though perhaps necessary to feed the sacred spite against the Middle Ages, so Popishly ‘dark’ with candles and incense-coals, pageants and bright Alleluias, brought into the service of God. But to no one in the Church of England before the Oxford Movement, did it seem an abnormal state of things. Nor was it so, dogma being dead. When poor Hurrell’s decided opinions had formed, he must have felt himself in some domestic difficulty. Ritual was nothing to him except as the language of belief: scant where that is feeble, full where that is steadfast and profound; how it can be anything else to man is not quite apparent to an inquiring mind. As he never lived to work out his beliefs very far, he had no drastic changes to suggest in the local ordinances, but he must have dedicated some uphill work to the excellent parent whom he truly reverenced, and ended by making over into a valuable defender of sacramentalism. The numerous clerical progeny of Squire Western, worthies like the famous fox-hunting ‘Passon FreÜde’[14] of his own blood, in another part of Devon, remained faithful to the Constitution and Parliament, to pay up for the Archdeacon’s partial defection.

Hurrell’s attitude towards the mother for whom his heart ached, and towards those who won his fealty at home, discovered itself day by day in letters to Mr. Keble, a record of occasional thoughts, and the private journals which he kept for his own conscience to whet itself upon. Sacred as these pages are, they have been printed before in the opening volume of his Remains; and they prove how very far he was from being a mere intellectual theoriser, oblivious of daily duty and common ties. His strife for perfection, a difficult and joyless one at best, began with these. Some excerpts, scattered or consecutive, will serve to show his sincerity and thoroughness: how his thoughts ran; how he fed upon his mother’s memory; with what lowliness he prayed for the divine help, and with what merciless constancy he learned to discipline himself, arraign his own motives, and master the bitter and sovereign science of self-knowledge.

—‘Yesterday I was very indolent, but … my energies were rather restored by reading some of my mother’s journal at Vineyard. I did not recollect that I had been so unfeeling to her during her last year. I thank God some of her writings have been kept: that may be my salvation; but I have spent the evening just as idly as if I had not seen it. I don’t know how it is, but it seems to me that the consciousness of having capacities for happiness, with no objects to gratify them, seems to grow upon me, and puts me in a dreary way. Lord, have mercy upon me.’

—‘Spent the morning tolerably well; read my mother’s journal and prayers, two hours: I admire her more and more. I pray God the prayers she made for me may be effectual, and that her labours may not be in vain, but that God in His mercy may have chosen this way of accomplishing them; and that my reading them so long after they were made, and without any intention of hers, may be the means by which the Holy Spirit will awaken my spirit to those good feelings which she asked for in my behalf. I hope, by degrees, I may get to consider her relics in the light of a friend, derive from them advice and consolation, and rest my troubled spirit under their shadow. She seems to have had the same annoyances as myself, without the same advantages, and to have written her thoughts down, instead of conversation. As yet they have only excited my feelings, and not produced any practical result.’

—‘Read my mother’s journal till half-past twelve: here and there I think I remember allusions. Everything I see in it sends me back to her in my childhood: it gets such hold of me that I can hardly think of anything else. It is a bad way to give a general account of oneself at the end of a day: people at that time are not competent judges of their actions; besides, everyone ought to be dissatisfied with himself always: it is better to give a detailed account like my mother’s by means of which I may hereafter have some idea of what was my standard of virtue, rather than my opinion of myself.’

—‘O Lord, consider it not as a mockery in me, that day after day I present myself before Thee, professing penitence for sins which I still continue to commit, and asking Thy grace to assist me in subduing them, while my negligence renders it ineffectual. O Lord, if I must judge of the future from the past, and if the prayers which I am now about to offer up to Thee will prove equally ineffectual with those which have preceded them, then indeed it is a fearful thing to come before Thee with professions whose fruitlessness seems a proof of their insincerity! But Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and knoweth my thoughts, independently of the actions which proceed from them. “O that my ways were made so direct that I might keep Thy statutes! I will walk in Thy commandments when Thou hast set my heart at liberty.”’

—‘Read my mother’s journal. I hope it is beginning to do me some serious good, without exciting such wild feelings as it did at first.’

—‘I must fight against myself with all my might, and watch my mind at every turning. It will be a good thing for me to keep an exact account of my receipts and spendings: it will be a check on silly prodigality. I mean to save what I can by denying myself indulgences, in order to have wherewith I may honour God and relieve the poor.’

(To Keble, but never sent.)

—‘Perhaps you may think it very odd, but this summer[15] has been the first time I have had resolution to ask for the papers which they found of my mother’s after her death. The most interesting to me are some prayers, and two fragments of [a] journal, one for the year 1809, I think, and the other in 1815. The prayers seem to have been a good deal later.’

(Not sent either.)

—‘All this summer I have been trying a sort of experiment with myself, which, as I have had no one to talk to about it, has brought on great fits of enthusiasm and despondency, and being conscious at the time of most contemptible inconsistencies, both in my high and dejected feelings, I set to work to keep a journal of them, to answer the purpose of a sort of conversation between my present and my future self: an idea which I got from reading an old journal of my mother’s, which they found after her death, and which I never could make up my mind to look at till this summer.’

—‘I have confessed to myself a fresh thing to be on my guard against. Every now and then I keep feeling anxious that by bringing myself into strict command, I may acquire a commanding air and manner, and am in a hurry to get rid of the punishment of my former weakness. I sometimes try to assume a dignified face as I meet men, and am never content to be treated as a shilly-shally fellow. I must not care the least, or ever indulge a thought, about the impression I make on others;[16] but make myself be what I would, and let the seeming take its course; or, rather, be glad of slights, as from the Lord. This will be a hard struggle. O Lord, give me strength to go through with it!’

—‘I felt as if I have got rid of a great weight from my mind, in having given up the notion of regulating my particular actions, by the sensible tendency I could perceive in them to bring me towards my t? ?a???. I had always a mistrust in this motive; and it seems quite a happiness to yield the direction of myself to a Higher Power Who has said: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”’

—‘It seems to me a great help towards making myself indifferent to present things, to conjure up past events, and distant places and people before me: things that happened at Eton, or Ottery, or in the very early times of childhood. I felt again to-day as if … the secret world of new pleasures and wishes to which I am trying to gain admittance, is a mere fancy. I must be careful to check high[17] feelings, [as] they are certain to become offences in a day or two, and must regulate my practice by faith, and a steady imitation of great examples: in hopes that, by degrees, what I now have only faint and occasional glimpses of may be the settled objects on which my imagination reposes, and that I may be literally hid in the presence of the Lord.’

—‘I might not indeed be too penitent, but penitent in a wrong way. Abstinences and self-mortifications may themselves be a sort of intemperance: a food to my craving after some sign that I am altering. They ought not to be persevered in, farther than as they are instrumental to a change of character in things of real importance: … how hard it is to keep a pure motive for anything!… I will refrain, rather, by forcing myself to talk, and attend to the wants of others [at table] than by constantly thinking of myself.’

—‘Made good resolutions about behaviour when I go home. Never to argue with my father, or remonstrate with him, or offer my advice, unless in cases where I feel I should do so to the [Provost?]. For even if it subjects me to unnecessary inconvenience, it would do so equally in both cases; and, if I would submit to it in one case through pusillanimity, I ought in the other for a punishment. It would be a good way to make opposite vices punish each other so, and be likely to cure both in time. In the same way to behave to Bob and my sisters as I would to [College equals?]: to comply with their wishes, and not interfere with their opinions, except where I would with the latter. I must try at home to be as humble, and submissive, and complying, as I can; and here as resolute and vigorous, till I get to be the same in all places and all company. I do not preclude myself from making amendments in this resolution, till I have left Oxford.’

—‘It has turned out a beautiful day, and fasting will cost but little pain. I have just been shocked at hearing that ——’s acquaintance, Mr. ——, had shot himself yesterday. How strongly it reminds me that I understand little of the things invisible which I talk and think about, when the most terrible occurrences having taken place quite close to me affect me so little! I could work up my feelings easy enough, but it is enthusiasm[18] to anticipate in this way the steady effects of moral discipline; even supposing both effects are, whilst they last, the same. I could not help crying violently just now, on reading over my mother’s paper. The ideas somehow mixed up together, and forced on my thoughts what a condition I may be in as to things unseen, and yet be unconscious of it. O God, keep up in my mind a feeling of true humility, suitable to my blindness and the things that I am among.’

—‘I have just been reading over my account of the time I spent at home last summer…. The great root of all my complicated misdeeds seems to have been (1) A want of proper notions respecting my relations to my father. (2) A notion that I was a competent judge how to make other people happy, by giving a tone to their pursuits. (3) A craving after the pleasures which I admire. (4) Arrogant pretensions to superiority. (5) A wish to make my conduct seem consistent to myself and others. The first is the main point, and when I have carried that, the rest will all go easily. The only way we can ever be comfortable is by our all uniting to make his will our law, and what little I can do towards this will be better accomplished by example than by presumptuous advice…. Nor do I see how I can so well repress my arrogance as by always keeping in mind that I am in the presence of one who is to me the type of the Most High.’

(To Keble.)

—‘Among the other lights which have been gradually dawning on me, one from following the guidance of which I hope I may derive great comfort, has made me conscious of the debt of reverence that I owe my father: not only in that, bearing his sacred name, he is proposed to me as a type of the Almighty upon earth, but that he has, in his high character, so demeaned himself as to become a fortress and rock of defence to all those who are blessed with his protection. Under his shadow I will, by God’s blessing, rest in peace, and will endeavour for the future to esteem his approbation as the highest earthly honour and his love as the highest reward. I feel in this resolution real peace; and while I am conscious of endeavouring to act up to it, will try, as you advise me, to quiet my gloomy apprehensions.’

—‘O my God! I dare no longer offer to Thee my diseased petitions in the words by which wise and holy men have shaped their intercourse between earth and Heaven. Suffer me, with whose vileness they can have had no fellowship, to frame for myself my isolated supplication. O my Father, by Thy power I began to be, and by Thy protection Thou hast continued to me my misused existence: yet I have forsaken Thee, my only Strength, and forgotten Thee, my only Wisdom. I have neglected to obey Thy voice, and gone a-whoring after my own inventions. As soon as I was born, I went astray and spake lies. I loved the delights which Thou hast given me more than Thee who gavest them; and I dreaded the might which Thou hast delegated to man more than Thee the Almighty…. Yet, praised be Thy holy Name, Thou hast not even thus utterly left me destitute; but with hideous dreams Thou hast affrighted me; and with perpetual mortifications Thou hast disquieted me; and with the recollections of bright things fascinated me; and with a holy friend Thou hast visited me. Thou hast sought Thy servant while astray in the wilderness; Thou hast shown me the horrible pit, the mire and clay in which I am wallowing: O mayest Thou, of Thy great goodness, set my feet upon a rock, and order my goings. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Turn Thy face from my sins, and put out all my misdeeds. Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. O give me the comfort of Thy help again, and stablish me with Thy free Spirit…. Bless, O Lord, with Thy constant favour and protection that high spirit whom, as Thy type upon this earth, Thou hast interposed between me and the evils I have merited. Fill him, O Lord, with the fulness of Thy grace, that, running with patience the race which has been set before him, he may finish his course at Thy good time with joyfulness, and find a rest from his labours in the portion of the righteous.’

—‘I will be cautious about talking of myself and my feelings: what I like; whom I admire; what are my notions of a high character; how few people I find to sympathise with me on any subject; and many other egotistical, mawkish, useless matters, about which I have suffered myself to prate. Also, I will avoid obtruding my advice, and taking high grounds to which I have no pretensions.’

—‘Just now, at breakfast,[19] I felt the inconvenience of not omitting an oath in a story I told of Sheridan. I felt directly that I lost ground, and should be unable to make a stand, if conversation were to take a turn I disliked. I must be watchful and strict with myself in this respect: for, if I comply with my father’s wishes, and enter freely into society, I shall have much harder work to fight off my old shuffling vanity, and shall be drawn, from not feeling my own ground, into foolishness and flash, and everything that is disgusting.’

—‘I used to speculate on the delight of keeping fasts upon the river in fine weather, among beautiful scenery, rather than in my dull rooms at Oxford; but last Friday was a real fine day, yet I did not at all turn it to this account. Though I ate little, it was something very different from my Oxford fasts, and still more so from what I then used to picture to myself, when I should get home. I waste time in preparing boats, and thoughts in speculating on schemes for expeditions, and for improving our appointments. Also, I observe other bad effects resulting from my misconduct, which I cannot but regard as signs that good spirits are deserting me. The other evening I had an argument with my father, almost in a sort of tone which I used to feel ashamed of last summer, and which, in the Christmas vacation, I think I was not even tempted to; and when I caught myself getting untuned, it cost me a [severe[20]] effort to check myself; nor was it till the next morning that all the effects of it subsided, and I felt quite good-natured and humble again. In this fight I was greatly helped by the experience of former conflicts, and recollecting the ways I had caught myself in self-deceit, so that it gives me some hope as well as humiliation. I pray God that He will not suffer all my feeble efforts to be wasted, and prove quite ineffectual, and that He will enable me to lie down to-night with a better conscience.’

—‘Just now, in riding home from Denbury,[21] I got arguing with my father about the little chance anyone has of doing good, in a way rather inconsistent with our relative condition; yet, when I thought I was going rather too far, could hardly convince myself that, at any particular moment, it was incumbent on me to stop. It is this self-deceiving disposition that I am afraid of.’

—‘I will brace myself and keep my attention on the alert on this S[alcombe?] expedition, by a vow about my food: I will make my meals as simple as I can, without being observed upon; will take no command upon myself, but obey my father’s instructions to the utmost of my power; will try to make no objections or propositions unless called upon; and that no one may be able to put me out of the way [of self-denial] everyone shall have theirs, however disagreeable they may seem to me.’

—‘We returned to-day, and on reading over these resolutions, which I called a vow, I find I have acted very poorly up to them. I believe they have operated as a sort of check upon me in some respects, that I have been less of an epicure and less of an interferer than I should have been else. But yet, quite at starting, I suggested, when my father proposed going ashore, that it would take a longer time than he calculated on: but this was merely a suggestion. And on one of the evenings when we were by ourselves, I argued about people going to Church in a way very inconsistent with our relative situations; neither was I quite cordial in my acquiescence with propositions of my father’s about minor excursions at S[alcombe?] and feel as if I had pressed unpleasantly on him some of my opinions about tides, and names of places.’

—‘Yesterday, I was talking to [Phill?] about [Peg?[22]]; and among other things, when I said how considerate she was about everybody’s wants, and how she was always on the lookout for an opportunity to relieve them, I said (and have reason enough to say it) that things of that sort did not come into my head. But I am afraid I must confess that I was a little annoyed at [Phill? allowing] that she did not think they did! I cannot accuse myself of having been so insincere as to have laid a trap for a compliment; but I was not quite prepared to find that my negligence was such as to obtrude itself on the observation of those who would always make the best of one. O God! give me grace to look on this as a warning voice from Thee, and let the remembrance of it brace my energies for the future…. Also, I yesterday gave way to a covetous inconsistent wish for a beautiful colt that we happened to see, and which my father had half a mind I should get for my own. I feel all these selfish wishes crowding on me, and have no clear decided rule by which to check them. I think I will always ask myself, when I wish for an elegant superfluity, what business I have to be so much better off than my sisters, and will not allow myself anything I can avoid till I have got them all the things they are reasonably in want of.’

—‘Teach me to be ever mindful of the wants and wishes of others, and that I may never omit an opportunity of adding to their happiness; let each particular of their condition be present with me, what they are doing or suffering. I am most fearfully deficient in this mark of a child of God. Protect me from all covetous desires of the pleasant things which money can procure: the D[enbury?] cottage, the new dining-room window, nice furniture, equipage, musical instruments, or any other thing, in order to obtain which I must lessen my means of benefiting others.

—‘I have done many things to-day that I ought to be ashamed of. For instance: I said to the [Provost?] I had not examined carefully an analysis that I had hardly read a word of. I have assumed, too, a harsh manner in examining. I feel too anxious to show my own knowledge of the subjects on which I am examining. Was very inattentive at morning Chapel, and not sorry to find that there was none in the evening. I believe the day before yesterday I made a bungle in examining W[illy] in Euclid, which made him appear to be doing wrong while he was quite right, but did not discover it in time to rectify it by confession (which I hope I should have done).’

The youth who wrote much else thus singularly and severely of himself, had an almost fierce sincerity. At an early hour, he made up his mind to be in his strength, what many men are said to be in their weakness, ‘nobody’s enemy but his own,’ and he carried out both clauses implied in the contract. Neither at Eton nor at Oxford, with opportunities by the score, did he ever make a single ‘influential’ personal friend; to no position or emolument did he ever aspire, though he was to give unremitting and precious labour to what he believed to be the best cause in the world. ‘Froude and I were nobodies,’ said Newman, two lifetimes later, with a touch of whimsical pride. Like a child of Socrates, our philosopher would fain see how many things there are which he could do without; like a child of Seneca, he would fain enjoy this life, with the zest possible to those alone who are always ready to leave it. Enough of this Journal, most practical in all its self-searching. It appears to concern itself with trivialities only to those who do not realise how relentless is the ascetic spirit, and how small a quarry it will still hunt when all the tigers are met and exterminated. As was said of a greater than Hurrell Froude: ‘Ce diable d’homme a toujours ÉtÉ en se perfectionnant. Il serait devenu honnÊte homme, si on l’eut laissÉ vivre.’

When Mr. Keble went down to his curacy at Southrop, at the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1823,[23] Hurrell went with him to read for his B.A. degree, which he took in December of that year. The summer was to him, as to one of his companions there, Isaac Williams, the turning-point in his career. In those tranquil fields and winding roads and the solemn little village Church, where he found ‘a man wholly made up of love, and religion a reality,’ Hurrell began to see the Last Things: he never could forget the place, the person, and the occasion which meant so much to him in the Providence of God. His third companion, Robert Wilberforce, ‘did not feel towards Keble,’ wrote Isaac Williams, ‘as we did at that time, having been brought up in an opposite school.’ In all the fresh and brave happinesses of nature and of grace which were round Keble like an aureole wherever he went, Hurrell brightened and strengthened visibly.

‘You are my Spring: and when you smile, I grow.’

He learned from him to follow conscience and to fear applause. As soon as he parted from Mr. Keble, their long correspondence began, and the home-loving pupil was proud indeed when the ‘first man in Oxford,’ as Newman enthusiastically called him, came on a visit to Dartington. We know from recent testimony of a delightful pen[24] how dear the neighbourhood became to Mr. Keble, and how often he would wander away from the animated household of his friends to the fourteenth-century priest’s-house hard by at Little Hempston, an almost unique survival, with its small quadrangle, its hall and solar, of Chaucer’s time. The lovely old Vicarage, in its still secluded situation, had taken captive Hurrell’s twenty-year old fancy, as a letter of 1823 to Mr. Keble shows.

‘I will pledge my own peculiar veracity to the following statement: The situation is, I am confident (and on this matter experience has peculiarly qualified me to judge), [by] far the most beautiful place in the world, the focus of irradiated perfection, the favoured haunt of romance and sentiment, the very place which, if you recollect the circumstance, you taxed me with a disposition to romanticity for encomiasing, when I informed you that I had destined it for my ???sf??et??, where, unmolested, flumina amem silvasque inglorius. The Parsonage is situated in a steep and narrowish glen, which intersects a long line of coppice that overhangs the Dart for the length of nearly a mile, and rises almost perpendicularly out of the river to the height of about two hundred feet. The stream there is still, clear, and very deep; on the opposite side is Dartington; and a line of narrow, long, flat meadows, interspersed with large oak and ash trees, forms the bank of the river. The steep woods on the Little Hempston side are in the form of a concave crescent (thereby agreeing with Buckland).[25] From the Parsonage to the river is a steep descent through a small orchard; at the bottom of which, on turning the corner which the glen aforesaid makes on its north side with the course of the stream, you come at once on a sort of excavation, of about half an acre, which, terminated by an overhanging rock, forms a break in the line of coppice aforesaid. In this said rock young M. found the hawks’ nests. I think they build there every year. On the opposite side, i.e. the Dartington side, is what was formerly a little island, but now no longer claims that proud title, in the oaks of which I am in hopes we shall soon have an heronry, as they haunt there all the summer. After this I should not so utterly despair of success, if I felt less interested in the event;[26] but as it is, I can hardly hope for so great a gratification.’

Several months later, he is still in the descriptive vein.

‘When I came home I found things looking most dismal. My father had cut all the laurels to the roots, in hopes of making them come up thicker. A field almost outside the windows, which had been put in tillage, was ploughed so extremely ill that we were afraid it would be forced to be tilled with turnips (DÎ talem campis avertite pestem!) instead of clover…. The copse also, which overhung the river by the Little Hempston rocks, was in great part gone, “and the place thereof knew it no more.” I hope the rest may be spared.’

The laurels he had planted gave the energetic Archdeacon some trouble. In his old age he had them all swept away, and made a needed if unromantic improvement in the outlook of the beautiful old house. Hurrell’s implicit differences with his ‘knowing, quick, and handy’ father, so many of whose best qualities he shared, hinged laughably often on such things as the culture of trees and the make and management of boats. In all, he did his best to become what the epitaphs of the time call ‘an humble obsequious son.’

Hurrell took only a second class in Classics and Mathematics (disappointing and astonishing everyone who knew him) during 1824. But he had exactly the sort of mind which, sooner or later, would come to grief with any curriculum.

To the Rev. John Keble, March 29, 1825.

‘… Be so good as to write a sermon on “flumina amem sylvasque inglorius,” for the benefit of my father, who objects to our having a four-oar given us, as infallibly tending to debilitate and torpify the mental faculties! I am afraid it is not in my stars to be ever contented; for I confess I do not feel that serene felicity which I pictured to myself last October as my destiny; though my delight is not impaired as to the misery I have escaped. I am sure the ghosts of those who have taken a degree at Oxford will require a double portion of Lethe before they begin “in corpora velle reverti.”

‘March 31. P.S.—I wrote enclosed the day before yesterday, but, as you will perceive, incapacitated it for going by the post without a cover; so I waited for a frank. And, as I am become so prudent as not to like wasting paper, you are indebted to this circumstance for an elongation of my epistle. I don’t recollect whether I told you that I have been reading Clarendon, for which, though I skipped over some parts, I feel much veneration. I am glad I know something of the Puritans, as it gives me a better right to hate Milton,[27] and accounts for many of the things which most disgusted me in his not-in-my-sense-of-the-word poetry. Also, I adore King Charles and Bishop Laud!… You prosed me once for not sending regards, remembrances, compliments, etc., so let everyone choose which they like best, as I commit to you an assortment of each kind for distribution.

To the Rev. John Keble, May 13, 1825.

‘????tate: I have been long intending to thank you for your benevolent instructions, which (I don’t know whether I ought to be ashamed or not in confessing it) answered a purpose different from what they were intended for; viz., they convinced me and (what was more to the point) my father, that I knew so little about the matter, and had so little time left, that it was no use to proceed. It certainly was no small satisfaction to me to have so good an excuse for giving up what I had exhausted the entertainment of, and had nothing but the laborious to come. Also, the weather has been so very beautiful this spring, and the delicious blue sky, with hardly a cloud on it for six weeks, so very tempting, that it was hardly possible to help being idle. But somehow my conscience rather misgives me, and what with admonitions now and then from my father, and my lately having taken up with reading sermons, I am become “as melancholy as Moorditch or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe”; so that upon the whole I think I must come to you to be prosed and put into a better way…. By the by, I am now officiating as ethical instructor to B[ob?], in which capacity I have been much humiliated at finding how little I know about the matter; but it makes me get them[28] up, which perhaps I should never have done else. I do not think them at all less prosy and long-winded than I used, and I would bet Bishop Butler against all the ‘stotles in the world. Among other things I am also becoming something of a florist, and something of an architect, in which latter I make some proficiency. I am a powerful coadjutor (though I say it that should not say it), in the completion of D[enbury], which bears a different aspect from when you saw it last. It will be a pretty monastic-looking erection, and if we could but make it old, and buy a ghost or two, would be somewhat sentimental. For, thanks to my grandmother’s[29] perverseness, she would not have a new house except in the shape of an old one repaired, which superinduced the necessity of so many crooked little passages and such an irregular exterior, that my father had an excuse for doing what would else have seemed fanciful. Talking about architecture, a new town[30] is going to be built down by Torbay, which is to cut out Brighton and every place. The ground where it is to stand is perfectly unencumbered with houses, and covered with trees, so that there is every advantage at starting; and all will be done on a general plan, so that the buildings shall as little as possible interfere with each other. If you know anyone that wishes for a delightful sea-residence, send him there. You must know you narrowly escaped having a poetical effusion from me the other day. I was out in so magnificent an evening; but being, as you know, a man of few words, I found that by the time I had made my verses scan and construe, they would be so remote from an effusion, at least in the quality of being effunded, that it was better to be contented with a prosaic statement: viz., that coming home from Little Hempston the other evening after sunset, and having with some difficulty discovered and scrambled into my boat, which was moored under an old stump at the bottom of the woods, as I proceeded on my course down the river, the sky gradually assumed a portentous appearance, and distant flashes of lightning, growing gradually more distinct, began at regular intervals. Things however are not so constituted as to allow the sublime to amalgamate with the comfortable: according to the decrees of Fate, the storm which had lingered in the upper regions till I had got so far on my way home as to be out of reach of shelter from Dartington House, now came down with such violence as to save me the trouble of running at any rate, by convincing me that whether I was out five minutes or fifteen I should be in an equally bad case. The thunder got very loud, and the lightning was so green and brilliant, that I could see the stiles and gates, and even their latches, like the spectres of the things from which “nox abstulit atra colorem.” Sometimes the flashes lasted for nearly a second, and dazzled me so that after they were passed I could make no use of the twilight at all. Having got thus far, I feel in the awkward situation of having told a story without a point, and feel inclined to resort to the usual remedy, and apply to my invention to help me out of the scrape with a marvellous conclusion. Perhaps however you may be contented with a moral: so here goes. As good never comes unalloyed with evil, so that very evil often serves to give it a relish which it might otherwise be destitute of. I could not have reckoned this as an adventure, if I had not been forced to change my clothes when I came home.’

To the same ‘holy friend’ for whom Hurrell privately says on his knees his heartfelt thanksgiving, he writes often, from the first, in a mood of bantering and almost irreverent freedom.

To the Rev. John Keble, 1824.

‘… Now I proceed to vindicate my character from the unwarrantable aspersions you have been pleased to throw upon it. Be it known then that since the first of May I have read the four first books of Herodotus, three of Ethics, two of Thucydides, Œdipus Tyrannus, Eumenides, ???t?de?, and a book of Homer; and all this not carelessly, but with Scapula and MatthiÆ. And though there are several posing places in the Æschylus and Herodotus with which I shall in course of time bother you, still upon the whole I flatter myself that in a short space I shall be at least equal to Peter Elmsley,[31] and I would advise you to prepare the examining masters for the reception of such a luminary…. My father, I must assure you, has received no favourable impression of your moral organisation from the injudicious exposure which you made in your last letter. But I will urge the matter no further; … the shortness of the time during which your ?????ea? have been discontinued may not yet have allowed the annihilation of the ????. I shall rest in hope that this timely admonition may awaken you to a sense of your duty, and reinstate your perceptions of the ?????? in their full vigour. “Thine by yea and nay, which is as much as to say, as thou usest him.”’

Mr. Keble was settled in 1825 as Curate in sole charge of Hursley, Hampshire.

To the Rev. John Keble, Aug. 16, 1825.

‘… Suaviter ut nunc est inquam: but it was not so with poor [Williams] in the packet, being that he was sick all the way from Portland Head to Plymouth Sound; and was so completely miserable that he would not be spoken to, and kept on groaning out that he would give all he ever expected in the world to be on shore. By this unfortunate circumstance he was prevented from seeing the sun rise over the watery element in the very act of “pillowing his chin upon an orient wave,” and from bearing testimony (which I can do) that there is nothing the least sublime in the mere fact of being out of sight of land, and having nothing but the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky. But what was most melancholy of all, he was unable to get a glimpse of all the glorious coast of the south promontory of Devonshire…. Next day we came upon Southampton, while it was under one of the most imposing magnificent effects possible: a rainbow, lost in a dark cloud which was raining as hard as it could pelt, was resting one of its ends on the woods: and the sun on the waters, and the spires, made the misty smoke that was rising up from the town, quite imposing and sentimental. However, my complacency was much alloyed by the tantalising sight of the beautiful yachts, with their glittering sails, skimming along in the breeze, which had just started up after the violent rain which had fallen, and the melancholy Heu, non mea rushed on me with irresistible force.’

How well he loved a boat! He complains, in one entry of his Journal, that the thought of boats distracts him insufferably during his prayers.

Hurrell was asked to say his say about The Christian Year, then in manuscript. He seems to have been inclined to begrudge the fact that Keble had set himself to write not as a poet for poets, but as a challenging voice to ‘earth-drudging hearts.’ That he appreciated the lasting charm of the book is quite apparent from the singularly apposite quotation applied to it in the second letter on the subject.

To the Rev. John Keble, Sept. 10, 1825.

‘About the poems—it is really too ludicrous for a fellow like me to sit down deliberately to criticise the taste and philosophy of a production of yours: so that I have no inclination to expose or commit myself, by detailing to you my remarks on particular passages. There are, as you may suppose, many places which, in fun, I would show fight about; and there is something which I should call Sternhold-and-Hopkinsy in the diction, of which I began to note down the first instances I met; but, finding it go through, I concluded it was done on a theory. But though I am not quite such a fool as to think my opinion worth offering in point of criticism, it may not, perhaps, be quite useless to confess it as a matter of fact, with which you may begin an induction as to the probable good you may do by publication. I confess, then, and not without some shame, that you seem to me to have addressed yourself too exclusively to plain matter-of-fact good sort of people … and not to have taken much pains to interest and guide the feelings of people who feel acutely, nor to have given much attention to that dreary visionary existence which they make themselves very uncomfortable by indulging in, and which I should have hoped it was the peculiar province of religious poetry to sober down into practical piety. I know all this may be great nonsense, may be even humbug; for long experience has convinced me how much I can cheat myself as to my real feelings. But that you may see that it has not been concocted since, but was the impression made on me while reading, I will extract a note which I made … I suppose I meant that things like Gray’s Elegy, which turn melancholy to its proper account, by pointing out the vanity of the world without telling us so, seem to me more to answer the purpose. And now I will cease making an ass of myself!… I am half-conscious that the same sort of objections might be made against the Psalms; and though I cannot but think that they will make your poems less generally liked and read, I am far from confident that it may not be better, upon the whole, for those who attend to them as a religious duty.

‘I can hardly shut up without telling you of such an interesting set of fellows that we heard of in our peregrinations. They were sixteen French fishermen and three boys, who had all come over, in one boat, to get bait on the English coast, and were kept there ten days by the wind: all that time they sat upon the deck knitting stockings and nightcaps; and, when Sunday came, they were just so far out at sea that the people on the coast could hear them singing the Roman Catholic service so beautifully, and in the evening they came on shore, and danced, out of mere jollity, for an hour. They were such grateful fellows, that a gentleman on the coast who had done them some kindness, could hardly get rid of them without his giving them some commission to do for him in France, i.e. to let them smuggle something over for him; and, when they could not remove his scruples as a Justice of [the] Peace, they caught him an immense fish, and were quite disappointed that he would not accept it as a present.’

The great mass of Keble’s letters to his pupil and friend have disappeared: but we have the answer promptly sent to this, and written with his own winning humility. ‘For your telling me exactly what you think about [the verses] I shall hold you in greater honour as long as I live.’ He goes on, sweetly and sagaciously, to explain that The Christian Year but aimed at helping ‘the plain and good.’[32] It will be remembered that the archpriest of letters, Mr. William Wordsworth, once offered to go over The Christian Year, with a view to correcting the English. To that height Hurrell could not rise.

To the Rev. John Keble, Dec. 6, 1825.

‘“Sir, my dear friend,” you cannot tell how much I am obliged to you for your benevolence to my last letter, but that does not make me the less a fool for having expressed myself so; and what provokes me most of all is that I did not give myself fair play by not writing till my opinions had settled; for as far as my memory goes, I think they are now undergoing a revolution, and that if I were to see the pottery[33] in question again, I should think quite differently of it. There is something about them which leaves (to use the words of our friend Tom Moore)

And though I cannot account for the fact, I have been much more sensible of this since a re-perusal of Genesis.—I wrote the foregoing not long after the receipt of your letter, but have been such a dawdle that I have not been able to collect materials for finishing it: and the circumstance which now at last helps me out is a melancholy one, no other than the decease of our friend and companion Johnny Raw:[34] who was taken off, some days since, in the staggers. There was something peculiarly doleful in the poor fellow’s exit; and there was a sort of dreariness diffused over all its circumstances, which set it off with almost a theatrical effect. As B[ob] says, it would have not been so much if he had wasted away by a long illness, or if he had heard of his death at a distance; but to have been using and admiring him till within a few days of his decease, to have watched all the stages of his rapid illness, seen him bled, given him his physic (which seemed to distress him very much, though all along the pain he suffered was evidently very great), and, after all, to have got up at two o’clock in the night, when the crisis was to take place, and come into the stable only a minute after his death, where we could just see him, by lantern-light, stretched out on the straw:—were incidents not calculated to excite pleasure. Add to this, it was one of those shivering cold stormy nights which make me feel as if I and the people with me were the only human beings in the world: a fact, by-the-by, which I am not yet sufficient psychologist to account for. And the next day, when we went out to bury him, the weather was just the same, and there was nothing to excite one cheerful association. Also, it was somewhat staggering to the speculatively inclined, not to be able to discover one single reason why he should not be able to gallop about as well as ever. He was evidently in good condition, his flesh hard, and his limbs sound: and why I should be able to walk any better than he, was more than I could elicit. We buried him under an elm tree in the lawn, and nailed his shoes to it for a monument.[35]

‘… My father has found the ????? [as?????] among some old books, and I have been reading it. It puts me in mind of a verse in this morning’s Psalms: “Thou shalt hide me privily by Thine own presence from the provoking of all men, Thou shalt keep me secretly in Thy tabernacle from the strife of tongues”; which seems to point out the clearest and most beautiful instance of the moral government of God being begun on earth. I should like to know the Hebrew of the verse before: “O how plentiful is Thy goodness, which Thou hast prepared for them that trust in Thee even before the sons of men.” For if “before” means “in the presence of,” then David is drawing the conclusion I want; but I am afraid it must mean “greater than falls to the lot of the rest of mankind.” … Please to look, when you are in a humour for it, in Medea, 705, where Ægeus says, e?? t??t? ??? d? f???d?? e?? p?? ???. The commentators cited by Elmsley have fumbled much about it, and some of them I do not understand; but may it not mean: “For as to my name continuing in my posterity, in that respect I am clean gone.” If e?? t??t? will bear this signification, it is certainly prettier than as it is commonly explained. I like Hecuba far better than Medea…. Another interval has elapsed, and the leaves, which had held out surprisingly hitherto, have almost totally disappeared, and now we may reckon winter to be fairly set in. I wish I could write verses to perform the obsequies of this delicious summer, the like of which will probably never visit the abodes of mortals again….’

The little implied joke, celibate and Greek, on his own name, is not the least adornment of this charming letter.

At the outset of 1826, Hurrell found at least one modern book to his liking. This was the Fragments in Verse and Prose, by a Young Lady, Miss Elizabeth S—— with Some Account of her Life and Character, by H[enrietta] M[aria] Bowdler, a new edition of which, in two volumes octavo, had just appeared. Elizabeth Smith of Burnhall near Durham, the Oriental scholar, was born in 1776 and died in 1806. Our present standard reference, the Dictionary of National Biography, which highly commends her self-won learning and its methods, adds that ‘her verses have no merit, and her reflections are of the obvious kind, gracefully expressed.’ But the reflections do not seem obvious to some readers, save inasmuch as at first all simple and profound little discoveries of the sort seem so: which is ever their highest praise. The book is but poorly representative, and badly put together: it certainly would give no clear idea, to our own more exacting public, of a personality full of goodness and charm, nor of a remarkable mind with a dozen hobbies, and not one affectation.

To the Rev. John Keble, Jan. 12, 1826.

‘?a????e: As I am conscious of being one of those imbecile-minded people who one day admire a thing as if they could never think of anything else, and soon after cease to think of it at all, I must write to you while a little book that I took up the other day accidentally continues uppermost in my thoughts. It calls itself Fragments in Verse and Prose, by a Young Lady; and struck with the sentimentality of the title, I took it up to laugh at it; nor did I find anything in the preface to do away with my preconceived opinion. But on opening the book at random, among some fragments extracted from her private meditations, I began to like her most extremely. The mention of Piercefield,[36] and the initials Miss S., made me remember your having told me of a Miss Smith that lived there, while we were scrambling up the Windcliff. I am sure if you had admired her half as much as I do, you would not have let me go till we had hunted out every corner that she mentions. There is something to my mind very peculiar in all the turn of her thoughts, and those half-metaphysical, half-poetical speculations which almost put me in mind of my mother. Yesterday I mentioned the book to a person who I was surprised to find knew a great deal about her, and from whom I was still more astonished to hear that I myself knew very well indeed her intimate friend Miss H[unt], to whom most of her letters are addressed….’

And again, a little later, winding up an intimate letter in Latin to Keble, there is more of this pleasant heroine-worship, coupled with some feeling analysis and amusing self-portrayal. Hurrell’s repugnance to things German were a foregone conclusion, had he never expressed it.

‘… I could not find the places you referred me to in Miss Smith, but am happy to find that we sympathise in the extent of our admiration, if not in the sources; though indeed, I am willing to believe, both. But as for old Klopstock, I cannot read about him and his wives;[37] and am rather horrified at Miss S[mith’s] having taken so much trouble about him, or any other sentimental old German. What makes me admire Miss S[mith] so excessively, is more than I can give any intelligible account of: she either does not admire, or is not acquainted with my favourite books; and those that she fancies she admires (for I am sure she does it only in ignorance) are my inveterate enemies. Neither could I fix upon any passages in her own writings which would seem to justify me if I quoted them. But somehow I seem perfectly certain I know her intimately, and that I can trace the feelings in which all she says and does originates; and all this is so consistent, as far as it goes, with what I have imaged to myself as the archetype of human perfection, that I have invested her, in my imagination, with all its attributes….

‘Lloyd’s[38] immense catalogue of books, that he recommends as necessary, has frightened me beyond measure: but I am getting to be of your opinion, that to be fully occupied is almost necessary, in order to get through life with tolerable ease and comfort….’

Says the Editor of the Newman Correspondence, in entering upon the annals of the year 1826: ‘The Oriel election and Fellowship was this year a momentous one to Mr. Newman, as bringing him into intimacy with the friend whose influence he ever felt powerful beyond all others to which he had been subject.’ Newman writes of the election to his mother on March 31, 1826, in terms of convinced enthusiasm which are not unlike Crabb Robinson’s after encountering for the first time the youthful William Hazlitt. ‘By-the-bye, I have not told you the name of the other successful candidate:[39] Froude of Oriel. We were in grave deliberation till near two this morning, and then went to bed. Froude is one of the acutest and clearest and deepest men in the memory of man. I hope our election will be in honorem Dei et sponsÆ suÆ ecclesiÆ salutem, as Edward II. has it in our Statutes.’ The Oriel electors had their own standards, and gloried in them. Fellowships depended hardly at all on the technical and the prescribed; indications of the scope and accuracy of acquired knowledge passed for next to nothing; but what did count, in Oriel’s golden days, was a man’s whole momentum and equilibrium, his relationship to the intellectual life, his mastery over his own faculties: ‘not what he had read, but what he was like.’ Originality, distinction, was the cachet, and Oriel College was the first in Oxford to throw open her unhampered Fellowships to the entire University. Like Whately, Thomas Mozley, and Newman himself, Froude who stood only moderately high in the books of the University examiners, had been preferred before candidates who were double-firsts. He took, as was but natural, an even more rapturous pleasure in the event than Newman had done. He wrote to Keble, when he was steadying himself under the impact of a lasting good fortune:

‘My dreamy sensations have at length subsided, and I cannot think how I could have made myself such a fool as to be so upset! But it was altogether such a surprise to me, and I knew it would delight my father so much, that I could not stand it all. I do not mean that when the news was announced to me I did not contemplate the possibility of it; for you must know that I am the most superstitious of the species, and that on the first day of the examination I had a sort of indescribable sensation from which I augured the event. But such a confused prophesying as this is so very different from a sober expectation that it served rather to increase than to diminish my surprise at its being realised.’

And again, turning from what he thought an almost unnatural success, he seeks refuge in his own special pun. ‘Crede mihi,’ he confides to Keble on the eve of Candlemas, ‘idem sum ille f???d?? qui utroque pede claudicans e scholis evasi: me in nulla re scholastica ex illo tempore usque ad hunc diem sentio profecisse.’ In ‘Empty-head’ limping with both feet out of the Schools, we are to recognise an allusion to Hurrell’s unforgotten double-second class. He was too humble to see that for a Romany rye of his sort, a double-second class was really a quite extravagant toll to pay to University conventions.

Oriel soon became a hotbed of revolution, as the consequence of her anti-academical processes of selection. Within two years, troubles began, and Froude, with Newman, R. I. Wilberforce, and Dornford, the other public Tutors, took up and for a long time maintained, against the settled paganism of the College, their own ‘fierce’ views of their duty towards undergraduates. Of this duty Froude and Newman had a particularly clear conviction. Keble had struck, and struck strongly, the pastoral note as early as 1818, and developed it in a letter to Sir J. T. Coleridge.[40] On the other hand, the Provost and the administrators held that intercourse between Tutor and pupil should be a routine of lectures only, and not that and a cure of souls beside. The antagonism lasted for nearly four years, during which Froude’s deep friendship with Newman grew up, and was perfected. The end came with Hawkins’ express refusal to sanction the further supply of pupils to the would-be spiritual directors who so quietly defied him. They had ‘led the last struggle for the ancient quasi-parental and religious character of the College Tutor.’[41] As the pupils they had went up for degrees and left the University, they fell quite idle, in that respect, by 1831, and with all their smouldering zeal and moral fire within them, the way was open for another onset of the Laudians which was destined to affect the consciences not alone of young Oriel, but of the nation and the age.

Froude’s allotted rooms were directly over Newman’s, in the Chapel angle of the Great Quad of Oriel College. The new Fellow did not, as such, come into residence until after the Easter vacation; during the following month, April, we find him still luxuriating in Devonshire and plunging deep into abstract metaphysics. ‘I have been taken with a fit of writing,’ he confesses to Keble. ‘I am happier than I ever was at Oxford, far: but that is not saying much.’ Apparently, he had posted manuscripts for criticism, and received it as gratefully and as combatively as usual. ‘I am infinitely indebted to you,’ he writes, ‘for your expeditious attention to my concern, and will try my best to set to rights the places you row [about]. However, I still maintain that my end is both relevant and true and my puzzle-headed antithesis a good one; but I bow my head in implicit confidence, as far as practice goes. Distinctions and refinements are growing on me, and I am all in a maze; and it is delightful to have the shadow of a great rock in a weary land to which I may turn for temporary shelter. If I had a year more, I could not make it at all to my satisfaction; so I must make the best of it.’

His note-books for this year and the next are full of the contemned ‘distinctions and refinements.’ In trying to beat out his conceptions of moral growth (a thing he refused to recognise in himself), he jots down some striking and arresting thoughts. Two or three which lie metaphysically not far apart, must suffice for transcription. They show the coherence, the synthetic power with which Froude’s philosophy knit all worlds into one.

—‘For whatever cause the great Author of Nature contrived that resemblance (as it appears to us) which subsists between the part of His dominions of which He has given us a consciousness, and that other part with which we are acquainted only through our understanding, it seems calculated to assist our conceptions of the one to observe what passes in the other…. The business of our life seems to be to acquire the habit of acting as we should do if we were conscious of all that we know…. It is delightful to see things turn out well whose case seems in some sort to represent to us our indistinct conceptions of our own. Animals fainting under the effect of exercise, and then again recovering their strength which that very exercise has contributed to increase; the slow and, uncertain degrees in which this increase is effected, and yet the certainty in which it is effected: the growth of trees sometimes tossed by winds and checked by frosts, yet, by the evil effects of these winds, directed in what quarter to strike their roots so as to secure themselves for the future, and by these frosts hardened and fitted for a new progress the next summer:—in things of this sort I am so constituted as to see brethren in affliction evidently making progress towards release.’

—‘Some people imagine that there is something blasphemous in the supposition that a finite creature can be conscious in two places at once. This is so far from being true that even our own experience contradicts it. Perhaps there is some absurdity in the very idea which attributes a place to consciousness, or the things capable of it. With regard to ourselves, there is nothing to show us where we are conscious (though most people suppose the conscious thing is somewhere within the body), or that we may not be with equal propriety said to be conscious, or, in other words, to be, wherever anything is of which we are conscious. It seems to me that the question where we are, is one not of fact, but of degree; and that the only facts which make us suppose we are where our body is, give us likewise the same reason for supposing that in the same sense we sometimes are far away from the body.’

—‘Yesterday, before breakfast, while the vacancy produced by fasting was still on me, and I was reading the Psalms, and craving for a comprehension of the things which I could only look on as words, and was worked up to such a pitch that I felt trying to see my soul, and make out how it was fitted to receive an impression from them,—Merton bell[42] began to go; and it struck me (I cannot tell why) that if such a trifle as that could give me such a vivid idea, my soul must be a most intricate thing; and that when senses were given to the blind part of it, what things would those appear, the apprehension of which I was struggling after! This is as near what passed in my mind as I can find expressions to shape my memory by. This blindness of heart is what, by habit and patience, it is our work practically to remove. We are to shape our souls for its removal, by making it in harmony with the things invisible.’

These passages mark a great point of divergence between the writer and the ‘religious genius’ with whom his memory is identified to all generations. It is something of an anomaly, even, to find the young Froude, and not the young Newman (rather the less practical of the practical pair), developing so strong a habit of purely speculative thought; but it was that which gave him his silent leadership. He combined with his turn for abstractions (yet with scorn shared with Newman for ‘formulas which antedate the facts’) an unexpected power of philosophical application of scientific ideas. All these half-mystical gymnastics of the reflective faculty are going to tell in 1833 and after, when the hour of action strikes, and when, by his already gathered impetus, Hurrell Froude is going to dart ahead in a still level flight, like a gull’s. He will seem external, as if talking more than he thinks, talking somewhat to the bewilderment of those others who can hardly think for his talking. He will be gay; he will be glib; he will pass care-free amid the sweat of horses and men, simply because of these long hard mental vigils, pen in hand, up Oriel Staircase No. 3, while he is hearing Merton bell, and trying to see his soul.

To Keble, who was still at home during the spring of 1826, Hurrell confides impressions of the Newman who had already conceived so lofty an opinion of him, and had probably not taken pains to conceal it: the Newman who dearly loved, to the last, to be ‘disvenerated.’ Many important Fellows of Oriel, such as Arnold, Hampden, Jelf, Jenkyns, Pusey, were absent from Oxford: hence they lack mention in our critic’s roster.

To the Rev. John Keble, May 25, 1826.

‘I should like to detail to you our [College] proceedings, but no striking features occur to my mind at present; so I will favour you with my general impressions. [Whately?][43] is the only one with whom I have got to be at all intimate; he is not the least of a Don, and I like him very much indeed. [Davison?] is a person for whom I have a very great veneration: but he is such an immense person that I hardly dare bring myself in contact with him.[44] [Newman] is, to my mind, by far the greatest genius of the party, and I cannot help thinking that, sometime or other, I may get to be well acquainted with him: but he is very shy,[45] and dining with a person now and then does not break the ice so quickly as might be wished. I venerate [Davison?] but dislike him: I like [Newman] but disvenerate him. Old [Wilberforce?][46] is very funny, good-natured, and, I think, very much improved. And now for my ill-fated inconsistent self; I have been trying to be diligent, and have been horribly idle; trying to be contented, and yet constantly fidgety; trying to be matter-of-fact, and have nearly cracked myself with conceited metaphysics. This last is principally attributable to Lucretius, whom I have been reading with considerable attention, and intense admiration; I shall very soon have finished him, as I have got on some way in the Sixth Book. In the end of the Book, about the mortality of the soul, there are some magnificent extraordinary reflections on our longings for something indescribable, and beyond our reach; on our having affections which have no adequate object, and which we long to forget and smother, because we cannot gratify them: [reflections] which make a striking preface to Bishop Butler’s sermons on the Love of God.’

June 15, 1826, was the five hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Oriel College. Perhaps the observance of it served to stimulate Hurrell’s filial piety and his spontaneous regard for the past. Few Fellows of Colleges, then or since, ‘supinely enjoying the gifts of the Founder,’ as Gibbon says, would have offered, after such an occasion, this private prayer, found among Hurrell’s papers:

—‘Almighty God, Father of all Mercies, I beg to offer Thee my deep and unfeigned thanks for all the blessings which Thou hast bestowed upon me; but in addition to those of Thy favours which I enjoy in common with all mankind, I more particularly bless Thy Holy Name for those of which I partake as member of this College; for the means Thou hast given me of daily sustenance, and of a continual admission to Thy house and service, through the pious charity of holy men of old. I bless Thee, O Lord, in that Thou didst put into their heart the desire of erecting to themselves a memorial, and of leaving to posterity a great example in the foundation and endowment of a seminary of religious learning; and I pray Thee that, as it has fallen to my lot to succeed to this their institution, I may fulfil my part in it as I believe they would approve if they could be present with me; that I may not waste in foolish or gross indulgences the means afforded me of obtaining higher ends; or allow myself to consider as my own that time which I receive their wages for dedicating to Thy service, by the advancement of useful learning, and adorning the doctrine of God our Saviour. But more especially do I beg of Thee to accept my thankfulness for those merciful dispensations of Thy Providence which affect my lot in particular. That it has pleased Thee to bring me into the world under the shadow of my holy mother, in the recollection of whose bright society Thou hast given me, as it were, a consciousness of that blessedness which Thou hast taught us to look for in the presence of Saints and Angels. Also, that my lot has been so cast that I should fall into the way of one[47] whose good instructions have, I hope, in some degree, convinced me of the error of my ways, and may, by Thy grace, serve to reclaim me from them; with whose high friendship I have most unworthily been honoured, and in whose presence I taste the cup of happiness.’

The correspondence with Keble continued implicitly confidential at all times. But Hurrell writes freely at the close of his first Long Vacation as Fellow, and after his return to Oriel, of his scruples and self-dissatisfactions and aspirations: ‘thoughts that do wander through eternity.’

To the Rev. John Keble, Oct. 14, 1826.

‘It will seem rather pompous to announce my determination not to rise till I have got a letter written to you; but unless I start with some such resolution, I shall not be able to get one written at all. I have made three attempts to write … but all of them ran off into something wild, which upon reflection I thought would be better kept to myself. The fact is, that I have been in a very strange way all the summer, and having had no one to talk to about the things which have bothered me, I have been every now and then getting into fits of enthusiasm or despondency. But the result has been in some respects a good one, and I have got to take a very great pleasure in what you recommended to me when we were together at F[airford], the evening before I left you our first summer, i.e. good books; and I feel I[48] understand places in the Psalms in a way I never used to. I go back to Oxford with a determination to set to at Hebrew and the early Fathers, and to keep myself in as strict order as I can: a thing which I have been making ineffectual attempts at for some time, but which never once entered my head for a long time of my life….

‘I wish you would say anything to me that you think would do me good, however severe it may be. You must have observed many things very contemptible in me, but I know worse of myself, and shall be prepared for anything. I cannot help being afraid that I am still deceiving myself about my motives and feelings, and shall be glad of anything on which to steady myself. Since I have been here I have been getting more comfortable than I had been for a good bit, from the society of I[saac][49] and P[revost][50] whom I get to like more and more every day…. We were to have wandered over North Wales together, but have been obliged to relinquish that scheme for this time, and perhaps it is a good thing, as far as I am concerned, to have a less exciting life for the present. I have had one bit of romance, viz., a walk early in the morning up the Vale of Rydal to Devil’s Bridge. The W[illiamses] wanted us to ride, but I thought I should remember it better by walking…. I shall always like scrambling expeditions as long as I can recollect ours up the Wye. Those few days seem like a bright spot in my existence; or perhaps it would be a more apt similitude to compare it to what you quoted as we were going in the boat to Tintern: “The shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”

‘I daresay you will think this letter rather strange, but it cannot do me any good to bottle everything up; besides, I think there is no pleasure in letters which do nothing but detail matters of fact. I should have liked much better to have seen you; but as I suppose there is no chance of that for some time, I must make the best of it. When I said that I had taken to liking good books, I did not mean that I had read many. I have read over and over again Bishop Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying, but till I came here I had not gone farther; since, I have read five sermons of Bishop Wilson, one on the History of Christianity, and the others on Profiting by Sermons; also most of Law’s Serious Call, about which I remember what you said to me three years ago.’[51]

To the Rev. John Keble, Nov. 5, 1826.

‘It may seem an odd sort of thing to say, but I got from your letter something more like happiness than I have known since my mother died. Since that time it seems as if I had been ??e?? ?? t? ??s?; but I hope I may yet get right at last. It is a great comfort to find so many expressions in the Psalms like “O tarry thou the Lord’s leisure,” as they serve to keep up the hope that, weary and unsatisfactory as are my attempts to be religious, they may in time “comfort my heart.” And now I can talk to you about myself, I feel a sort of security against bewildering my mind with vague thoughts, which I did not know where to check, because I could not get anyone to sympathise with them at all.

‘I have borrowed Mr. Bonnell’s Life,[52] and have got about two-thirds through it. I did not at first like the plan you recommended to me about reveries, as I had been directing all my actions with a view to fitting myself for realising my reveries. But it is a wretched unsatisfactory pursuit, for besides that it does not seem to have any real religion in it, I have often felt as if I had lost myself, and that I was acting blindly, without a drift. It is much better to give up all notion of guiding myself, and “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added.” I beg your pardon for putting before you the roundabout fantastic methods to which I have been resorting to arrive at a plain simple truth that ought to have come at once; but perhaps they may serve to show the state of my mind better than any direct description I could give. It is very frightful to see people like Mr. Bonnell so alarmed about themselves, and expressing so strongly the wretchedness of their moral condition. It seems as if, to a fellow like me, it must always be presumptuous not to despair. The evening before last I was much struck with a thought in the beginning of Hooker’s Preface to the Ecclesiastical Polity, about not permitting thoughts to pass away as in a dream. It seems as if people might make so much more out of their lives by keeping records of them….

‘I will write you down some horridly-expressed verses which call themselves to the tune of “Allan Water” and “Rousseau’s Dream”; the first sketched in autumn, 1825, but undergoing changes for a long time, poor as is the result; the second written at W[illiams’s]. I have not shown them to anyone, and they may give you a sort of guess at the things my mind has been running upon.’

‘On the Banks of Allan Water’ was his favourite air.

To this productive year belong also some haunting unfinished lines which might bear for a title The Summons. Of course none of these three poems of Hurrell’s appeared, later, in Lyra Apostolica; nor elsewhere than in the Remains.

Froude at this time was associating a good deal with Blanco White, the Anglicised Spaniard and ex-priest who came to Oriel, aged fifty-one, when Tyler left it, and deeply interested Oriel men with his knowledge of the scholastic philosophy. For some three years he was in great repute among them: his mental gifts were invalidated to them, later, by his aimlessness and instability. To his practical acquaintance with the Roman Breviary, often demonstrated in his own rooms, after dinner, to Froude, Newman, Pusey, and Wilberforce, Hurrell owed much, especially in conjunction with the able lectures on liturgical subjects being delivered by Dr. Lloyd.

Hurrell’s most intimate letter of all those addressed to Keble, beating and surging with the pathos which is inseparable from a young man’s interior life, ends sadly and bravely on Jan. 8, 1827:

‘I am glad of your advice about penance, for my spirit was so broken down that I had no vigour to go on even with the trifling self-denials I had imposed on myself; besides, I feel that though it has in it the colour of humility, it is in reality the food of pride. Self-imposed, it seems to me quite different from when imposed by the Church; and even fasting itself, to weak minds, is not free from evil, when, however secretly it is done, one cannot avoid the consciousness of being singular…. I have not much more to say, and when anything comes over me, will put it down on a large sheet, and send it off when it is full. I am so very unequal to my feelings, that sometimes I suspect all to be hypocrisy; but the tide has by this time so often returned after its ebbing, that finding myself again on the dry land does not make me so much doubt the reality of all His waves and storms which have gone over me.’

To his dear Robert Isaac Wilberforce, an approaching guest, Hurrell indites on the same day a more mundane theme:

‘I must prepare you to find me a great humbug about cock-shooting; for, though I will not recede from my assertions concerning the pre-eminent qualifications of our woods in that line, yet, as our sporting establishment does not go beyond the bare appointments for what Bob calls hedge-popping, the vicinity of the cocks will serve no other purpose than to make you feel more acutely the disadvantages of a connection with such unknowing people.’

His Tutorship was not an unmixed enjoyment to him, after taking his M.A. Of it he writes thus seriously, humbly, and characteristically:

To the Rev. John Keble, Oct. 23, 1827.

‘Perhaps it may amuse you to hear something of my proceedings in my new line of life. I have six Lectures in all: three each day…. I have now got through two days and seen the general aspect of affairs, and as yet no liberties have been taken with me, to my knowledge: however, this is the thing against which I endeavour to arm myself, and from which I expect a fruitful harvest of moral discipline. I look upon it as one of the best opportunities which can be given me to put my elements into order and harmony. It is a quick and efficacious refreshment to me to think of the south-westerly waves roaring round the Prawle after our stern, or the little crisp breakers that we cut through, when you cruised with us off Dartmouth Harbour. Somehow or other, without having exposed myself that I know of, in any flagrant way, there remains upon my mind a more vivid impression of my incompetence than I expected to await my entrance into the office. I feel called on to act a part for which neither my habits nor my studies have fitted me. I am, and always have been, childishly alive to the pain of being despised, and I cannot but feel that I have not the sort of knowledge to give me any command over the men’s attention, or even power of benefiting the attentive; and, if it was not that I know how good it is for myself, I believe I should give it up at once!… Two more tedious days are over; I am not a bit more in love with my occupation, so that this letter, instead of suggesting to you some ludicrous ideas and reminiscences, will terminate in a concatenation of dolefulness, and ask for a consolatory answer.

‘Lloyd gave us his introductory Lecture to-day, i.e., settled the books we were to do, and the times of coming, and was very good-natured, as usual, in his reception of all of us. I am afraid my time and spirits will be so much drawn upon in another quarter, that I shall not have much left of either for him. Otherwise an historical account of the Liturgy, tracing all the prayers, through the Roman Missals and Breviaries, up to their original source, for one Lecture, and the Epistle to the Romans and First of Corinthians for the other, would be a very eligible subject to spend a good deal of time on…. I go to the Tyrolese singers, who perform some national music in the Town-Hall at eight o’clock. I hope they will help to lull me into a momentary forgetfulness; and that I may dream myself among lakes and mountains, far, far away from the vulgar crowd.’

Hurrell’s forecast that his time and spirits would be drawn upon to the detriment of his studies, was due to the anxiety he began to feel about his brother Robert. The latter had followed Hurrell to Oriel in 1822, and graduated B.A. on the 8th of June, 1826. Ardent and active in everything, he had taken a chill during that Long Vacation, after a particularly long pull at sea, and the chill was to terminate only in consumption.

To the Rev. John Keble, New Year’s Day, 1828.

‘… I wish I could write verses! and then I should make an attempt to perpetuate in my mind the notions that came into it the other day at seeing the dead body of a poor woman who for the last two years has been in a state of intense bodily suffering, from which she was released a few days since. I do not recollect having seen her before her illness; but while she was alive I had never seen her free from the expression of dull pain; and her face was distorted by a sore wound, which never healed, on the side of her mouth. But the morning after her death there was such a quiet careworn beauty on her countenance, that it seemed to me as if good spirits had been ornamenting her body at last, to show that a friend of theirs had inhabited it. I am willing to hope that the recollection of it may be a help to me in fits of scepticism, when everything seems so tame and commonplace.’

These serious thoughts haunted Hurrell at home where his brother’s health was failing day by day. ‘Bob’ had the chief share of the physical beauty and vitality of the family. One who knew him well has preserved an anecdote of his lovable mischief.

‘The richness and melody of Copleston’s[55] voice surpassed any instrument…. It was no small part of the daily amusement of the undergraduates to repeat what Copleston had said, and just as he said it, and to vary it from their own boyish imaginations…. The second of the four Froudes, who died young, made this a special study. Coming out of Tyler’s room after a Lecture, he tapped gently at the door, and said in the exact Copleston tone: “Mr. Tyler, will you please step out a moment?” Tyler rushed out, exclaiming: “My dear Mr. Provost!” but only saw the tail of the class descending the staircase. “You silly boys, you’ve been playing me a trick!” was all that he could say.’[56]

The wheel of fortune brought the Provostship of Oriel not to ‘an angel,’ John Keble, but to Edward Hawkins, on the promotion of Copleston to the See of Llandaff, early in this year. A letter of Froude’s to him has been preserved. There is an entry in the former’s Diary, under date of Nov. 22, 1826, thus printed: ‘Promised —— I would not vote against him if ever he stood for the ——. Foolish: but I must abide by it.’ Hawkins and James Endell Tyler were the two among the Fellows who had for years set their hearts upon the Provostship. Tyler lost his chance when he left Oriel during the autumn for the living of S. Giles-in-the-Fields, London, where Endell Street, W.C., yet preserves his name. Either to him, or to Hawkins, Hurrell had hastily pledged his word. But when he wrote the following letter he was quite aware of Mr. Keble’s definite withdrawal from the candidacy which was not yet announced. As a matter of fact, Mr. Keble had never consented to come forward, and his disciple’s course became, thereby, easy as well as plain.

To the Rev. Edward Hawkins,[57] Jan. 23, 1828.

‘My dear Hawkins,—Though I don’t set so high a value on the emanations of my pen as to volunteer a superfluous communication, yet, from what Churton said to me in his note, I fancy I ought to supply an ???e?a in my last letter by making a more formal declaration of my unconditional and uncompromising determination to rank myself among your retainers. I am really very sorry that my stupid delay in answering your letter should have caused you any bother (to use a studiously elegant expression, than which I cannot hit on a better): and this is the more provoking, as I actually had written you an answer the first day; but as I said something at the end of it about my brother, which afterwards I thought too gloomy, and which, I believe, was suggested by seeing him look particularly unwell from some accident, I thought it rather too hard to call on you for sympathy in my capricious fancies. I suppose I may take the liberty to enclose this in a cover to the Bishop, otherwise I should hesitate to draw on your purse as well as your time for such a scribble as this. However, I have left you enough clear paper at the end to work out a question in algebra, or make the skeleton of a sermon! And as this is probably worth more than any words I have to put into it, I shall conclude by begging you to consider me ever affectionately,

‘R. H. Froude.’

For poor ‘Bob’ Froude, full of frolic and power, the Lusisti satis had been spoken. He died on April 28, 1828, between the dates of the two following letters, which Hurrell wrote with a heavy heart.

To the Rev. Robert Isaac Wilberforce, April 2, 1828.

‘… I have not much spirits to write to you, but will not allow my promise to go for nothing. When I first came home I found my brother very much emaciated and enfeebled, but not quite so far gone as I had been prepared for. But since I have been here his disorder has been making very rapid progress indeed…. From what I had heard at Oxford, I almost doubted I might not find all over before my arrival: and the relief which I felt when, on getting off the coach at Totnes, I heard from my father that, not a quarter of an hour before, he[58] had driven in to meet me, was so great as almost to unsettle my resolution. So that now the near prospect of a conclusion is rather hard to face. Even so late as yesterday evening I began a letter to you, in which I expressed a hope that when Monday came my brother and I might not part for ever, but that he would be alive on my return for the Long Vacation. But the medical person who has attended him told me, just now, that unless he was relieved from his present oppression, forty-eight hours would end him. In this state I really do not think that the [Oriel] election has claims on me so great as those which retain me here; and, unless his illness take some unexpected turn, I shall write to [the Provost] in a day or two, to apologise for absenting myself. I cannot, indeed, flatter myself that any turn will long retard the encroachment of the disorder; but, unless appearances decidedly indicated that, by staying out the Vacation, I should see all, I think it would be foolish to shrink from my business; for, when the time of parting came, it would be worse a fortnight hence than now…. I have known enough of myself to foresee the return of all my fretfulness and absurdity, when I leave this enchanted atmosphere. I hope you will excuse my not writing a longer letter; for most things now seem insipid to me, except such as I have no right to inflict upon you. So good-bye, my dear [Robert], for the present, and do not expect to see me till the beginning of Term. I should very much wish to take my part in the election, and do not even now wholly abandon the idea. For I know that active occupation is the best resource, and I shall not shrink from it merely to indulge my feelings.’

To the Rev. John Keble, May, 1828.

‘… The feelings under which I wrote to you last, were, as you say, like the effect of a stunning blow, and I was quite surprised, myself, how quickly they evaporated. I cannot indeed call them either groundless or irrational, and I am, in some respects, not contented at being so soon released from them. Yet many things have occurred to me, which, even to my reason, have made things seem better than they did at first. The more I think of B[ob], the more I am struck with his singleness of heart, and the low estimation in which he held himself. I have found, too, some things which he had written, which I regret much that he had not shown me, which give me almost assurance that he was farther advanced in serious feeling, and had taken greater pains to fight against himself than anyone supposed. Among others, there is one which seems to me quite beautiful, On the Legitimate Use of Pleasure; which he has headed with: “My opinion, June, 1827. I wonder what it will be next year.” It is well arranged as a composition, quite elegant in the language, and shows that he must have thought over the Ethics in a common-sense way, and compared it with Bishop Butler. I had often heard him say what a fool he used to be in thinking that the Ethics was only something to be got up, and something quite irrelevant to actual conduct…. But I feel now as if I had been conversing with a person, who, if he had not much undervalued himself, would never have deferred to me….’

To the Rev. John Henry Newman, Aug. 12, 1828.

‘I have just torn up a letter which I began for you the other day, and fear that you will have cause to wonder how I could reserve this for a better destiny. For the fact is, that I seem to myself to become duller as I grow older, and to have acquired a fustiness independent of place and occupation, an inherent fustiness which idleness cannot blow away nor variety obliterate…. I fear from what I hear of C[hurton][59] that the chance of his recovery is at present very slender. His brother wrote to me the other day to ask what place in Devonshire we reckoned the best suited[60] to complaints of that description, as his enfeebled state put his going abroad out of the question. But I know from experience how little Devonshire air can do … I myself am still, as I indeed have been for a long time, perfectly well. But I find the freshness which at first resulted from a relaxation from College discipline now gradually wearing out; and as the images of impudent undergraduates fade away from the field of my fancy, and the consciousness of what I am released from becomes less vivid, a new host of evil genii take possession of the deserted spot. Till within this last week or so, I felt quite differently from what I ever used to, and reckoned myself to have become quite a cheerful fellow; but now I begin to see with my old eyes, and to feed upon the dreams of faËryland.

… I have a brother now at home who is coming to Oriel next term, and will make a very good hand at mathematics unless he is very idle.’

The brother at home referred to was William Froude, afterwards LL.D. (Glasgow) and F.R.S., then newly come from Westminster School. He was entered at Oriel on Oct. 23, 1828, with Hurrell for Tutor.

To the Rev. John Keble, Aug. 26, 1828.

‘… I have long been meditating a letter to you, and have put it off from day to day, in hopes that when the fine weather should come at last, it might rekindle in me some spark of poetical feeling. But I was thinking over with myself last night how I could scrape up a verse or two in honour of this long-wished-for revolution, and was, after some fruitless pains, obliged to abandon the undertaking. It is a melancholy fact, yet full often does it force itself upon me, and in too unquestionable a shape, that I get stupider as I get older; and that I either never was what I used to think myself, or that Nature has recalled her misused favours! In vain is it that night after night I have tried to peep through the clouds at Lyra and Cassiopeia, as they chase one another round the pole, and that I have got up at three to see Mercury rise, when he was at his longest distance from the sun; and that I have sailed to Guernsey on a fine day and come back on a finer, when the waves washed in on the deck as each passed in succession; and that (when for a short time off the island in a calm) I found the latitude within a minute by taking the sun’s meridian altitude, and that I have seen him rise out of the water, cut in two by the horizon as sharp as a knife. “This brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,—what seemeth it to me but a pestilent congregation of vapours?” I can partly account for it from the fact that we are so uncommonly comfortable and cosy here, and quite agree with you, that “home by mazy streams” is not the most bracing school in which the recipient of habits can be disciplined.

‘Then, henceforth, hail! ye impudent undergraduates: ?e?es?e, ? fe?des?e.’

‘I heard from N[ewman] the other day, with the testimonials,’ he adds, a little later. ‘… He is a fellow that I like the more, the more I think of him; only I would give a few odd pence if he were not a heretic!’ This in reference to Newman’s early Evangelicalism, not yet sloughed away. As between Froude and Newman, so between Newman and Pusey, affection appears to have preceded perfect intellectual confidence. There is a parallel thought, in more sedate dress, in Newman’s private journal of May 17, 1823: ‘That Pusey is Thine, O Lord, how can I doubt? … yet I fear he is prejudiced against Thy children…. Lead us both on in the way of Thy commandments!’[61] Hurrell quickly came to a correct reading of Newman, and he presently made sure that his beloved Keble should share it too. He said once, when conversation ran on the traits of undoubted excellence in criminal characters: ‘Were I asked what good deed I had ever done, I should say that I had brought Keble and Newman to understand each other.’ That mutual love, indeed, despite a long parting, never wavered. There is an odd little footnote to be gathered from Mr. Anthony Froude’s ‘Oxford Counter-Reformation.’[62] He is speaking of events subsequent to 1845.

‘My eldest brother had left to us younger ones, as a characteristic instruction, that if we ever saw Newman and Keble disagree, we might think for ourselves. The event which my brother had thought as impossible as that a double star should fly asunder in space, had actually occurred. We had been floated out into mid-ocean upon the Anglo-Catholic raft, buoyed up by airy bubbles of ecclesiastical sentiment. The bubbles had burst, the raft was splintered, and we—I mean my other brother and myself—were left, like Ulysses, struggling in the waves.’

Says Mr. Thomas Mozley,[63] referring to this time, and to tastes shared in common among Oriel men: ‘I think we all of us found it easier to admire and even to criticise, than to design. Keble, Froude, and Ogilvie undertook a memorial of William Churton, to be placed in S. Mary’s. It was to be simple, modest, and unobtrusive, like the subject. Whether the result carried out this idea, I leave others to say,’ If we are to judge from a letter of Hurrell’s addressed to Keble, the first design emanated from Newman, though drawn by himself. ‘I don’t make much progress in my design for C[hurton’s] monument,’ he writes on May 23, 1829. ‘O[gilvie] decides on its being Gothic; and if this is the case, it will never do to let it take its chance in the hands of a statuary.[64] Yet the responsibility of doing it one’s self makes me so fastidious that I cannot settle on anything,’ He had thought of falling back upon ‘the sort of niches which are used to hold statues of saints, or [stoups for] holy water: somehow it does not seem quite congruous to make one of these merely to frame an inscription.’ However, he draws a narrow pointed arch over a tall pedestal supporting a plain cross, on the suggestion of Newman, adding that he likes it especially, though it may be a bit eccentric.[65] ‘It is to stand in the wall over one of the doorways, between the blank window on the south side, and the window in which the gallery terminates. This is meant to be represented standing under an arch cut out in the wall.’ There were not many Englishmen attempting Early English decoration in 1829. The memorial to William Ralph Churton, Fellow of Oriel, aged twenty-seven, phthisi eheu prÆreptus, is to be found in S. Mary’s Church, though not in the position allotted it in this letter; and the big ugly white sarcophagus with fussy details in high relief on a grey ground is certainly no design of Hurrell Froude’s.

Froude’s intimate correspondence with Newman began in 1828, their friendship having been forming since 1826. To all to whom the latter spoke or wrote with affection, as Miss Mozley reminds us, he was ever open and confiding. ‘But there is distinction in his confidences. Thus to his mother he writes what it would not occur to him to say to anyone else: experiences, sensations, and odd encounters; dreams, fancies, and passing speculations: while to Hurrell Froude, on another field altogether, there is the same absolute trust, and unlocking of the heart.’[66]

Sometimes, in the early letters, the correspondent at Dartington feels impelled to continue his autobiography, in default of anything better to deal with. ‘When I come to consider my resources,’ he says in his smiling mock-grandiose way, ‘I feel that they will not prove commensurate with my malignity, and that I shall not be able even to bore you with success.’

To the Rev. John Henry Newman, Aug. 12, 1829.

‘Since I left Oxford, little has happened to me, and still less have I done. I have indeed written two sermons, and they lasted near twenty minutes, so that I may hope to get on. But the time that they took me is quite absurd, and that which they gave me an excuse for wasting, under the plea of thought, grotesque indeed. Also, the paper that I wasted on things that turned out to have no reference to the subject would form a distinct object of contemplation; and after all, when I came to preach them, they seemed so rambling and incomplete that I could not fancy, while I was reading them, how anyone could possibly follow me. Besides this, I have done nothing except getting my equatorial put up and adjusted in our garden, and trying provoking experiments on the insensibility of my hearing organs. I find the summit of perception to which I can attain is to observe that a note harmonises better with its octave, twelfth, and fifth, than with their next-door neighbours. I also can acknowledge a discord in a deuce[67] and a seventh; but as for knowing one from the other, unless they come very close on each other, it passes my comprehension how man can do it…. I am quite ashamed of the length of time this has been on the stocks, and of the shabby performance which it turns out. Alas, it is a sad reflection that I am condemned to retrograde in all respects: to find no resting-place for my self-complacency either in my intellectual, moral, or corporeal prowess, and notwithstanding to be as conceited as ever!’

This was a note of needless dissatisfaction only too sincere, repeated in Keble’s ear. ‘As for me, I despair of ever becoming a scholar or mathematician either, beyond just enough to amuse myself when I am a solitary country Curate….’

1829 is a silent year with Hurrell, on the whole. He had lost his beloved brother, and he was preparing for his own Ordination. In the late summer he paid his first visit to his cousins at Keswick.

To the Rev. John Keble, Sept. 17, 1829.

‘The evening I received your criticisms I wrote you three sides of a letter, and did not send it, only because I thought time would produce things better worth writing: and now I am so changed in position and circumstances I think I may as well begin again. So all I will retain of my former letter is a criticism on The Christian Year, suggested by a very tempestuous night, in which all our party were crossing the Channel in a pilot-boat. You must not say “the wild wind rustles in the piping shrouds”:[68] shrouds never “pipe” when trees or rustling can be presented to the fancy, but only on occasions when it is more sublime than comfortable to be a listener. This, in my letter, I endeavoured to enforce by a description of the scene I witnessed, and the night I spent on deck: but I doubt not you will willingly take all this for granted…. I left Devonshire more than a fortnight since for Cumberland. [Dornford?][69] made me stay some time in Dublin, which was my first stage, and is, in point of time, much the nearest way: and also sent me into the north of Ireland after Captain Mudge, who is surveying the coast. In my hunt for him, I saw the Giants’ Causeway, every stone of which is beset by some fellow who claims a fee for describing it. It is certainly well worth seeing; but you can conceive nothing so perfectly unlike any of the pretended representations of it. I made two bad drawings there, which will serve to keep it in my own mind, but will do little to illuminate mankind at large. I am forgetting all this while to tell you that, while at Dublin, I found I was within twenty-five miles of

and immediately hired a horse, to start the next morning at five to see it. I was most unlucky in my day, as it had been fine for the preceding week, and only set in for rain when I got among the Wicklow mountains. I had a very wild romantic uncomfortable ride through a wholly uninhabited country, till I got within the baleful influence of lionisers,[70] and was pestered out of my wits by humbugging guides who dinned into my ears miserable expansions of Tom Moore’s note about St. Kevin, till I was quite out of patience. The day was so misty that it was only once or twice that I could make out the scene distinctly, and so constantly raining, that all my paper was soaked in trying to draw what I could make out. By dint of perseverance, I crawled into poor St. Kevin’s[71] cell, which is hardly large enough to coil one’s self up in, and when I was there hardly a square foot of it was dry: so the day answered the purpose, at any rate, of showing me that there is a dark side to a hermit’s existence. He had chosen himself a most picturesque rocky point, which projects a little into the Lake, with one or two hollies and mountain ashes growing up in its crevices; and cut out a cell for himself in its perpendicular face. It would take too much space to describe the grand gloom of the Lake, the seven ruined Churches on its borders (one of which is still a burial-ground for the Roman Catholics), and that extraordinary Tower, a relic of paganism, which stands in one of the churchyards.

‘I am now on the bank of the Lake by which my mother was brought up, and of which I used to hear over and over again. It has been much altered by Macadamisers, and the house she lived in has been sold. Houses seem to have sprung up about Keswick Lake as if it was a Torquay or Sidmouth; and new dandy names have been given to all the creeks and islands, and nothing but gaiety seems to be going on or thought of. But I suppose old Skiddaw looks pretty much the same as he used to do, and will see things go to pot with their predecessors…. I hope in a day or two to find out the Parish Register, and see her birth and marriage: which is something like poring over the name of a place one likes in a map….’

The home of Margaret Spedding’s childhood, Armathwaite Hall, is within six miles of Cockermouth, the birthplace of Wordsworth. It stands at the foot of Bassenthwaite Lake, and looks out towards some of the loveliest and best-known mountains of the district, including Skiddaw, Helvellyn, and the Borrowdale Hills. It had been sold to Sir Frederick Vane, Bart., of Hutton Hall, Penrith, in 1796. Hurrell was a guest at Mirehouse, where his cousin John Spedding was always from time to time entertaining some of the noted literary men of the period.

To Newman, on Sept. 27, 1829, he writes more of St. Kevin’s dismal and delightful habitation, and ends with the praises of his mother’s county. ‘I got to Cumberland about ten days since, and I can safely assert that it exceeds anything that imagination can conjure up. I don’t mean that the extensive views of lake and mountain are so especially splendid, for, when the scene is on so large a scale, the trees and rocks become deplorably insignificant, woods seem little better than furze brakes; but, in rambling along the brooks and waterfalls, one comes to such excessively romantic corners, that they have quite put me out of love with Devonshire. The only thing which I desiderate is a Church steeple here and there in the valleys; for the worst of it is, that very few of the Parish Churches here are in exterior little better than a decent barn. What a horrid-looking scribble this is! and I know it is full of false spellings of all sorts, which will in many places make it unintelligible.’

To the Rev. John Keble, Feb. 5, 1830.

‘My Lectures this Term are less fatiguing than they have ever been yet, and there are fewer men that one cannot take an interest in. I have a set of very nice men in Pindar, which I am glad to be forced to get up: it certainly is one of the most splendid organs of Tory feeling that I have come in contact with! Don’t you think he had the republican artificial style in his head when he talked about

???a?e? ?? ???a?ta ?a??et?? ???? p??? ?????a ?e????’

All was grist which came to this preoccupied critic’s mill. He had an unaffected fondness for the classics. His theory about the poet whom he loved and understood best, and whom he is always quoting, is that he was a shy pastoral lyrist driven by officious friends into the epic field. Says Newman in a passing note of interest: ‘It was [Froude’s] notion that Horace and others used to (what is now called) patronise Virgil, as a man who really had a great deal in him; but who, the pity was, would not conform himself to the habits of society, and so lost opportunities of influence. So they set him upon the Æneid, to make something of him.’[72]

On Easter Monday, 1830, the Rev. R. H. Froude preached in the pulpit of S. Mary-the-Virgin, before the University, his sermon on Knowledge. His quiet sober sermons, of which no fewer than twenty appear complete in the Remains, are to a reader searching, pitiless, unforgetable. The undergraduate, however, must have ‘disvenerated’ them.

This to Newman, on Aug. 1, 1830, in a letter filled with political comment admiring the spirit of King Charles X. and Polignac in their disasters, and growling over Whig successes in England, is too amusing to be omitted. ‘… I set out in the rain to Exeter. I was not very well; and had made up my mind, as a matter of conscience, to have a tooth out when I got there; because, though it had not yet ached, I thought it probable it might before I had another opportunity. I got to Exeter, went to the dentist, had the forceps applied: the top of the tooth broke; they were applied again: a splinter came out of the side; and so on, till it was down fair with the jaw, and part of the nerve had come away in the fragments. Nothing remained to be done except to punch, etc.; and here I thought: “Satis jam pridem sanguine fuso”: I had satisfied my debt to my future self; and the present self might be excused from further suffering, till the toothache actually came.’

Froude’s lecturing at Oxford was now quite done; Newman’s and Robert Wilberforce’s likewise; they resigned their Tutorships as gracefully as they might, being joyful over the turn things had taken. The long opposition maintained against their desire to arrange the terminal table in accordance with their own best judgment, ended in total defeat for ‘the erect fighting figures’ of the three friends. The Provost himself, Hampden, Denison, and the junior Copleston rushed into the breach with Lectures many and purposeful; but Oriel felt the change, whether for good or ill, to be a real crisis. According to one distinguished commentator, her regeneration dates from that day; according to another, she never recovered the loss, and could but suffer her scholarly pre-eminence to pass, gradually but surely, to Balliol, which has ever since held it. Two at least of the dispossessed Tutors had conceived already a wider field of action for their energies. They had leisure now to think and to write; and leisure bred consequences. ‘Humanly speaking,’ Newman assures us, in his fragment of autobiography, written throughout in the third person, ‘the Movement never would have been, had they not been deprived of the Tutorship, or had Keble, not Hawkins, been Provost.’

Newman made a proposal that Robert Wilberforce or Froude should join him in the care of S. Mary’s parish, or rather, in building up at Littlemore what the Vicar ultimately intended even then should become a separate parish: but neither saw his way to accept the work. From letters of this time we gather knowledge of their ever-increasing attention to the Fathers; to the ethical aspects of many great political questions; and to the country walks and rides, apart or together, which did so much to strengthen that pure passion for Nature, ‘subdued and cherished long,’ which in Newman, as in Froude, lent sweetness and balance to character. Froude’s heartfelt love of Devon is conspicuous, whether he be in it or away from it. During the Long Vacation of 1831, he succeeded in carrying Newman off from his books and the stuffy summer air of low-lying Oxford, to the delights of Dartington. As a glowing corroboration of what Hurrell himself was always writing, it is worth while to quote his friend’s description of the district, sent to his interested mother at Iffley.

‘Dartington, July 7, 1831.

‘I despatched a hasty letter yesterday from Torquay which must have disappointed you from its emptiness; but I wished you to know my progress. As we lost sight of the Needles, twilight came on, and we saw nothing of the coast. The night was beautiful, and on my expressing an aversion to the cabin, Froude and I agreed to sleep on deck…. When I awoke, a little before four, we were passing the Devonshire coast, about fifteen miles off it. By six we were entering Torbay…. Limestone and sandstone rocks of Torbay are very brilliant in their colours and sharp in their forms; strange to say, I believe I never saw real rocks before, in my life! This consciousness keeps me very silent, for I feel I am admiring what everyone knows, and it is foolish to observe upon. You see a house said to have belonged to Sir Walter Ralegh;[73] what possessed him to prefer the court at Greenwich to a spot like this?… I know I am writing in a very dull way, but can only say that the extreme deliciousness of the air, and the fragrance of everything makes me languid, indisposed to speak or write, and pensive. My journey did not fatigue me, to speak of, and I have no headache, deafness, or whizzing in my ears; but, really, I think I should dissolve into essence of roses, or be attenuated into an echo, if I lived here!… What strikes me most is the strange richness of everything. The rocks blush into every variety of colour, the trees and fields are emeralds, and the cottages are rubies. A beetle I picked up at Torquay was as green-and-gold as the stone it lay upon, and a squirrel which ran up a tree here just now was not the pale reddish-brown to which I am accustomed, but a bright brown-red. Nay, my very hands and fingers look rosy, like Homer’s Aurora, and I have been gazing on them with astonishment. All this wonder I know is simple; and therefore, of course, do not you repeat it. The exuberance of the grass and the foliage is oppressive, as if one had not room to breathe, though this is a fancy. The depth of the valleys and the steepness of the slopes increase the illusion, and the Duke of Wellington would be in a fidget to get some commanding point to see the country from. The scents are extremely fine, so very delicate yet so powerful; and the colours of the flowers as if they were all shot with white. The sweet peas especially have the complexion of a beautiful face: they trail up the wall, mixed with myrtles, as creepers. As to the sunset, the Dartmoor heights look purple, and the sky close upon them a clear orange. When I turn back and think of Southampton Water and the Isle of Wight, they seem, by contrast, to be drawn in Indian ink, or pencil. Now I cannot make out that this is fancy, for why should I fancy? I am not especially in a poetic mood. I have heard of the brilliancy of Cintra and still more of the East, and I suppose that this region would pale beside them; yet I am content to marvel at what I see, and think of Virgil’s description of the purple meads of Elysium. Let me enjoy what I feel, even though I may unconsciously exaggerate.’

Newman’s senses were extraordinarily delicate: he writes as if at thirty he was half unaware of some of his most special faculties.

A week later, a postscript follows, addressed to Harriett Newman, telling of ‘a sermon to write for to-morrow, which I do believe to be as bad a one as I have ever written, for I was not in the humour; but I do not tell people so. It may do good, in spite of me!’ and this confidence: ‘The other day the following lines came into my head. They are not worth much; but I transcribe them:

There was a lifelong strife in Newman’s mind between created and Uncreated Beauty, or rather, a lifelong choice. He seems to have felt that he could not be as much of a poet as his own heart prompted, and be also as much of a hard-working saint as Divine Grace called him to be. For him, as in the beginning, a loved landscape was ‘pagan’: a temptation towards false gods. How little his attitude was understood, during his life, is well illustrated by the published complaint of Mr. Aubrey de Vere that his friend Dr. Newman of the Catholic University would never make time to go driving with him through the exquisite scenery about Dublin, though invited again and again. In all this, as in much else, he was entirely Augustinian. Ejiciebas eas et intrabas pro eis. It does not seem clear that Hurrell Froude, who outran Newman in many austerities, shared fully in the exercise of this signal one. His loneliness of spirit, far more developed than his friend’s, was also far less conscious, and his boyish relish of the beauties of moor and sea based itself, rather, on a philosophy which was Keble’s, and Henry Vaughan’s long before him:

Certainly, Newman was never so tormented by his affection for music, or for anything else in the same class, as he was by the glamour of out-of-doors at Taormina, and the homelier charms of ‘Devon in her most gentle dimplement.’ Spiritual matters apart, one does not perceive what else could have inwrought him more effectually with the very fibres of Hurrell’s being, than his felt infatuation for the Dartington he visited but twice in his busy life. They shared the same passion, again, for Rome. The spirit of place can always create a final test between any two cultivated minds. To differ in kind or even in degree of response to it, is indeed to differ.

The principle which lay at the bottom of Newman’s renunciation was one, however, which was equally familiar to his friend. It may not always have involved, for him, the need of so determined a depreciation of the loveliness of rural England, as too keen a reminder of

‘Isaac’s pure blessings, and a verdant home,’

things forsworn by both young men in that ‘highly religious and romantic idea of celibacy’ which they had adopted for good and all, between them, without Keble’s help. As Newman says of S. Basil and S. Gregory, retiring together from the world: ‘somehow, the idea of marrying-and-taking-Orders, or taking-Orders-and-marrying; building or improving their parsonages, and showing forth the charities, the humanities, and the gentilities of a family man, did not suggest itself to their minds.’ Nothing is plainer than that the arch-celibate was Froude, and not Newman: perhaps it would be quite exact to say that the idea, in Froude, as in Pascal, was wholly endemic, and in Newman only so in part. We are told in the Apologia how the idea was strengthened and supernaturalised by contact with Froude. Hurrell sometimes deplored with unmixed simplicity the social disqualifications of a total abstainer. ‘I wrote S[am] a letter the other day,’ he tells Robert Wilberforce, when the future Bishop had plighted his troth. ‘I suspect it was of the dullest! for I have no knack at writing to people in his interesting situation.’ In all this lack of sympathy with ordinary conduct and motive, there was no touch whatever of conscious oddity, but only of childishness. Newman, by far the tenderer heart of the two, never shared it.

Newman has left us an account of the origin of the sermon he mentions, which was preached in the old Church on July 16, 1831: that on the Pool of Bethesda, ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow,’ in the first volume of Parochial Sermons. ‘Twice in my life,’ he writes about 1862, ‘have I, when worn with work, gone to a friend’s house to recruit…. When I was down at Dartington for the first time, in July, 1831, I saw a number of young girls collected together, blooming, and in high spirits; “and all went merry as a marriage-bell.” And I sadly thought what changes were in store, what hard trial and discipline was inevitable. I cannot trace their history; but Phillis and Mary Froude married, and died quickly. Hurrell died. One, if not two, of the young Champernownes died.[76] My sermon was dictated by the sight and the foreboding. At that very visit [from Oxford] Hurrell caught, and had his influenza upon him, which led him by slow steps to the grave. He caught it sleeping, as I did, on deck, going down the Channel from Southampton to Torbay. Influenza was about, the forerunner of the cholera. It went through the Parsonage at Dartington. Every morning the sharp merry party, who somewhat quizzed me, had hopes it would seize upon me. But I escaped; and sang my warning from the pulpit…. I am a bird of ill omen.’[77]

Correspondence of course broke out anew, the moment the two were parted. Hurrell’s Greek reading progressed on his own summary lines. ‘TimÆus gets worse and worse. I can see no point in which it is interesting, except as a fact to prove what stuff people have sucked down…. I have cut TimÆus,’ he announces a bit later, ‘and have nearly finished Gorgias, which is as elegant and clever and easy as possible.’ His weather comments (such being unavoidable in England) are concise and instructive. By way of letting Newman know that there had been a fortnight of fine weather since the latter’s own rainy experiences at Dartington, he throws out an abrupt postscript of July 29: ‘What a lie old Swith.[78] has told!’

The Rev. Thomas Mozley seems to have received conditional offers or promises from Hurrell of sharing with him a country cure. The former proposed first the vacant Moreton Pinkney, thirty miles north of Oxford, then the parish of S. Ebbe’s, within its ancient limits. But both projects failed of realisation. Hurrell’s strength had to be hoarded, and Archdeacon Froude was averse to any measure which would create new duties, and cause a stricter separation between them. Keble, on behalf of his friend, would have favoured Northamptonshire rather than the city. He saw Newman on August 10 of this Long Vacation of 1831. ‘He wishes you to have a country parish,’ Newman writes; ‘he did not give his reasons.’ Newman himself coveted Hurrell’s parochial co-operation. These plans for an active employment of superfluous energies, formed, one after another, by appreciators of them, were destined to be vain. Meanwhile, relish for historical study was indicating to him how he could be of use, in a day full of most unscholarly conceptions of the past, long before the documentary firmament had been unrolled by Government for the man in the street. Dandum est Deo eum aliquid facere posse. He knew the path he meant to take, and communicates his dream to Newman, prefacing it with a bit of encouraging domestic news: ‘W[illy] continues very steady, getting up at half-past five, and working without wasting time till two or three.’ His next surviving brother William was then twenty years old, and reading for Honours.

To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Aug. 16, 1831.

‘Since you wish to have a definite categorical answer to M[ozley’s] question, I will say, No; and having said this, will proceed to my reasons and qualifications. First, whatever you may think, I have a serious wish, and (if I could presume to say so) intention of working at the ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages. Now, my father assures me that such a parish as [S. Ebbe’s] would be a complete occupation of itself, so that I am unwilling at once, and without giving myself the trial, to give up the chance of doing what I cannot but think as clerical, as improving, and much better suited to my capacity, such as it is, than the care of a parish. A small parish, and a less bothering one, might be a recreation, almost; but such an absorbing one as this I should be sorry to take, till I found that I could not work at anything else. Secondly, my qualification of the ‘No’ is this: if you either feel very certain I shall do nothing else, or have a strong opinion as to the improvement I should get from the occupation you propose, believe me willing to be convinced that my present view is incorrect.

‘I have read a good deal of Plato, have stuck in Parmenides as in TimÆus, but think all which keeps clear of metaphysics is as beautiful and improving as anything I ever read. As to Socrates, I can scarcely believe that he was not inspired, and feel quite confident that Plato is responsible for every tint of [puzzleheadedness] which shows itself in his arguments. One is apt, of course, to be carried away with a thing at the moment; but my present impression is, that Gorgias, Apologia Socratis, Crito, and PhÆdo, rank next to the Bible in point of the greatness of mind they show, and in grace of style and dramatic beauty surpass anything I have ever read. I think I am improved in composition, and attribute it to imitation of Plato. I am going to serve D[enbury?] for the next month, and shall have to write a number of sermons.

‘How atrociously the poor King of Holland[79] has been used; but nothing yet is so painful as the defection of the heads of the Church. I hear that the Bishop of Ferns[80] is dying: spes ultima.’

During the early autumn, Froude returns to the curacy question, and reiterates the conviction which his own idiosyncrasy was strengthening in him every day, and which surely was as warranted as it was sincere.

‘I have read the Lives of Wycliffe and Peacocke[81] in Strype; but must read much more about them and their times, before I shall understand them. At present I admire Peacocke and dislike Wycliffe. A great deterioration seems to have taken place in the spirit of the Church after Edward III.’s death. I hope I shall have perseverance to work up the history of the period. If I do this, I shall not think myself bound to take a curacy.’

It is a thousand pities that we can never have on our shelves the Froude of historical verity, to counterbalance the Froude of historical romance. Hurrell, so far as he got, was certainly all for ‘the ideas underlying history, and their organic connection,’ and was but poorly adapted for ‘the insertion of his own ideas into history … the professing to find in history what he had in reality put there.’[82] Is it not clear that such a fault may spring not from perverseness, but from the too pictorial eye? This the elder brother lacked, as likewise the other disadvantage of a magical prose style. That perturbing possession, the luckiest asset of the essayist, seems to delight in playing tricks on historians, for in the past, at least, the dullest have been the safest.

As one who understood the dangers of style, Hurrell chides Newman for the hair-splitting preliminary method to which he was treating The Arians. ‘If you go on fiddling with your Introduction, you will most certainly get into a scrape at last!’ And then: ‘I have for the last five days been reading Marsh’s Michaelis, which I took up by accident, and have been much interested by it. I see that old Wilberforce[83] owes to it much of the profundity which I have before now been floored and overawed by. It has put many things into my head that I never thought of before.’

The first unmistakable symptoms of Hurrell’s chronic illness had developed by the January of 1832. ‘I don’t think he takes care of himself,’ Keble says anxiously, in a letter to Newman, shortly after his election to the Professorship of Poetry. And Hurrell himself had confessed to Newman, as it were, ‘how ill all’s here about my heart: but ’tis no matter.’ Hence the reply from Oxford, on the 13th.

‘Your letter was most welcome, sad as it was; I call it certainly, from beginning to end, a sad letter, and yet somehow sad letters, in their place, and in God’s order, are as acceptable as merry ones. What I write for now is to know why you will not trust your brother to come up by himself? Let him go into your rooms; and do stop in Devonshire a good while, in which time you not only may get well, but may convince all about you that you are well—an object not to be neglected…. Your advice about my work is not only sage, but good, yet not quite applicable, though I shall bear it in mind. Recollect, my good Sir, that every thought I think is thought, and every word I write is writing, and that thought tells and that words take room, and that though I make the Introduction the whole book, yet a book it is; and though this will not steer clear of the egg blunder, to have an Introduction leading to nothing, yet it is not losing time. Already I have made forty-one pages out of eighteen.’ The correspondence between the two, then as ever, gives diverting glimpses of the mordant and ineffably frank critic away from Oxford, and the divine and man-of-letters in residence who continually sought, ‘in the beaten way of friendship,’ the advice he did not invariably need. Thus he sends a rough draft to Dartington of ‘a sermon against Sir James Mackintosh, Knight,’[84] expecting strictures, ‘should you discern anything heretical,’ and calling special attention to the argument: ‘therefore be sharp.’ The young censor was pleased to approve ‘on the whole,’ though with minor reservations. ‘As to your Annotationes in Neandri[85] Homiliam,’ Newman writes cheerfully, ‘to be sure I have treated them with what is now called true respect; for I have spoken highly of them, and done everything but use them! I did not have them till Saturday morning; so having your authority for what I wanted (i.e., the soundness of the main position and the t?p??), I became indolent.’

Meanwhile, towards the end of January, Hurrell sends an asked-for bulletin of his physical progress, and follows it up with several others, in all of which he makes it unconsciously plain that he has more pressing interests than his own sinking barometry. His mind was going forward by leaps and bounds towards convictions then unguessed-at, now quite general, about ‘the Tudor Settlement.’

To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Jan. 29, 1832.

‘I promised I would give an account of myself, if I did not appear in person by the beginning of Term. I am getting rid, though by slow degrees, of all vestiges of cough, and, what is more to the purpose, my father is quite easy about me, which he was far from being when I first came home…. I have been very idle lately, but have taken up Strype now and then, and have not increased my admiration of the Reformers. One must not speak lightly of a martyr, so I do not allow my opinions to pass the verge of scepticism. But I really do feel sceptical whether Latimer was not something in the Bulteel[86] line; whether the Catholicism of their formulÆ was not a concession to the feelings of the nation, with whom Puritanism had not yet become popular, and who could scarcely bear the alterations which were made; and whether the progress of things in Edward the Sixth’s minority may not be considered as the jobbing of a faction. I will do myself the justice to say that those doubts give me pain, and that I hope more reading will in some degree dispel them. As far as I have gone, too, I think better than I was prepared to do of Bonner and Gardiner. Certainly the ???? of the Reformation is to me a terra incognita, and I do not think that it has been explored by anyone that I have heard talk about it.’

With what astonishing prescience this novice surveys his terra incognita!

Again, writing to Newman on Feb. 17, the obsession for historical truth, as the handmaid to religious reform, breaks through some melancholy detail. He has been asked for a full bulletin; he confesses that the doctor states, and that he himself cannot deny, that there has been an attack on the lungs, attended, however, with but little pain or fever. He finds it ‘disheartening,’ for he had been taking long rides, and was in great spirits. Then he runs on to a topic which occurs to him not for the first nor for the last time. Might it not be a good thing to turn journalist, to have a Quarterly, and to speak in it the thing which is? ‘Imagine me in a yellow jacket,’ he says elsewhere to Newman; imagine him seated, and goose-quilled, and editorial. It was never to be. Was it not quite as well? Would not Mr. Froude (if the pun will pass muster) have proved gunpowder in a Magazine? He talks as he always talks of his own inspirations, derisively. But plainly, his heart is in it. He would start, this time, ‘on a very unpretending scale,’ and design his foxy Quarterly ‘to be at first only historical and matter-of-fact, so that writing for it would be the reverse of a waste of time even if it failed entirely, which I really hardly think possible, considering the ridiculous unfounded notions most people have got, and the vast quantity of unexplored ground. A thing of that sort might sneak into circulation as a book of antiquarian research, and yet, if well-managed, might undermine many prejudices. I am willing to think that I could contribute two articles per annum to such a work, without losing a moment of time, indeed getting through more than I should else. Memoirs of Hampden would be a subject [Keble] would take to with zest, as he hates that worthy with as much zeal and more knowledge than your humble servant. However, this is a scheme formed at a distance, which, as Johnson remarks, makes rivers look narrow and precipices smooth. Can you tell me where to go for the history of Lutheranism? I must know something of it, before I get a clue to Cranmer and the rest.’

Lastly, to the same correspondent, on Feb. 26.

‘… I trouble you with a few lines of grateful acknowledgment for the concern you are so kind as to take in my welfare, though I cannot at the same time refrain from observing that your advice does more credit to your heart than your head…. I was at Dr. [Yonge’s[87]], where I stayed three days, and was thoroughly examined. He assures me that whatever may have been the matter with me, I am now thoroughly well, and that I may return to Oxford at once without imprudence. At the same time, he says I must be extremely cautious, as the thing which formed in my windpipe proves me to be very liable to attack, and he looks on it as an extraordinary piece of luck that I got rid of it as I did. I am to wear more clothing than I have hitherto done, and to renounce wine for ever; the prohibition extends to beer: quÒ confugiam?’

Before Hurrell left home, his father had notified Newman of their conditional intention to visit the Continent. ‘If the doctor advises it,’ the Archdeacon writes on Feb. 22, ‘I have offered to be Hurrell’s companion to the Mediterranean, or any other part of the world that may be supposed most favourable in such a case as his. I own [that] my faith in the advantages to be gained by going abroad is not very great, unless they can be procured under the most favourable circumstances. At any rate, I think your suggestion for his giving up the office of Treasurer[88] shall be followed.’ He had held this office of Junior Treasurer since 1828, to the great general satisfaction, sharing with Newman the mental quickness, the ‘constitutional accuracy’ and the conscientiousness which go towards the casting-up of a perfect accountant. Hurrell, however, came up in the spring, whence he blithely reports his improved health.

To the Rev. John Keble, May 5, 1832.

‘… Thinking that you may wish to know something of my concerns, and wishing to know something of yours, … I send you the following. As to myself, about which valuable thing I am most concerned, you must know that I have at last found a ???sf??et?? in barley-sugar; only to think that my stars should let me off so easily! Sucking has had a most wonderful effect on me, and has removed nearly all that F[airford][89] had left of tendency to irritation; I might say all, if I could suck continually, but just now these east winds take advantage of casual intervals, and remind me that I am not perfectly at liberty. However, I have left off my handkerchief, and never feel the want of it; also, I am up at half-past six every morning; and taking an enlarged view of myself, I think my condition to be approved of.’

Up to July 31, Froude remained in Oxford, being and doing with all his usual zest, writing his papers on architecture, proving a very well-head of vitality to his friends, and ‘living his life.’ Could it have been indeed as early as this that he cut across the preliminaries described by Lord Blachford,[90] and paralysed an intended appeal to Bishops and Deans by announcing that he, for one, meant to ‘get on the box’ in person? This is thought to be the moment of Miss Giberne’s inspiration. It would seem as if the date should be a year later. In July of 1832 the Tutorial question was over; and there was no other agendum in debate between Froude and Newman. However that may be, there in the handsome lady’s sketch-book is Hurrell, smoothly, almost infantinely, mischievous, with one obedient Mozley to listen and abet; there is Newman, at an angle of the ottoman, distinctly not surveying with fond adoring gaze and yearning heart his friend (as he says he does, in a poem, part of which, at least, was written that very week), but back to back with him, sulking furiously, and putting on a silent stare which sufficiently expresses human disapproval: that little sudden void stare, entirely characteristic, as of one who is forced to survey, for the time being, an endless vista of Siberian snows.

It was a boding time; the cholera was raging all about; Newman himself was tired and dejected from overwork, and none too hopeful concerning Hurrell’s health or the impending prospect of separation. Long after, annotating his own correspondence at Edgbaston, he tells us something special about the lines just referred to, in what may be called, from a merely literary point of view, one of the most successful, though one of the least known, of his shorter lyrics. Hurrell’s share in it is no more, so to speak, than a tiny marginal portrait of him, tender, in passing, as the work of some old Flemish illuminator. Newman ascribes the origin of the last lines to this July. ‘With reference to the memory of that parting, when I shook hands with him, and looked into his face with great affection, I afterwards wrote the stanza:

But it is remarkable that the completed poem is dated Valetta, January 30, 1833: as if to mark the vanishing of the only shadow which ever crossed the united path of Newman and Froude; and that shadow was due, as we shall see, to a fancy of Newman’s, conceived in illness. Abstract and gnomic as his verses are, two human faces, nameless but recognisable, look through them with ‘sad eyes spiritual and clear.’ One is Mary Newman’s, in her sisterly youth;[92] the other is Hurrell Froude’s. Dearly as Newman loved his many friends, then and after (and as Dean Church reminds us, mutual affection as profound as that of the early Christians, was the very hall-mark of the Tractarians), there is but one friend discernible in the long vista of his poetry, most of which was written in his living presence. Hurrell may never have suspected as much. The temper of both, shrinking from the least emotional emphasis, would have precluded any open give-and-take. The privilege of being English has its own system of taxation. The Cardinal, in his old age (possibly when Little Lord Fauntleroy was overrunning the stage), had to assure some inquirer, by post, that he hardly had been in the habit of addressing Hurrell as ‘Dearest,’ in the prose exigences of every day.

The truant Fellow, restored to his father’s Parsonage, was able to send a definite announcement of his future movements, within a fortnight of his leaving Oxford.

To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Sept. 9, 1832.

‘I am afraid poor [Willy] will make no hand of his Second Class. He has no interest, and can pick up none, for what he is about; and all his interleaves and margins are scribbled over with lug sails. You will be glad to hear that I have made up my mind to spend the winter in the Mediterranean, and my father is going with me, the end of November, and we shall see Sicily and the south of Italy. We are both very anxious that you should come with us. I think it would set you up…. I have read M. Thierry’s stuff.[93] His ignorance is surprising. He supposes Oxford to have been a Bishopric in Henry the Second’s time, and he sticks in Saxons ad libitum, quoting authorities with which I am familiar, and where nothing of the sort occurs. My translations have been at a standstill…. Also, I am getting to be a sawney,[94] and not to relish the dreary prospects which you and I have proposed to ourselves. But this is only a feeling: depend on it, I will not shrink, if I buy my constancy at the expense of a permanent separation from home. I think this journey will set me up, and then I shall try my new style of preaching. We must indulge ourselves and other people with a little excitement on such matters, or else the indifferentists will run away with everything!’

William Froude, at Michaelmas, took his First Class in Mathematics, and a Third in Classics, quite as Hurrell expected. As to the microbe of travel thus featly introduced into the post, it did its work upon the recipient, though not without much hesitation and debate. One of Newman’s arguments against a plan with which, it is plain, he fell violently in love at once, was the state of his own health, involving, possibly, some additional responsibility for Archdeacon Froude. ‘You need fear nothing,’ Hurrell gallantly assures him, ‘on the score of two invalids: I am certainly better now than I have been for more than a year. I bathed yesterday with great advantage, took a very long walk, drank five glasses of wine, and am better for it all. My contemplated expedition is wholly preventative, so don’t be uneasy on that score…. As to my sawney feelings, I own that home does make me a sawney, and that the First Eclogue runs in my head absurdly. But there is more in the prospect of becoming an ecclesiastical agitator than in At nos hinc alii, etc.’

On Monday, December 3, Newman set out on the Southampton coach, reaching Exeter next day, and Falmouth, whence the Maltese packet of 800 tons, called the Hermes, was to sail, early on the Wednesday morning following. He wrote there his poem,

‘Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?’

the first of eighty-five dating from the Mediterranean voyage, the eighty-fifth being the ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ which has endeared to English-speaking pilgrims the Straits of Bonifacio. When the Froudes arrived at Falmouth, Newman had a nocturnal adventure to relate to them. He had been very roundly sworn at by a person, apparently a gentleman, who sat near him on the box. ‘I had opened by telling him he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maid-servant stuck atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain!’ The hasty fellow-traveller afterwards apologised. In the moonlight he had attributed a highly laic motive to Newman’s interference, so the latter explains to his mother. On the 8th of December the Hermes sailed. The three friends were to be together for five months, and their route is minutely and enchantingly mapped out in the first volume of the Newman Correspondence. The journey held unique experiences, filled with interest, for the two younger men, and they, on their part, seemed to have interested deeply many whom they met. Hurrell kept a log as they moved, for his brothers and sisters, for Mr. Keble, for Mr. Williams, and a few others; and out of it a fairly connected narrative can be extracted, of a colour and form quite other than Newman’s, the better correspondent, but graphic enough. Before starting on his voyage, Hurrell had seen in print, in the first and second volumes of The British Magazine, both his pioneer papers on Gothic Architecture, and the earlier chapters of his history of S. Thomas À Becket; these were followed, in volume iv., by The Project of Henry II. for Uniting Church and State, A.D. 1154.

To the Rev. John Keble, Dec. 12, 1832.

‘We started from Falmouth about eleven, on the 8th. “Jamque tibi e mediis pelagi mirabilis undis,” about sixty-eight miles to the south of Oporto, and thirty from the shore: the sea a perfect sheet of glass, showing the reflection of the stars, particularly Sirius, which is most splendid. The Pole-star sinking perceptibly: I am sure the Great Bear’s tail must have had a dip as he went his rounds. It has been very calm all day, and we have gone seven-and-a-half miles an hour: when the sun came to the meridian our latitude was 41° 36´. In the daytime the sea was a pale blue colour; I will not attempt to describe the sunset. Yesterday was very interesting: when we came on deck in the morning we could just make out Cape Ortegal to the south-east of us, at a distance of about forty miles. It was very pale, and scarcely to be distinguished from the sky, but rose very high above the horizon, and, as we neared it, seemed to be quite precipitous; we did not get within thirty miles, so that it has left on my mind only the ghost of an impression: but it is a grand ghost. We saw where Corunna lay, and must have been within twenty miles of some part of the coast between that and Cape Finisterre, which we doubled in the dark. All of it was of a very singular character, but insignificant compared with Cape Ortegal. All that day the wind was fresh from the east, and the sea very wild and grand, of a deep black-blue, covered with breakers: we went rather more than eight miles an hour, though the ship tossed amazingly. This was the first day that we had had a clear sky, and marvellous it was: a strong east wind in the middle of December, and the climate like May! our latitude at noon 44° 3´. There is something in the colour of the sea out of soundings, which is very striking to one who has only seen the shallow water that surrounds England. There is not a tint of green in it; to-day it has been a pale blue, like a beautiful lake; yesterday it was a black-purple. We find that this steamer is to touch at Cadiz and Algiers, and to spend two days at Gibraltar, in the way to Malta, and that afterwards it is to spend four days between Zante, Cephalonia, Ithaca, and Leucadia, touching at Patras (olim PatrÆ), then to spend six at Corfu, and afterwards return to Malta the same way; so we shall certainly extend our trip. The commander and the midshipmen are a very gentlemanlike set, and we the only passengers: so it is most luxurious…. And now I am stupid; if there is nothing more to tell to-morrow, I shall fill up the blank between Falmouth and Cape Ortegal, which may be regarded as our Dark Age.

‘Thursday evening.—The day has again been beautiful, and quite summery, with scarcely a cloud. When the sun rose we were off the Berlingas (some small sharp rocks, which you will see in a map), and from thence we kept near shore all the way to the rock of Lisbon. The greater part of the way we could not have been much more than a mile off. The sea has been its old green to-day; the coast all along very peculiar, not very high, but wild, and strongly marked; the rock precipitous, and deeply indented, and every promontory relieved by a thin mist of spray from the breakers of the Atlantic. We watched them curl in upon the shore, each rising in a green transparent line as it came to its turn to break, and then turning partially into a delicate mist where it met the more prominent rocks, till at last the whole line seemed to burst, and another rose behind its aËrified relics, and put me in mind of ?f??d?t?…. When we passed Mafra we saw the cupolas of the palace of Cintra, and, through an opening of the hills, made out the greater part of it through glasses. The situation is strange for so magnificent a building. And now we had a clear view of the ridge on which the Duke took up his position on the northern side of the lines of Torres Vedras. I will not attempt to describe it, except that it is grand to a degree, rising in spire-like shaggy tops, and cut by deep ravines, the sides of which were fringed with what we were told were cork trees. As we got near we saw many villas about half-way up, and on the two highest points were two convents. The Roman Catholics are queer fellows: they are determined to be admired and not envied; we, unhappily ?a???te? ??t??st??f?? t????, are envied and not admired. We doubled Capo Roca at three, and then went down to dinner. The mouth of the Tagus was too distant to make anything out, except the masts of the English ships, who are there to bully Don Miguel.[95] On Friday we got up at seven to see Cape St. Vincent, and passed close under it. The light on it was very fine, and the form of the rocks bold; but yesterday had spoiled us. The day is fine, cloudless, and windless—almost too hot…. Just now we saw a fishing-boat, and made towards it. The people were in a great fright, and pulled with all their might, while they thought there was a chance to get away; at last they gave up in despair. When we came up we found they had no fish: there were four of them, very dark complexions, and, as well as I could judge, Moorish features: the boat, sails, and all, perfectly un-English (a word which has ceased to be vituperative in my vocabulary). The coast which we are now passing is too distant to be very interesting, but a grey ridge of mountains rises behind, out of a dead flat, reminding one that we are off a strange land. The lateen sails, too, of which many are about, and two turtles which we almost ran over just now, and a shark’s fin just showing above water, all tell the same story…. On Sunday morning it was foggy and disagreeable, and we were in the dreaded Bay of Biscay: however, I was still well enough to do Service on board…. All the ship’s crew attended except the steersman and the stokers, i.e., the fellows that feed the fire of the engine. The commander had them all upon deck in the morning and gave them a practical discourse on good behaviour, which amused [Newman] and me by being so much to the point: he is a nice fellow, I think. After Service I was fairly done up, and lost my character…. Next day we were in the middle of the Bay: still cloudy and damp, and a long gentle swell: but we had served our time, and were all alive and merry…. In the evening we found that the commander was a musician and a painter; he had a very elegant miniature of his wife that he had finished up for his amusement at sea; and he sang us several songs, accompanying himself on the Spanish guitar, in very good taste, as [Newman] said: we the ???t?? liked it much; and we have not had any qualms since: and now I have got on to where the rest begins. We live splendidly on board, have a cabin each, capital dinners, and good company: the three midshipmen, gentlemanlike obliging fellows as can be: yesterday they went out of the vessel’s course, to show us the coast to advantage.

‘Saturday.—On getting up, found ourselves in Cadiz harbour; the convent bells put us in mind that we are in a religious country: it sounded just like Oxford before Morning Chapel. We found ourselves in quarantine and unable to land. The Consul’s boat came off for the letters, rowed by eight Spaniards, such odd-looking fellows! they row without rullocks, having a strap and a t??p?t??…. We saw the unfinished Cathedral very distinctly through a glass: it had not at all an ecclesiastical look, but was large and picturesque. It will never be finished now, I suppose, as the day of apostasy seems at hand in Spain.

‘Sunday morning.—Here we are at Gibraltar.’

Newman’s letters, enthusiastic over sky and sea, are full of the horrors of the ship (which he says was not properly cleaned before being sent down from Woolwich), and of the little stuffy rooms which are enough to kill a valetudinarian; but valetudinarian Hurrell seems to have enjoyed it all.

To the Rev. Isaac Williams, Dec. 27, 1832.

‘… We were at Gibraltar only forty-eight hours, and of that we were in quarantine forty. The remaining eight hours, however, we turned to account, under the auspices of the Colonel of engineers, who was kind enough to lend us horses, and go over everything with us: unfortunately we were there so short a time, that we could only see what was curious, and had no leisure for the picturesque; to enjoy which, it would have been necessary to ride away five or six miles, on what they call the neutral ground: the low sandy isthmus which joins the rock to the continent; but from the fortifications we saw enough to convince us what a magnificent object it must be. In our scramble we had the luck to see three or four monkeys, scrambling, with the greatest ease, up and down what seemed a smooth precipice. I know how odious descriptions are, yet I must just tell you that, among other things, we were taken through a gallery cut out in the most precipitous face of the rock, about 650 feet above the base, and 800 feet below the top, so that when you peep out through the port-holes, which are cut every here and there for cannon, you seem suspended in mid-air, and feel giddy, in whatever direction you look. Thanks to Colonel R[ogers] we saw so much that we had no right to grumble at the quarantine: but it really is something so exquisitely grotesque, that one cannot help being provoked. We were moored close alongside of a coal-wharf, and all the day that we were imprisoned, a parcel of fellows of the town were at work, wheeling coals into our vessel, and upsetting them on the deck, so that they were in all but contact with our crew for a whole day; also, all packages were received, after undergoing the ceremony of a partial ducking in the water; and letters had a chisel dug into them, which was supposed to let out the cholera. And while all this absurd farce was going on, we were imprisoned in one of the most interesting places in the world, not knowing when we should be released, or whether at all; however, even in this time, we had some amusement from the variety of curious figures that came down to the Quay to look at us. One fellow, a Moorish Jew, was dressed so picturesquely, and looked so exotic altogether, that I tried to draw him; but he saw what I was at, and first hallooed out: “You no paint me,” and, when I went on, he bolted as fast as he could. The Moors are magnificent-looking fellows, with very high stern features, dark eyes, and very marked nostrils that give to the full face rather a look of ferocity; even the lowest of them look like aristocrats. The Spanish women, too, were worth looking at: three of them came down to visit a merchant who came with us from Cadiz; the high head-dresses were the only peculiarity in their dress, but one of them was very fine-looking, and very unlike an Englishwoman. I should have thought her ladylike, only she spat with the most perfect indifference, just as —— would in C[ommon] R[oom]. We left Gibraltar at ten on Monday night, and had very calm beautiful weather for two days…. We got to Algiers [Thursday morning] about three, and it was then rough, cloudy, and blowing fresh. This is the most wretched, wicked-looking place I ever set eyes upon. I can associate its idea with nothing but a wasp’s nest. It is huddled together, leaving no apparent room for its streets; its windows are loop-holes, as if to fire through. All beyond its walls looks perfectly desolate, except a number of white specks, which are houses where the rich inhabitants retire in time of plague. The town itself is a mass of white, as perfectly white as a chalk quarry; and the monotony of the glare[96] is only relieved by the rust of weather-stains, which are not white-washed by the French so regularly as by the Moors.

‘The Quay, as every one knows, is a strong battery, expressly for the shelter of pirates; and, when one thought of the horrors that had been practised in that detestable place, and felt the personal discomfort of an approaching storm, and saw, for a foreground, the infamous tricoloured flag on the ships, the general impression was as much the reverse of favourable as can easily be fancied. A boat came alongside with the Vice-consul, for letters. His Excellency was an English Jew, and there was an half-starved Frenchman for his p??ed???. He was rowed by four fellows, of what race I know not…. Their features were perfect apathy, and looked like stuffed red leather more than flesh and blood. If we had touched any one of the crew we should have been in for a hundred days’ quarantine in every port of Europe, and yet the wretches had the impudence to insist on our slitting all the letters, to let out the cholera. We stayed an hour, and then started; and sure enough, the storm came. The wind was north-west, and blew right across from the Gulf of Lyons, which I shall always think more formidable than the Bay of Biscay. The wind lasted till we got under the lee of Sardinia; and what with the stink of the bilge-water, which was stirred up by the tossing, and the constant noise, and the difficulty of standing and sitting and eating and drinking, we were constantly wretched enough. My father spent the whole time in his berth; [Newman] and I the greater part of ours. But ills have their end. The sea and the stink subsided, and we made the rest of our voyage to Malta stilly and quickly, arriving there on Monday morning after breakfast. [Newman] does not think his health perceptibly improved yet,[97] but he has entirely got over sea-sickness, and has written an immense deal for the Lyra Apostolica.[98] He has written so many letters to his mother and sisters, that I need say no more about him. He will write to you soon. I know you will think this a very dull letter, as it is about places and not people; but we have been so little on shore, that I have not been able to indulge your taste. Kindest remembrances to O.[99] I will write to him soon.—Yours affectionately,

R. H. F.’

From Malta also, on Christmas night, a letter was despatched to Dartington, addressed, apparently, to John Spedding Froude, which carries on the record of the travellers. All the Froudes, like all the Hares, could draw.

‘… There is so much that is picturesque and singular about this place, that I do not despair of occupation for all the fifteen days in drawing, if the weather is only tolerable. The boats, and the dresses, and the colours and forms of the buildings are all as good practice as anything I can fancy, and I shall not be sorry to have time on my hands for studying them at leisure. We shall be allowed to go about the harbour [in quarantine] as much as we like, and there are several places where we may land. This will have to start a day or two after our return, so you will not hear much more of Malta till the next packet. As yet I have made egregious failures in attempts to colour; indeed, I have had no opportunity of doing anything from nature, and recollection supplies one too indistinctly. My father has made many very interesting coast drawings as we have come along, but he has done nothing in a finished way.

‘Corfu, Jan. 1.—We got here the day before yesterday, after a most interesting voyage. The sea has been as still as a lake, and we have had a light breeze in our favour; but it must be owned that we have sailed away from the fine weather. Ever since we got here it has rained torrents, and is now blowing a violent gale, so that we thank our stars we are in harbour. On Friday morning we (as you would say) made Zante on our larboard bow, at a distance of about fifty miles. The high land of Cephalonia appeared at the same time, so they kept her away three-quarters of a point, and made for the passage between the islands. The south point of Cephalonia is a very high mountain; it was covered with snow, which here and there appeared through the clouds. Zante is cliffy, and not so very unlike some of the Isle of Wight.[100] We got to the town just after dark, and went ashore to make out what we could. We went to a billiard-room, a coffee-house, the head inn, and two or three shops. Everything was filthy to a degree, but there seemed to be some really handsome houses, such as Sir John Vanbrugh might have built. The shops are all open to the street, and one would think that the shopkeepers had never taken more than coppers in their lives; yet in a tobacco shop, on asking the price of a cherry-stick pipe, which I should have guessed at twelve shillings in England, they told me it was one hundred dollars, and a midshipman who was with us, and had lived a great deal in those parts, said that it was not at all dear at the money. The mouthpiece was amber inlaid with turquoise, and in that miserable-looking shop there must have been thirty or forty more pipes as costly: I wonder where they get customers? We drank a bottle of Zante wine at the head inn, and very nice it was; on asking the price, the landlord most unaffectedly said there was nothing to pay, and when we gave him a shilling he seemed to think it was most munificent.

‘… The town is now in possession of a Suliote chief, who has taken the castle into his own hands, and has quartered himself and his followers in all the best houses of the town, which is now newly building, and promises to be regular, and even elegant. The streets are quite straight, and cut one another at right angles, and the houses all have piazzas before them; but everything is now at a standstill, and the streets themselves, unpaved, are more like the courses of rivulets than anything else. It was a night of rejoicing, this being the Day of St. Dionysius, and all the common people were assembled in the bazaar, a sort of shambles, and the gentlemen in a coffee-room, smoking and playing cards, in their best dresses: most of them were fine-looking fellows, very quiet and polite. We had coffee there, and very capital it was, but thick and almost like chocolate. I should like to know how they make it. The Greeks there were all dressed in their white linen petticoats, embroidered coats, and shaggy capotes, except one old fellow, who had on an English box-coat, and one other fellow, whom, from his vulgar impudent countenance, I conclude to have been an English blackguard. They all say the Morea is in a most wretched state, full of banditti and pirates, so that you cannot go anywhere without an escort. Next day we found ourselves just off Ithaca, at breakfast-time, and got breakfast over before we entered the strait between Ithaca and Cephalonia. This was the first day that I attempted what is called sketching, and I made a tolerable hand of it; at least, I found out how to make memoranda that did to work upon afterwards. I can make no hand of colour, and think I shall hardly attempt it, till I have time to make some finished studies from nature. You and W[illy] care so little about classics, that I need not trouble you about Ulysses’ castle, Sappho’s leap, etc. We got here on Sunday night, and the rain came soon after us, and has persecuted us incessantly ever since. We got ashore yesterday and walked about the town, which is very picturesque, and exactly like the panorama….

‘We were at a ball at Corfu on the anniversary of the installation of the Ionian Government, at which all the native population were expected; but the day was so stormy that it made a poor show. I meant to have got you a real Albanian capote, but they were not to be had at Corfu, and the cherry-stick tobacco-pipes were too dear.’

To the Rev. Isaac Williams, Jan. 10, 1833.

‘We spent Christmas Day at Malta in an incessant row, taking in coals, while the bells of all the many Churches of Valetta told what was going on in that land of superstition;—watched one poor fellow in quarantine all day, saying prayers to himself, and looking towards the Church nearest on the shore, opposite to the Lazaretto.[101] The time is now drawing nigh when we shall spend fifteen long days in that abode of the unblessed. It is now the 10th of January, and we are just in sight of Malta, on our return from the Ionian Islands. We have not seen them under the most favourable circumstances, as the weather has been wintry, i.e., either very stormy or very cold. I have been often longing for the bright hot Spanish sun which conducted us from the Bay of Biscay to Gibraltar…. Among other things, we spent half an hour in the coffee-house [at Zante] where the Greek merchants were assembled for the holiday evening: a little wretched dirty place, but the company were very polite to us, and we were surprised at the cleanness of their dresses, and a certain refinement in their appearance and manner. We were under the guidance of Major L[ongley] brother of L[ongley] of H[arrow][102] who is Governor of Cythera, and knows something of the habits and language of the people. The company all rose to him, and sat down when he said ???este; but they pronounce so queerly, that one can hardly ever make out a word, although their newspapers are quite intelligible, and differ but little from old Greek. I would give much to live among them for a bit, and get into their notions. As it is, we have seen nothing but the surface, and heard the notions of the resident English, which cannot be relied on…. In Corfu, the breed is very mongrel, mixed up with Venetian and Italian blood; so that, altogether, the sight was uninteresting, except that when one saw a splendid set of apartments, with magnificent English furniture, and brilliantly illuminated, with a band of music, etc., it contrasted itself oddly with the thought of old Thucydides and the Corcyrean sedition. The remains of the old town are very scanty, and one cannot make out anything satisfactory about t? ??a???, etc. There is a rock that they call Ulysses’ ship; but I suspect the name of a Venetian origin. In one place there is the remains of an Ionic temple, on a very small scale, lately discovered; but we had no time to go into antiquarian questions. We rode over most of the island, and saw several of the villages, all of which bear marks of having been tenanted by a rich population; but everything is of a Venetian character. I cannot make out whether the people are religious or not; yet they seem, on the whole, to be an innocent civil set. Every small knot of families have their priest and their chapel, but no parishes that we could hear of. Their Churches are very small, but great numbers of them: two or three to a small village. [Newman] and my father went into one in an out-of-the-way village, in which there [were] fine silver lamps, a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, well executed, and several pictures of Saints, in the hard German style of the fifteenth century. I went twice into the Church which is the depository of the body of St. Spiridion;[103] and people were praying there both times, one person apparently from the higher classes. In the chapel where the body lies, lamps are always kept dimly burning, and the people go in and kiss the shrine. The feet are stained with tears, and there are many splendid offerings there of precious stones. They keep all the Saints’ days by going to Church, and playing cards afterwards; and on the fast days they fast fairly…. On our way back from Corfu, the curtain was drawn back which had before hung over the scenery, and the long ridges of the Acarnanian mountains appeared in full splendour; among these many points in the range of Pindus were visible in the distance; and from Zante we certainly saw the summit of Parnassus, though partially intercepted with clouds. To look at, Mount St. Meri, in the north of Morea, is the most magnificent, but I do not know its classical name.[104] And now I suppose I must bid farewell to these extraordinary places for the rest of my life; having only just seen enough of them to know how well worth seeing they are.’

The fifteen days of detention were not quite so annoying or so monotonous as the travellers had feared. ‘This Lazaret,’ says Newman in the course of a long letter to his sister Jemima, ‘was built by the Knights [of St. John at Malta] for the Turks…. We burn olive wood. I assure you we make ourselves very comfortable. We feed well from an hotel across the water. The Froudes draw and paint. I have hired a violin, and bad as it is, it sounds grand in such spacious halls. I write verses, and get up some Italian, and walk up and down the rooms about an hour and a half daily; and we have a boat, and are allowed to go about the harbour.’ An incident on the quarantine island is responsible, in Newman’s biography, for the one and only tiff between himself and Froude.[105] In reality, it was no tiff at all, as Froude was wholly innocent of offence. (Newman, it may be remarked in passing, had just written his David and Jonathan.) It seems that during the January nights in the Lazaretto, all three of the English travellers used to hear unaccountable footsteps, in the rooms and galleries, their own doors having been locked from the outside. On one occasion Newman thought he heard the noises in Archdeacon Froude’s room. ‘The fourth time it occurred, I hallooed out: “Who’s there?” and sat up in my bed ready to spring out. A deep silence followed, and I sat waiting a considerable time: and thus I caught my cold.’ A week later, there is no clean bill of health to send Mrs. Newman. ‘The weather has been unusually severe here. My cold caught in the Lazaret ripened the day I came out of it into the most wretched cough I ever recollect having, as hard as the stone walls, and far more tight than the windows.’ In short, Newman was housebound, a close prisoner, and miserable enough, despite his successful completing of his ‘Patriarchal Sonnets.’ Archdeacon Froude forbade his going out to Church. The next day, Monday, he confides to the all-sympathetic bosom of his family: ‘I am properly taken at my word. I have been sighing for rest and quiet. This is the sixth day since I left the Lazaret, and I have hardly seen or spoken to anyone. The Froudes dine out every day; and are out all the morning, of course. Last night I put a blister on my chest; and never having had one on before, you may fancy my awkwardness in taking it off and dressing the place of it this morning. I ought to have had four hands. Our servant was with the Froudes…. Well, I am set upon a solitary life, and therefore ought to have experience what it is; nor do I repent…. I have sent to the library, and got Marriage[106] to read. Don’t smile—this juxtaposition is quite accidental! You are continually in my thoughts. I know what kindness I should have at home.’ He ends dismally, not without citing the Apostolic precedent of going not alone but two and two: ‘I wonder how long I shall last without any friend about me!’ One can imagine the anxiety and indignation of the devoted hearts at Iffley. Early in April their unfriended John Henry received his sister Jemima’s answer, distinctly uncomplimentary to Hurrell Froude; whereupon Newman rushed into explanation: he could not have Froude blamed; he had begged to be left alone (‘you know I can be very earnest in entreating to be left alone’): he had refused his repeated solicitations even to let him sit by him and read to him; he had, in short, driven him away. Hurrell, indeed, was not cut out by Nature for a nurse. Be that as it may, would it be far wrong to surmise that it was influenza which had been playing its now-well-understood tricks on Newman? But he made up like a lover for his passing semi-accusation. Froude, as it happened, was singularly well at this time, though the reprieve from discomfort was to be but brief.

The three companions went from Malta to Messina, where, in wretched weather, they had divers small misadventures, shared with Rohan-Chabots. Hurrell kept, that week, a sort of journal of events; and the pages describing the capture of lodgings at Palermo seem worth transcription, since they show the revered Vicar of S. Mary-the-Virgin defeated by female diplomacy, and in the unexpected rÔle of a sprinter.[107]

‘We got to Palmero about eleven or twelve next morning [Feb. 11, 1833]: the sea calm, the sun hot, and everything beautiful to a degree. Here we knew that there was to be a scramble for rooms; so when we anchored, [Newman] and I made a rush for the ladder, and were first in the boat; but unfortunately, when we were in it we found that we had mistaken the landing-place. Our boat was nearest the Quay; and we had to clear out round all the others to make for the custom-house and town, which were a mile off; also, our boat had only one man. So we saw two other boats give us the go-by, in one of which was the wife of the Governor of Moldavia and Wallachia:[108] they landed about four minutes before us, and we thought to make up our way by running. I was soon left behind by [Newman] and the boatman. When they passed the Countess, I saw her tap a fellow on the shoulder, who ran off for a coach, in which she set off as hard as she could for the Albergo di Londra. We found afterward that she had secured Page’s whole house by letter; and not contented with this, she had two servants ahead, who, when [Newman] came up with them, raced him; and being fresh, they contrived to keep ahead by a foot or two, so as just to bespeak Jaquerie’s whole house before he could speak to the landlord. On this, we despaired, and put up with the first place we could find to hide our noses in: luckily, it had no fleas! and that was more than we had bargained for.’ Newman, in his own letters, does not single out for praise the one negative charm of their temporary dwelling. “It is astonishing,” he says from the depth of English decency, “how our standard falls in these parts!”

The Archdeacon, with his attendant spirits, was off at four in the morning for Egesta. They had a carriage to themselves, drawn by three mules with bells, and a boy and a guide, besides the driver; much Æsthetic rapture and next to nothing to eat, seems to have been their portion. But the culminating point, the complete satisfaction of the heart’s desire, was Rome. ‘All the cities I ever saw are but as dust, even dear Oxford inclusive, compared with its majesty and glory,’ writes Newman to the Rose Hill auditory. This enthusiasm of his was not without its scruples and torments. He adds an occasional colophon of genuine self-comfort, being sure that ‘our creed,’ the while, is ‘purer than the Roman’: a matter which, apparently, Hurrell forgot to dwell upon. He never had to rid himself of the least taint of the Pharisee, although he had been scandalised enough at Naples. That alien city of all badness had given his notions of its nominal religion a rude shock. Frederick William Faber, passing through Cologne in 1839, got, unwillingly, the very same sort of painful disedification which Froude got at Naples.[109] The sadness of the decay of an ideal, even though a misplaced and mistimed one, hangs over some of the letters sped towards holy Oxford.

To the Rev. John Keble, March 16, 1833.

‘Rome.—… I should like to be back at the election much; sed fata vetant. Being abroad is a most unsatisfactory thing, and the idleness of it deteriorating. I shall connect very few pleasing associations with this winter, and I don’t think I shall come home much wiser than I went. The only ???s?? on which I can put my hand, as having resulted from my travels is, that the whole Christian system all over Europe “tendit visibiliter ad non esse.”[110] The same process which is going on in England and France is taking its course everywhere else; and the clergy in these Catholic countries seem as completely to have lost their influence, and to submit as tamely to the State, as ever we can do in England…. Egesta … by good luck we have been able to see, though we were obliged to abandon the rest of our Sicilian expedition. It is the most strangely romantic place I ever saw or conceived.[111] It is no use attempting to describe it, except that the ruins of the city stand on the top of a very high hill, precipitous on three sides, and very steep on the other, literally towering up to heaven, with scarcely a mule-track leading to it, and all round the appearance of an interminable solitude. After going some miles through a wild uninhabited country, you approach it by winding up a zigzag path cut in the face of what looks a perpendicular and inaccessible rock, and, till you have got some way up, it wears so little the appearance of a track, that without guides no one would venture on. At the top the old walls of the town can be distinctly traced, where one would think that mortal foot had never or rarely been, and numbers of tooled stones [are] scattered in all directions, evidently the remains of well-finished buildings. Here and there is a broken arch which makes one fancy the remains to be Roman, and in the most conspicuous place a fine theatre, nearly perfect. When you come to the ascent on the opposite side, you all at once see the Temple, in what seems a plain at the bottom, with its pediments and all its columns perfect, and only differing from what it was at first in the deep rich colouring of the weather-stains. When we saw it there was a large encampment of shepherds in the front of it, with their wolf-dogs and wild Salvator-like dresses; and, by-the-by, as we found afterwards, with no great objection to lead Salvator-like lives; for when by some accident we were separated from one another, they got round [Newman] shouting “Date moneta!” and, he thinks, would certainly have taken it by force, except for a man with a gun who is placed there by Government, as custode of the Temple, and who came up when the others were getting most troublesome. On getting close to the Temple, we found that it stands on the brink of a precipitous ravine 200 or 300 feet deep, which gives a grandeur to the whole scene even beyond what it gets from the mountains and the solitude. Compared with Egesta, PÆstum is a poor concern, and so is Naples when compared with Palermo.

‘But Rome is the place, after all, where there is most to astonish one, and [it is] of all ages, even the present. I don’t know that I take much interest in the relics of the Empire, magnificent as they are, although there is something sentimental in seeing (as one literally may), the cows and oxen Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis. But the thing which most takes possession of one’s mind is the entire absorption of the old Roman splendour in an unthought-of system: to see their columns, and marbles, and bronzes, which had been brought together at such an immense cost, all diverted from their first objects, and taken up by Christianity: St. Peter and St. Paul standing at the top of Trajan’s and Antonine’s columns, and St. Peter buried in the Circus of Nero, with all the splendour of Rome concentrated in his mausoleum. The immense quantity of rare marbles, which are the chief ornament of the Churches here, could scarcely have been collected except by the centre of an universal Empire, which had not only unlimited wealth at its command, but access to almost every country; and now one sees all this dedicated to the Martyrs. Before I came here I had no idea of the effect of coloured stone in architecture; but the use Michael Angelo has made of it in St. Peter’s shows one at once how entirely that style is designed with reference to it, and how absurd it was in Sir C. Wren to copy the form when he could copy nothing more. The coloured part so completely disconnects itself from the rest, and forms such an elegant and decided relief to it, that the two seem like independent designs that do not interfere. The plain stone-work has all the simplicity of a Grecian temple, and the marbles set it off just as a fine scene or a glowing sky would. I observe that the awkwardness of mixing up arched and unarched architecture is thus entirely avoided, as all the arched work is coloured, and the lines of the uncoloured part are all either horizontal or perpendicular. So Michael Angelo adds his testimony to my theory about Gothic architecture.

‘As to Raphael’s pictures, I have not had time to study them with attention. The most celebrated of them, especially your friend Heliodorus, are so damaged or dirty that one cannot see them distinctly except close; they say we should use an opera-glass. All that the painters say of Raphael tends to exalt him as a poet and a man of genius, but rather at the expense of his technical skill; he and Michael Angelo seem, by what they say, to be counterparts. But I wish I could hope to form an opinion of my own about it.

‘There is an English artist here, a Mr. S[evern],[112] to whom [Newman] had an introduction, and who certainly is a very clever man, who gave us a most curious and interesting account of a German school of painters that is now growing up in Rome. He says that several of them are here, living on pensions from German Princes, particularly the King of Bavaria, and are studying Raphael in a very singular way: curious fellows, with a great deal of original enthusiasm (utterly unlike the a?a?s?? of England), who have got it into their heads that the way to study Raphael is not to copy him, but to study the works he studied, and to put their mind into the attitude in which he formed his conceptions. So they poke away at the old hard pictures of early Masters, with stiff drapery and gilt backgrounds, and are so intent on dissociating Christian and classical art, that they think grace and beauty bought too dear, if they tend to disturb the mind by pagan associations. One of these fellows,[113] he said, had become intimate with him in a curious way. Mr. S[evern] has made colouring his principal study; he seems to be a bit of an enthusiast himself, and has been aiming at combining the colouring of the Venetian school with the designs of the Roman. Well, this German, who is a shy, reserved man, having been one day in Mr. S[evern’s] studio, returned the next day with ten or twelve of his German friends, and again, the day after, with as many more; and so on, for some time. At last Mr. S[evern], who took it as a great compliment, asked him what it was that had attracted his notice. He said he had always gone on a notion that colour had nothing to do with the poetry of painting, but was merely sensual, and that a Madonna he had seen of Mr. S[evern’s] made him alter his mind; so he had been bringing friends to see if they felt the same about it. Since this time they have been very intimate; but the man is so reserved, in general, that except for this accident he might have kept his notions to himself. Mr. S[evern] says his designs are quite in the spirit of Raphael, and that his whole mind is so taken up with Catholic ????, that he has given up his Protestantism, and is a rigid conformer to all the ordinances of the Church. I have prosed about this because I was struck with it. I hope it is no mare’s nest…. I don’t know whether I mentioned to you that [Newman] and [Williams] are going to indite verses for The British Magazine, under the title Lyra Apostolica? [Rose][114] would not take a sonnet that I made, because it was too fierce; but says it may come by-and-by. I will write it out for your edification and criticism.

‘???I ??S ??S???? S??S?OS.[115]

‘I mean to do one on Lord Grey’s interpretation of the Coronation Oath.[116] Will you do some? A mixture, some fierce and some meek: the plan is to have none above twenty lines…. My cough is just the same as when I left England. The climate is worse than an English autumn, and sight-seeing does no good. I was almost well at Malta, and if I had stayed there should have been quite so now. I expect to see the original EpistolÆ S. ThomÆ in the Vatican Library.’

Overbeck seems to have attracted Froude purely, or chiefly, on moral grounds, but he found at Rome an abiding object of enthusiasm in the lovely genius of Francesco Francia. One of his letters to his second brother, from Leghorn, illustrates both his own passion for thoroughness, and the range and zest of his lifelong interest in arts and crafts. He was ‘an ingeniose person,’ and constantly invites the application of that favourite and comprehensive seventeenth-century word.

To William Froude, April 12, 1833.

‘… If you choose, you may easily find out in London what is the particular process by which the red colour of glass is produced from gold, and also in what way they would go to work to give glass a vitrified coat of gold, retaining its own colour; and whether any accident in attempting the latter might effect the former. For it has always struck me as a puzzle how so recondite an idea as that of producing a ruby tint from a yellow metal should come into the heads of the early glass-painters; and it has occurred to me that some such accident as I have guessed at above might be the key to the puzzle, for the practice of giving glass a vitrified coat of gold for the purpose of mosaic work was very common, long before the use of coloured glass in windows had been thought of, and specimens of it are to be seen in Rome of almost every age between [A.D.] 400 and [A.D.] 1000. Please not to forget this question, or be contented with vague answers. It will be likely to take some time and trouble to get at the truth, but it is curious, and there is no hurry, and you will at any rate have more opportunities than I shall. The best red colour that has been produced in modern times has been managed by a French chemist, and there is a wholesale house of his goods somewhere in Holborn. The Pope’s mosaic manufactory in Rome is curious: there are eighteen thousand shades of colour in it, which can be looked out as in a directory. Some of the imitations of pictures which they have made are so perfect that you must look close before you can see joinings and transitions of colour; and they have the advantage over every kind of painting, being mellow from the first and brilliant to the last. In St. Peter’s there are many very fine ones, copies of all the most famous pictures, and they are said to have cost 4500l. a piece. St. Peter’s itself is the great attraction of Rome, worth all the classics put together. I think the dome is built with all the layers of stone horizontal, so that the principle of the arch applies not to the vertical section, but only to the horizontal. I am not sure of this, but I think so.’

It does not appear, though Newman and Froude saw the Pope’s mosaic manufactory, that they saw the Pope himself, Gregory XVI. They seem to have gained their chief vistas of Roman society through their acquaintance with the Prussian ChargÉ d’Affaires, Baron Bunsen,[117] and his English wife, at whose house of all hospitality Sir Walter Scott, then near his end, had been the beloved guest less than a year before. Hurrell must have had his own impressions of the excellent Bunsen, with his pleasant Teutonic habit of holding up his finger and hushing the company, before he began to speak. There is no mention of our modest and all-observing pilgrims in the published correspondence either of Bunsen or of Joseph Severn, for 1832-1833.

On April 13, 1833, Hurrell sends to the Rev. John Frederick Christie one of the most discussed letters in the first volume of the Remains.

‘It would not become me to apologise for not having written before, since I much doubt my capacity[118] to produce anything worth the postage. Nevertheless, I have for some time been intending to write to you, and can’t account for having let so much time slip through my fingers. My father and I are now on our way home, having left [Newman] to retrace his steps to Sicily…. I hope to be at Genoa to-morrow morning…. Between [Lyons] and Paris, I hope to visit and make drawings of some of the Abbeys, etc., which are connected with the history of St. Thomas of Cant. “Sixth and lastly,” if the Fates allow, we shall cross from Havre to Southampton by the first steamer in May … soon after which you may expect to see me in Chapel. I congratulate you on having got over your first audit so prosperously;[119] … it is better occupation than travelling, take my word for it. It is really melancholy to think how little one has got for one’s time and money. The only thing I can put my hand on as an acquisition is having formed an acquaintance with a man of some influence at Rome, Monsignor [Wiseman][120] the head of the [English] College, who has enlightened [Newman] and me on the subject of our relations to the Church of Rome. We got introduced to him to find out whether they would take us[121] in on any terms to which we could twist our consciences, and we found to our dismay that not one step could be gained without swallowing the Council of Trent as a whole! We made our approaches to the subject as delicately as we could. Our first notion was that the terms of communion were, within certain limits, under the control of the Pope … or, that in case he could not dispense solely, yet at any rate the acts of one Council might be rescinded by another; indeed, that in Charles the First’s time it had been intended to negociate a reconciliation on the terms on which things stood before the Council of Trent. But we found, to our horror, that the doctrine of the Infallibility of the Church made the acts of each successive Council obligatory for ever, that what had been once decided could never be meddled with again, in fact, that they were committed finally and irrevocably, and could not advance one step to meet us, even though the Church of England should again become what it was in Laud’s time….

‘… So much for the Council of Trent, for which Christendom has to thank Luther and the Reformers. [Newman] declares that ever since I heard this I have become a staunch Protestant, which is a most base calumny on his part, though I own it has altogether changed my notions of the Roman Catholics, and made me wish for a total overthrow of their system. I think that the only t?p?? now is “the ancient Church of England,” and, as an explanation of what one means, “Charles the First” and “the Nonjurors.” When I come home I mean to read and write all sorts of things; for now that one is a Radical, there is no use in being nice![122] I wish you had sent a longer postscript to [Newman] about the position of things; all I have heard, directly or indirectly, has made me long to be home again. You don’t say whether you have done anything for the L[yra] A[postolica]?[123]…. Tell [Isaac Williams] that I think he has used me basely to send me a mere scribble of a few lines, prosing about some theory of poetry, when there were such a lot of atrocities going on on all sides, of which one can get no tolerable account through the papers.

‘Genoa, April 15.—Here we are, as at Leghorn, detained a day beyond our time, though there is a perfect calm, because these absurd fellows are afraid of a swell which was got up by last night’s wind. The more I have to do with these wretched Neapolitans, the more my first impressions about them are confirmed. I wonder how anyone can tolerate either them or their town, which is as nasty and uninteresting a place as I ever set foot in. As to this Genoa, I should not grumble at being detained here, if I were in plight for sight-seeing, for it is truly magnificent, both in itself and in its situation; but, unfortunately, I was taken with a very severe feverish cold the morning we landed, i.e., the day before yesterday; and that day and yesterday was confined to my bed, where I should probably be now but that I had to get up early, in hopes the vessel would keep its appointment…. Never advise a friend of yours to come abroad for his health! It would be very well if one could have Fortunatus’ cap, and wish one’s self at Rome; but travelling does more harm than change of climate does good.

‘While we were at Rome [Newman] and I tried hard to get up the march-of-mind phraseology about pictures and statues, and we hoped we were making some little progress under the auspices of a clever English artist, to whom we had an introduction: but, unfortunately for our peace of mind, just before our departure we became acquainted with [a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge], who, though he had not been in Italy much longer than ourselves, had attained an eminence so far beyond what we could even in thought aspire to, that we gave the thing up in despair, and retire upon the t?p??, that “we don’t enter into [those] technicalities.” Certainly those C[ambridge] men are wonderful fellows; I know no one but [Head][124] that could compete with them at all. They know everything, examine everything, and dogmatise about everything; they have paid particular attention to the geological structure of this place, and the botany of that, and the agriculture of another, and they are antiquaries, and artists, and scholars, and, above all, puff off one another with the assiduity of our friends the [W.]s. W[hewell’s][125] book, and S[edgwick’s][126] Lectures, and T[hirlwall’s][127] research, and H[are’s][128] taste, pop upon one at every turn…. We mean to make as much as we can out of our acquaintance with Monsignor [Wiseman], who (by the by), is really too nice a person to talk nonsense about. He desired me to apply to him, if on any future occasion I had to consult the Vatican Library: and a transaction of that sort would sound well….’

The ‘transaction would sound well’: this, as if the writer’s study were only to heighten others’ opinion of him! Newman was surely right in calling attention, years after, to this habit of Froude’s of depreciating, nay, belying, his own motives. It was not an affectation, but it was a little piece of sheer cruelty.

The friends had parted at Rome, the Froudes very loath to leave Newman behind; and he, on his part, roaming about the Janiculum after they had gone, in a silent passion of grief, reproaching himself for his wilful fancy to return, under a sort of romantic obsession, to Sicily alone. There he was all but destined to meet an untimely death. Hurrell finished his long letter to Mr. Christie as he moved homeward.

‘Marseilles, April 22.—This France is certainly a most delicious place: we landed in HyÈres Bay, owing to a storm from the north-west, and found everything so warm and green that I could quite enter into John of Salisbury’s[129] feelings. The people, too, [are] so extremely civil that I cannot help hoping there may yet be the seven thousand in Israel, and that sometime or other we may be able to talk of la belle France with some kind of pleasure. I feel like a great fool here, from not being able to talk French. In Italy half the population kept me in countenance, but here it is a constant humiliation. And what is worst, I can’t hope to make progress; for having learned the little I know by writing and not [by] speaking, I annex wrong-shaped words to all the sounds. It is like talking Latin[130] to a foreigner.’

Again, on May 23, to William Froude, is expressed further commendation of the French people, founded on the keenest instinctive understanding of them: an understanding even more unusual then than now. Newman, until later, was certainly far from sharing it, or wishing to learn to share it. The ordinary attitude of the contemporary Oxford mind was frankly, though playfully expressed, by the young W. R. Churton, some years before. He gallantly addresses France: ‘What have I seen in thee that should make me long to see thee again? Have I seen a gentleman from Calais to Beauvoisin? Have I seen one gleam of poetry in the country or its inhabitants?’[131] Hurrell Froude was ‘un-English’ enough to be arrested, but not repelled, while on the Continent, by the spectacle of extra-English human nature. We have heard him longing, at Zante, to ‘live among them a bit, and get into their notions.’ This beautiful and uncommon openness of mind stamps him an ideal traveller, despite his lack of opportunity; at no single point of a hurried route, beset with difficulties, could he look far below the surface of things. But it is strikingly inaccurate to say of him, as Mr. Mozley does, that he lacked not only opportunity, but curiosity, ‘to see the interior of either the political or the religious systems they came upon.’[132]

‘What I have seen since my last letter ends, has been more interesting than anything else except Rome. We stopped about at many places in the central part of France, to see out-of-the-way things connected with Becket’s history, and found some of them so very curious and striking in themselves, that they would have amply repaid us by their own merits. But what I was most interested with was, that the French seem to me to have been so grossly belied as a nation. I never saw a people that tempted me to like them so much, on a superficial observation. I declare, if I was called upon to make a definition of their national character, I should say they were a primitive innocent people. The fact seems to be that France is governed by a small despotic oligarchy, the aristocracy of wealth, who by their agitating spirit have contrived to get the franchise so restricted as to secure to themselves a majority in the Chamber, and the command of the military, by which they keep France under such a strong hand…. There is now in France a High Church party who are Republicans,[133] and wish for universal suffrage, on the ground that in proportion as the franchise falls lower the influence of the Church makes itself more felt; at present its limits about coincide with those of the infidel faction. Don’t be surprised if one of these days you find us turning Radicals on similar grounds.’

The next communication posted to Mr. Keble, on June 26, contained a nameless poem. The title and the motto here given belong to the version in Lyra Apostolica.

‘Trembling Hope.

“And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.”

‘Very flat, I know,’ the author says, in his usual undecorative manner; but he adds: ‘I wrote it the night before you went; I wanted to show it you, that you might do one on “He that testifieth these things saith: Surely I come quickly”; and then, after the verse, to finish with: “Even so, come, Lord JESUS.” I think that so it might make a composition on which some people’s thoughts would run.[135] You may think all this bother; but I cannot help fancying that this sort of arrangement is worth some little trouble.’ Hurrell’s poem stands collocated with Keble’s ‘Encouragement’ in the Lyra, with its opening ‘Fear not’: and its heartening beauty is almost a direct address to the burdened spirit who called it forth:

Even the text from S. John, which Hurrell had suggested as colophon, stands under his separate after Keble’s poem, in every edition, as if by some solemn little rubrical observance. Both Keble and Newman were most careful, in all these delicate ways, to preserve their friend’s least touch upon the early printed work of the Movement. It was his death which led to the revelation of the authorship of all the poems in Lyra Apostolica. They would else have remained strictly anonymous. ‘One of the writers in whom the work originated,’ says Newman in his very brief preface, dated at Oxford on All Saints’ Day of 1836, ‘having been taken from his friends … it seemed desirable … to record what belonged to him, while it was possible to do so; and this has led to a general discrimination of the poems, by signatures at the end of each.’

Two days after ‘Trembling Hope,’ on June 28, Hurrell sends to his old Tutor the most beautiful, and also the most characteristic of his verses.

‘Daniel.

e?s?? e???????, ??t??es e??????sa? ?a?t??? d?? t?? as??e?a? t?? ???a???.
—S. Matt. xix. 12.[136]

And immediately after, linked with a quotation from the beloved Eclogues: ‘I send you some sawney verses…. Can these be doctored into anything available, or are they dotings?’

‘Old Self and New Self.[138]

Four other sacred poems which Hurrell wrote in 1833 may as well be given here. He and Newman burst into song together, though he with far more remote and infrequent music. Probably no lyrist ever had such a poor opinion of himself. But in the qualities of clearness, simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity, there is something very remarkable in Hurrell’s few brief scattered verses. They have a strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of them a little chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful; they, like himself, are impersonal, and full of character; abstinent, concentrated, true. The unexpected grace is their cunning harmony, and the trick of that is neither derived nor deliberately invented. His every line instinctively sings and flies. He has nothing to match a certain refrain of Newman’s, in what he calls his ‘ecclesiastical carol,’—

It is a good instance of an always interesting literary anomaly that such a line, in its raucous sibilation, should have been produced by an accomplished musician, whereas unfailing melody belongs to Froude, who, loving naturally what he once called ‘the bright and silent pleasures of poetry,’ had small sense of music as an independent art. Yet Newman certainly was capable of a sustained grandeur, as in his verses on Greek models, which Froude did not attempt, and could not attain.

‘Sight against Faith.

‘“And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons-in-law that married his daughters, and said: ‘Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city.’ But he seemed as one that mocked, unto his sons-in-law.”

‘Farewell to Feudalism.[141]

‘“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”

‘Weakness of Nature.

‘“Be strong, and He shall comfort thine heart.”

The following fragmentary lines are appended to the poem as given in the Remains, though they do not, of course, appear in Lyra Apostolica:

From poetical ‘dotings,’ Hurrell, having reached England, throws himself gladly into the interests of the young scientist his brother, who was already at work on the unique experiments concerning the resistance and propulsion of ships, which now stand connected, all over the world, with his successful name. He was going forward to be, as Hurrell anxiously wished, no ‘mere engineer,’ no ‘Liberal,’ i.e., agnostic or materialist, ‘at heart.’

To William Froude, July 11, 1833.

‘… I cannot understand how the dock-gates can make any further resistance to the water after the curvature has been squatted out of them, nor how, if the curvature is right, the pressure should have any tendency to alter it. Tell me if you succeed in getting a verdict against them; also, how your resistance experiments succeed. I will never believe that a sail will do as much work if you split it in two; but, if R ? area, you might have each cloth independent, and all would do as well. I never gave you an answer about the Book of Job, for I cannot get a distinct idea of its argument. It is said to be a discussion on the moral government of God; but my view of it is not more distinct than what ladies get of Butler’s Analogy.’

Honest Hurrell and his baffled Willy were looking for the sort of intellectual company which misery is said to love, and found it in ‘ladies.’ These, as yet, were certainly busier with worsted samplers than with the problems of the educated.

On July 14, the day of the storming of the feudal Bastille, came the formal start of another revolution which had a quieter, but no less ominous foot. Mr. Keble mounted the pulpit stair of S. Mary-the-Virgin’s at Oxford, and preached his memorable Assize Sermon, which went to press under its title of National Apostasy. It served as a bugle to let men know that the work of recapturing Faith for England had begun, and that ‘things have come to the pretty pass’ (in Lord Melbourne’s celebrated expression), ‘that religion is to invade the sphere of private life!’ There had been long preliminary agitation, and much personal consciousness, especially on Newman’s part and on Froude’s, of ‘a work to do in England.’

Secular authority was on the eve of abolishing in Ireland ten Bishoprics, which, in that country at least, it is not pretended that it had not created. But there could be no guarantee whatever that secular authority, so gorged, would be sated; and operations in England being only too likely, it was time for the objectors to rise. Besides, the general change effected during 1832-3, in the relations of Church and State, was the most disheartening or enraging thing in the world to the sentinels at Oxford, according to individual mood. Up to then, ‘spiritual cases were referred by the Sovereign to the Court of Delegates, which contained a majority of spiritual persons. But in those years, the final appeal was transferred, by Act of Parliament, from the Court of Delegates to, first, the Privy Council, and then a Committee formed from it.’[143] In that bondage, a worthy legacy from the ‘unidea’d’ reign of William IV., the Church of England stood, and stands. Things had been bad enough before. Already Hurrell had cried out in private: ‘The Church can never right itself without a blow-up.’ This was more sanguine than Dr. Arnold’s simultaneous jeremiad, and quite as loyal. ‘The Church as it now stands,’ he said, ‘no human power can save.’ But now Froude’s song is: ‘If the State would but kick us off!’ caught from Lamennais and the great democrat-Ultramontane agitation in France. The wish is translated into the weighty and telling pages of the long essay which stands first in his Remains, and which he wrote in 1833. More suo, he uses in it all the original documents which he can lay his hands on, and furthers his argument by italicisation and capitalisation of leading words and phrases. Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle once remarked that the step of throwing off the supremacy of the State had been dreamed of, in England, only by the Nonjurors, and ‘the first authors of the Tracts for the Times.’ Has it not been dreamed of ever since? The deification of a Privy Council was the occasion, not the cause, of the High Anglican onset, itself but one movement of several against the intrenchments of British materialism, but distinct from them all, inasmuch as Scott and Coleridge, riding just before, with the armed protest of Carlyle, of Ruskin, and of Emerson to follow, bore no known emblems of a Christian Crusade. The hour of latent dissatisfaction had crept up to flood-water mark. As we are well aware, no great movement springs full-armed from the brain of any local Jupiter; and this one was a birth, and only a birth, of 1833. For years previously, semi-active agitation, fed by the feeling all over the country, was quite patent and open. There was much popular stir and screaming, all making, no doubt, for righteousness and right ideas. The thinkers, the Universities, were far clearer as to what they did not mean, or wish, than as to what they did. ‘Newman and I are both so consequential,’ Froude writes in a leave-taking letter of 1832, ‘that we fear all sorts of things going wrong while we are away.’ It is perfectly true that these men did not create, but evoke, the religious spirit of their time. The Chinese narcissus bourgeons at a miraculous rate from a bulb a year old. The Platonic theory of individual knowledge should be extended to meet the case of nations: they, too, remember, and have rhythms which antedate the conscious life, and recur throughout it. We are always forgetting the commonplace that a spirit rather than intelligent persons with a polity, a law rather than its visible agencies, is the true operative force. Well-meaning students of the Movement have looked upon one name or another as the generating cause, whereas the real leader is ever nameless, like Odysseus in the cave of his baffled giant. There was ‘an unseen agitator,’ as Newman knew. His earliest friend of undergraduate days, whom he called, afterwards, Princeps Apostolicorum, was, for one, independently aware of it, as soon as events began.

‘… What a wonderful drama is going on,’ Mr. Bowden[144] writes, ‘if we could but trace it as a whole, and know the multiplied bearings of each varied scene upon our nation and our Church! However, we can see our own parts, and that must for the present suffice us.’ Newman confessed the same wide vision, writing later in that year to Froude: ‘I do verily believe a spirit is abroad at present, and we are but blind tools, not knowing whither we are going. I mean, a flame seems arising in so many places as to show no mortal incendiary is at work, though this man or that may have more influence in shaping the course, or modifying the nature of the flame.’

‘This man or that’ was not lacking, and there was work for him: work for ‘the bright, vivacious, and singularly lovable figures with whom the eyes of Oriel men were then familiarised.’[145] Mr. Charles Kingsley thought them, as it would appear, not ‘virile’: a necessary opinion for any ‘virile’ Kingsley to hold. So much depends upon definition! It was a passing conversational remark made by Hurrell Froude concerning the great Churchmen of the Middle Ages, that their portraits had ‘a curious expression as of neither man nor woman, a kind of feminine sternness.’ A very similar remark was made at almost the same moment by the prince of English metaphysical critics. Of the coincidence Froude was not aware; but his Editors, in a footnote, fail not to refer to it. ‘[Wordsworth’s] face is almost the only exception I know,’ said Coleridge, ‘to the observation that something feminine, (not effeminate, mind!) is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius.’[146] This angelic or epicene aspect is, indicatively, the most terrible force in the world. It is certain that the Tractarians lacked the girth, the gait, the entire and triumphant visibility of John Bull going out with his gun. They lived with abstract ideas, and came to look like them.

‘Mr. Froude, if anyone,’ wrote Newman anonymously in The British Critic of April, 1839, ‘gained his views from his own mind.’ But indeed, as is implied, none of us ever gain our views from our own minds: views coming with an underived spontaneous air are born of a man’s superior attentiveness to the working Mind of things. Hurrell, pacing Trinity Gardens, his hand on Williams’ shoulder, with the off-hand edict: ‘Isaac, we must make a Row in the world!’ recalls to us another agitator of whimsical disinterestedness, Camille Desmoulins. Or he is speaking a too free translation of the message of high and urgent poetry which La Pucelle once poured into the ears of Durand Laxart at Domremy. (It is always of French genius that his genius reminds us.) In all the polemics of the day his voice is the Æolian one, fitful and laconic, unexpected and alarming, yet oddly sweet. He is very busy chastising and correcting himself; but that other strife going on is far more interesting: he is a soldier of fortune, he must fight, he must interfere. When the outriders of the whole sea of returning Catholicism charge at first singly and silently, then with uproar, along the levels of the sleeping Protestant kingdom, the Hurrell Froude who loved duty and hard work, and abhorred display and conspicuosity, rises, despite himself, a little dominant, a little spectacular. He is inevitably marked, to ear and eye, as the legendary ninth wave, the foamiest green breaker of the line, ever re-forming and breaking, so long as he is visible, brighter, taller, and farther in-shore than the rest. With the year 1833 he comes into public play, and vanishes almost as soon.

To J. F. Christie, Esq., July 23, 1833.

‘… By the bye, I write [“Newman”] as if you knew he was returned. He came back last Tuesday week.[147]… He has been delayed by what one can now look back on without uneasiness, as he has not suffered eventually; but the fact is, he has had a very narrow escape of his life, owing to a severe epidemic fever which he caught in Sicily, and in a place where he could get access to no kind of medical aid. At the place where he was seized he was laid up for three days, unable to move, and at the end of that time strangely took it into his head that he was well. In consequence, he set out on his journey, and after having gone about seven miles, was carried almost lifeless into a cabin, just at a moment when, by a strange accident, a medical man was passing. This person relieved him sufficiently to enable his attendants to remove him to a town some way farther on, in which a doctor resided: Enna, or Castro Giovanni. Here he was eleven days before the crisis of his fever arrived, and it was long thought he had no chance of recovering…. He was afterwards delayed at Palermo by the stupid vessel, which did not sail for three weeks after it had promised, and thus lost all the advantages of a good wind. However, he is back safe at last, and really looks well, though his hair is all coming off, and his strength is not yet thoroughly restored. Do something for the [Magazine] and the Lyra. Wherefore stand ye all the day idle? I am going to [Hadleigh] in an hour or two to concert measures.’

Hadleigh Rectory, in Suffolk, was the scene of the little four-days’ congress called together on July 25, by the independent Cambridge forerunner of the Movement, the Rev. Hugh James Rose; ‘the most eminent person of his generation as a divine,’ Dean Church calls him. It is interesting to recall that the young Richard Chevenix Trench was Curate of Hadleigh at this time. Neither Keble nor Newman was able to attend. It was the first rally of those willing to fight ‘for the doctrine of Apostolical Succession, and for the integrity of the Prayer-Book’; and means were about to be taken to found a powerful Association of Friends of the Church. Froude, impatient of talk and of preliminaries, distrustful of the need of organisations, cherishing a preference such as Newman was to express long after, writing to Pusey, for ‘generating an ???? rather than a system,’ went down from Oxford somewhat grumblingly. The subjects brought forward at Hadleigh were chiefly disciplinary. The complicated relationship of Church and State, the call for Lay Synods, and the ever-burning topic of the manner of the Appointment of Bishops in the Church of England, seem to have engrossed the four men present, Froude then as always, in his extreme abstract way, pushing on to conclusions the others were not ripe for. He found Rose, disinterested as he knew him to be, ‘conservative’; he lamented that Rose and Palmer of Worcester clung to what he calls the ‘gentleman heresy,’ to ‘the old prejudices about the expediency of having the clergy gentlemen, i.e., fit to mix in good society; and about “prizes” to tempt men into the Church, and the whole train of stuff…. What I have learned,’ he adds, generalising, ‘is not to be sanguine, not to expect to bring other people into my views in a shorter time than I have been in coming to them myself.’ And again to Newman, with candour: ‘You seem to think I am floored, and in fact, I partly am so; at least the predominant impression left on my mind is that I am a poor hand at entering into other people’s thoughts.’ There follows a description of a fellow-guest, which must have made both Newman and Keble smile, as being possibly applicable to another and more fiery spirit who, as Mr. Rose their host said afterwards, with his delicate Gallic justness of criticism, was ‘not afraid of inferences.’ It can hardly be proved that Hurrell appreciated Mr. Rose, who was a sort of precursor in Pusey’s spiritual dynasty, as Hurrell himself was in Newman’s. But he overrated Mr. Perceval. Newman was given to understand, at the close of the session, on the thirtieth day of July, some of Mr. Perceval’s excellences and moral dangers.

‘Perceval,’[148] Hurrell writes, ‘is a very delightful fellow in ????, a regular thorough-going Apostolical; but I think Keble should warn him about putting himself in the way of excitement. Some of the things he says and does make me feel rather odd. I am sure he should be set to work on something dull that would keep his thoughts from present interests. I never saw a fellow who seemed more entirely absorbed, heart and soul, in the cause of the Church, and without the remotest approach to self-sufficiency.’

‘Both Rose and Palmer,’ wrote Newman on the other hand, after he had heard from those allies, ‘think Froude and Perceval very deficient in learning, and therefore rash.’ Considerable time had been spent in revising the Churchman’s Manual, by Mr. Perceval. Books, committees, bylaws, and such tangible machinery, seemed important to Mr. Rose, who was intelligently planning a great local campaign, to improve the position of his disadvantaged party. Froude, ahead of Newman or Keble, seems from the first to have outrun anything of this sort. To these three, the very existence of religion, whether expressed in the public worship and formularies, or in the conduct and belief of Englishmen, was at stake. He alone lacked a just conception of minor needs, what was the nature of these, or how far they should be satisfied: he felt only the need of supernaturalism in a society again grown godless since Wesley’s time. He did not, therefore, march forward in order, but by a long leap threw himself half-blindly upon ‘incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch.’ Certainly, cohesion, as not being the note of the Church of England, was not the note of the conference at Hadleigh. Froude especially, with his terrible consistency, his capacity for getting all there was to get out of the mere innuendoes and half-lights of circumstance, his passion (to employ a serviceable expression of Locke’s) ‘to bottom everything,’ must have obstructed unconsciously the deliberations of a great liturgiologist and a true ecclesiastical statesman, both born to move with caution, and to end in the deltas of compromise or sheer weariness. Froude felt then, as afterwards, what he calls his ‘stigma of ultraism’; what really worried him more than that, was the slow foot of reform, toiling behind his own. He wished nothing less, as we have seen, than a ‘blow-up,’ and reconstruction. His poetic foresight made him implacable; consequences, not processes, were in his foreground. He had the individual vision. Galahad-like, he saw, while wise men were spurring up and down upon the quest. Mr. Palmer’s adjectives were well chosen: Hurrell was not ‘learned,’[149] and he was ‘rash.’ But it is also true that learning will call anything rashness which travels towards a given goal by a shorter route than its own. An extremely fine definition of Froude’s might be wrested from its context, and applied to his discomfiture at Hadleigh, and his position in general. ‘The understanding,’ he says, ‘pursues something which it does not know by means which it does; while genius endeavours to effect what it has a previous idea of, by means of which it has to ascertain the use.’[150] The ‘bold rider across country’ would perhaps look unnatural as a mounted collaborator in a procession. It is to be feared that the Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude was a difficult factor, a Montagnard, in the debates of nascent Anglo-Catholicism.

In the strife of ideas, during the summer, there were not lacking pastoral interludes.

To the Rev. John Keble, August, 1833.

‘… You can’t think what delicious weather we have had here [at Dartington]. It is like May back again…. I saw the other night what I can hardly convince myself not to have been a supernatural fire. I and one of the [Champernownes?] and two other boys, and a labourer, were coming up the river in a boat when it was dark, and we all saw as distinctly as possible under a tree, close by the water, what we took for a wood fire: hot embers, which did not blaze, but gave off sparks; the boys thought a wasp’s nest must have been burned out there, and landed to stir up the embers and examine; in landing we lost sight of the fire for a minute behind the bush, and in going to the place found nothing; no smell of burning, no ashes, no marks of fire on the leaves or grass: in fact, there certainly could not have been any fire there! The labourer was really frightened, and I cannot account for my not having been so; but somehow the thing has made an impression on my imagination. I never dream of it, nor think of it in the dark, or anything: yet I am absolutely certain of the facts, and wholly unable to account for them. Sometimes I look on it as a half-miracle, of which the counterpart is in store for us. The return of rough times may revive energies that have been dormant “in the land of peace wherein we trusted.” Is this nonsense?… I am very well, all but my cough, which is exactly what it was, and is likely to continue….’

This touch of mysticism, gracing a phosphoric phenomenon, reminds one keenly of what Newman thought and expressed about the whole Movement, if not of the men who seem to us now ‘of unearthly radiance.’ ‘No mortal incendiary,’ he said, in one of his splendid phrases already cited, ‘is at work.’

To Newman, during this August, Hurrell pours out his mind, with his usual forecasting irrelevance.

‘Aug. 22.—I have written a sermon on the duty of contemplating a time when the law of the land shall cease to be the law of the Church; and I hope to get it preached by a friend of mine at the Bishop’s Visitation. My father thinks it most temperate and satisfactory.[151] If I had strong lungs I should go about the country, holding forth.

‘Aug. 31.—… It has lately come into my head that the present state of things in England makes an opening for reviving the monastic system. I think of putting the view forward under the title of “Project for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.” Certainly colleges of unmarried priests (who might, of course, retire to a living, when they could and liked) would be the cheapest possible way of providing effectively for the spiritual wants of a large population…. I must go about the country to look for the stray sheep of the true fold: there are many about, I am sure; only that odious Protestantism sticks in people’s gizzard. I see Hammond takes that view of the Infallibility of the Church which P[almer] says was the old one. We must revive it. Surely the promise, “I am with you always,” means something?’

It is extraordinary how Hurrell’s talk runs not so much on existing outer problems as on notions which ‘have lately come into my head.’ The others were content to face emergencies the moment they arose. He knew not how to wait till things turned up: he went forward to turn them up. His vocation was less to lead than to prompt the men born to be leaders. The hard necessity of his lot, the denial to so vigorous a spirit of the physical fuel to keep it alight, imposed this upon him: to be what Emerson calls ‘the seeing eye, not the helping hand.’ Yet his enforced contemplative life kept those active brother lives together; he riveted their armour, mounted their banners, and re-tipped their spears. It was his destiny to give very much more than they could use, so highly congested and quintessential were his ideas, and the verbal hints born of them:

He is the vision of a pilgrim entering from the Middle Ages, barely laying down his staff and wallet before turning roadwards again, yet managing to blurt out, irrespective of the tavern conversation, fragments of his own correlated thought, immemorial things which he, at least, seems never to have forgotten. He is no opportunist, and chooses neither the audience nor the hour. ‘What to assume and what to prove,’ as he says, do not sort themselves in his mind. He is only oracular. He instructs Newman, in relation to no particular topic whatever, but on a mere salutary general principle: ‘Do keep writing to Keble, and stirring his rage. He is my fire, but I may be his poker.’ His influence over Keble’s fearless intelligence, felt from the first, was ultimately very great. His influence over Newman will hardly bear analysis, for Newman and he were one: the gnomon and the disk of a dial, or the arrow and the bow of some busy archer. We have all seen just such influence as Froude, invalided, had upon the Movement, privately exercised by Ministers of State, or by wives with a ripe understanding of their husbands’ practical concerns. It is the uncatalogued and intangible power, almost a plaything to its possessor, least known among the powers which move human society; and, therefore, perhaps it is the grimmest reality of all.

On September 9, Newman burst forth with the famous first sentence of his famous first Tract: ‘I am but one of yourselves, a Presbyter.’ Hurrell wrote no comment on the move; he was intimately aware of it from the beginning, and the earliest and hungriest reader. By the 16th, he is deep in study; there is a new historical theory to start, opening with an ironic reference to Mr. Keble’s ‘friends’:

‘… I have been reading a good deal lately about your friends the Puritans in Queen Elizabeth’s time; and really I like poor Penry very much. I think of writing An Apology for the Early Puritans, whose case I think to be this. The Church of England had relinquished its claim to the jus divinum, and considered Ordination to emanate ultimately from the Queen. These poor fellows, i.e., Penry and Co. (not Beza and Co., nor Knox and Co.), detested so abominable a notion: but what could they do? They had been bred up in a horror of trusting history in matters of religion, so they could look for a divine institution and a priesthood nowhere except in the Bible. Here, then, they looked, assuming as an axiom that they must find; and finding nothing more reasonable than the platform, they caught at this. In the meantime our people, and the smug[152] fellows on the Continent, were going on with their civilities to one another, and servilities to their respective Governments, and left these poor men to fight for a jus divinum, though not the true one. It seems to me that Saravia and Bancroft are the revivers of orthodoxy in England, and that the Puritans shielded them from martyrdom. Had it not been for their pertinacity in claiming a jus divinum, that tyrant[153] would certainly have smothered the true one. Such are my crude speculations, on a rough survey: if you think me hopelessly wrong, floor me at once, and save me from wasting my time. How do you like my “Appointment of the Bishops?”[154] I have sent one on “State Interference in Matters Spiritual,” very dry and matter-of-fact, and mean to have a touch at the King’s supremacy, which I think Hooker would not justify under present circumstances. I think, if we manage well, we may make the idea of a Lay Synod popular. Its members should be elected by universal suffrage among the communicants, more primitivo. I find this view most effective in conversation. I am very well, and don’t think of going abroad this winter, though you seem to say I must. Time and money are two good things, and I don’t like wasting more of them. I have done enough in that line already…. I am quite surprised to see how much less of a conservative [Rose?] is than he was six months since. I do believe the progress of events is converting every one, and that we shall not have much longer to encounter the stigma of ultraism.’

Froude supplied, at most, but four of what George Eliot called The Tracts Against the Times, if we are to count as his only what he wrote out with his own hand. Of these, the earliest, briefest, and most comprehensive is No. 8, The Gospel a Law of Liberty, the authorship of which was, and is, frequently assigned to Newman.[155] It somewhat complicates matters that in Newman’s printed correspondence are various remarks addressed to him as responsible for No. 8, which bear no disclaimer in any note or parenthesis supplied by himself. It is also noticeable that he writes to Hurrell on November 13, 1833: ‘Evangelicals, as I anticipated, are struck with The Law of Liberty, and The Sin of the Church. The subject of Discipline, too, I cannot doubt, will take them. Surely my game lies among them.’[156] He might have said ‘our game,’ but he does not. Nor does The Gospel a Law of Liberty appear in Froude’s Remains. Dean Burgon, however, prints in the Appendix to his Twelve Good Men an extract from a letter of the Rev. Charles Marriott to the Rev. A. Burn of Chichester, Jan. 29, 1840. ‘You ought to know,’ says that gentle and unimpeachable authority, ‘that Froude was the author of the Tract, The Gospel a Law of Liberty, which is the subject of No. 8.’ Froude and Newman may well have devised this No. 8 in concert. So far as the wording goes, Newman’s light galloping touch is certainly upon it. In idea it is intensely Froude-like in its concentrated suggestiveness: in it we see the very pupa, as it were, of the wide-winged theory of Dogmatic Development, broached at Littlemore so long after. No. 8, with its staccato marcato form, is perhaps the most typical of the early Tracts, and most expressive of the spirit in which they were conceived. These shared in common (in the opinion of Dr. Pusey’s conjoint biographers, men who usually see things as they are) a ‘startling and peremptory language.’ ‘First rouse,’ ran Hurrell’s business-like programme, ‘then modify.’ Newman certainly, in his office of rouser, availed to set gentle and simple by the ears. Briefly, pungently, he did his inimitable work. Dr. Pusey, with his serious grasp, his moral weight, his immense learning, by contributing to the series his great signed Tract on Baptism, changed the fashion as we know. To ‘modify’ began with him, and progressed with him. He had the genius of explicit statement. It might even be said that his whole influence and care, especially from 1845 on, were on the side of expounding and applying, as Newman’s and Froude’s had been preponderately on that of naked presentment, full of novelty, excitement, and ‘danger.’ The little guided Israel which had followed the pillar of fire by night, found it well, in due course, to follow the pillar of cloud by day.

Froude’s other contributions to the Tracts were No. 9, On Shortening the Church Services; No. 59, Church and State (incorporated in the Remains as the concluding section of State Interference in Matters Spiritual); and No. 63, on The Antiquity of Existing Liturgies. The last-named was intended to display the novel features of the Communion Service in the Book of Common Prayer, as contrasted with those Uses having inter-resemblance and an unbroken Apostolic derivation. It is shown that every Ordo except the English contains a memento of the dead; a sacrificial oblation; and a prayer ‘that God may make the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ.’ The method adopted by Froude in printing the Forms of Consecration is that of the parallel column: an early instance of the employment of that practical and sometimes deadly modern device. He calls the Tract, elsewhere, ‘my analysis of Palmer,’ and it was certainly fitted to concentrate fresh attention on Mr. Palmer’s Origines LiturgicÆ, as well as on the norm of the matter it deals with.

Hurrell’s hands were full of writing in 1833; and being so busied with larger matters, he ceased to compose and preach sermons. Two very fine sombre ones, on S. John Baptist, and Riches a Temptation, date from June of this year; but they were his last. His true work lay in a less trodden field. The strong essays signed ‘F.’ in The British Magazine are in a happier vein than any of the sermons, and far more spontaneously worded. Like Dr. Johnson, Hurrell had a writing language, and a talking language which made faces at it. The only papers of his which approach in animation the unconventional utterances of his living voice and of all his letters, are just those upon historic-ecclesiastical, not secular subjects. There he sends up rockets too, though with a certain resigned decorum, and would have filled the sky had he not been curbed, as time went on, both by Rose and by Newman.

He came up to Oriel on October 5. Newman, now in the thick of affairs, and overjoyed to have him close at hand, writes privately to Keble, whom it ‘grieved to the heart’: ‘I fear that Calvert,[157] whom you may recollect here, and a physician now, has pronounced about Froude (not to him) a judgment so unfavourable that I cannot bear to dwell upon it, or to tell it. Pray exert your influence to get him sent to the West Indies. I know he has a great prejudice against it; but, still, what other place is hopeful? They say Madeira is not. He might take a cargo of books with him. N.B.—Could you not manage to send Isaac Williams too?’ On Oct. 26, Hurrell left Oxford for home, Keble going with him as far as Bath. He sailed away on his second long voyage a month later. During the interval, he takes up his tireless pen.

To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Oct. 29, 1833.

‘Thank I[saac Williams] for a Thomas À Kempis he sent me, and tell him to know more about the other Sanctus Thomas before he draws invidious comparisons. I have got here without increasing my cough at all…. We will have a vocabularium apostolicum, and I will start it with four words: “pampered aristocrat,” “resident gentlemen,” “smug parsons,” “pauperes Christi.”[158] I shall use the first on all occasions: it seems to me just to hit the thing…. Love to C[hristie] the prefect, and all the sub-Apostolicals. I am like the man[159] who “fled full soon on the first of June, but bade the rest keep fighting.”… Mind and write me all the news as it comes to hand; else I shall go to sleep at Barbados entirely…. Tony Buller[160] was here yesterday. He is a capital fellow, and is anxious to assist us with trouble and money in any way he can. I told him it was better not to say anything about money yet, till we had given people a longer trial of us. It is no use to form expectations of people, but I am willing to hope that he is a most zealous fellow, and will not start aside like some other broken bows.’

By early November the address of the clergy to the Archbishop (Howley) of Canterbury, which covered much ground, took many revisions, and ultimately was so well received, was afoot. Hurrell was ready, with his own uncompromising diction, to help it into being, leaving it to others to ‘supply the etiquette about “the undersigned clergy, etc.”’ Rhetorical drapery was hardly in his line. He sends to Newman some pithy sentences about ‘the misapplication to which some of the Services [of the Church of England] are exposed by the practical disuse of the Rubrics prefixed to them, and the inefficiency of attempting to act on these Rubrics without first completing the ecclesiastical system they presuppose.’ Also, he would have the reformers declare their conviction that ‘measures such as these, affecting the spiritual welfare of the Church, ought to originate only with its spiritual rulers, and that in such matters they deprecate every kind of extra-ecclesiastical interference.’ ‘Satis hÆc lusisse,’ he breaks off. ‘I am very well indeed;—not had so little cough as to-day and yesterday, since the Lazaretto at Malta.’

So on Nov. 4; and on the 14th, some affectionate abuse: ‘??e??? ??’ ???ste. Have you not been a spoon to allow the Petition to have nothing about “the system presupposed in the Rubrics,” and to leave out your key-words “completing” and “extra-ecclesiastical”? The last word I would introduce thus: “They take this opportunity of expressing their conviction that the powers with which God has entrusted the spiritual rulers of the Church are sufficient for its spiritual government, and that all extra-ecclesiastical interference in its spiritual concerns is both unnecessary and presumptuous.” My father is annoyed at its being such milk-and-water. Do make a row about it. I see already that I shall find in your book[161] sentences which I am sure stood, when they were first written, after some other sentence than that which affects to introduce them now, and seem conscious of being in the neighbourhood of a stranger: “buts” where there should have been “ands,” etc., of which I shall make a catalogue, and pay you off for all the workings you have given me before now. However, it looks very pretty; and when I puff it, and people turn over the pages, they have a very imposing effect. People say, “Ah! I dare say, a very interesting work.”… Love and luck to all the Apostolicals. Why do you say “yours usque ad cineres”? If I am wrecked on Ash-Wednesday you will be the cause of it….’

‘My father’ was usually the bridle, not the spur, to his young high-pacing ‘Apostolical.’ ‘I have often told Hurrell he was going too fast,’ the Archdeacon writes a little later to Newman. ‘He alarms people by his speculations, and is incautious in talking to persons who cannot enter into the purity of his motives. I dare say he laid himself completely open on his visit to Archdeacon Lyall.’[162]

Hurrell could not but enjoy his too quickly-ended months at the Parsonage. However, he was never, even in full health, very social, because having tested society, he feared the effect of it upon himself. Much of it, he thought, would wake in him pettiness of various sorts, and lead him to be ‘flash and insincere,’ and tempt him also to value those who thought him clever and charming, and to form ‘wild schemes about becoming popular.’ But he ‘made himself agreeable,’ as it is called, to please his father. He even rode to hounds, though on principle he objected to hunting; and he put up generally, without visible grimaces, with the customs, viands, amusements and conversation of his class. He hated eccentricity, most of all in himself, and very likely from his native fastidiousness, as well as from the supernatural motive. Conscious idiosyncrasy is so cheap! a deliberate escape from the vulgar being essential vulgarity. ‘Any eccentric pleasure we have a fancy for, particularly if we think it a proof of genius,’ had small chances with Froude. His very difficult ideal, borrowed unconsciously from S. Benedict and S. Bernard, was moderation, the mean of things, the spiritual adornment of the ordinary. He would attain to the ‘humdrum.’ ‘Whatever is disagreeable,’ he formulates to himself at twenty-three, ‘whatever, at the same time, makes us like other people, is an opportunity for self-denial,’ and through self-denial he meant, if possible, to remodel Hurrell Froude. That was his fine art and his religion. To ‘make a few saints,’ as he told his friend Rickards, was the way for each man to build up Christianity again for all.

‘I have heard from dear Froude, who is certainly downcast,’ Newman confides to Keble towards the middle of this month of November, in an undated letter. ‘He left home to-day, and was to be with Canon Rogers till Saturday, when the packet sails. He is full of disappointment at the address; but then, say I, it effects two things: first, it addresses the Archbishop as the head of the anti-innovators, and it addresses him, and not the King or Parliament: which has a doctrinal meaning, and is a good precedent. However, Froude calls me names, and bids me stir you up into a fury, if I can.’

Newman’s thoughts continued to play pensively about his friend ‘ordered South.’ He reverts to him, without naming him, on the 22nd, when he writes to Mr. Rickards, in reply to a letter of censure: ‘Nor can I wish anyone a happier lot than to be himself unfortunate, yet to urge on a triumphant cause: like Laud and Ken in their day, who left a name which after ages censure or pity, but whose works do follow them. Let it be the lot of those I love to live in the heart of one or two in each succeeding generation, or to be altogether forgotten, while they have helped forward the Truth.’

Hurrell put to sea, again from Falmouth, this time without Newman or his father. ‘Blowing a full gale … and I to start to-morrow morning!’ And, by way of hygienic consolation: ‘A sailing vessel is as nearly the cleanest thing in the world as a steamer is the dirtiest.’

Mr. Keble, who may have chiefly influenced his decision to go to Barbados, would be intimately interested, for a dozen reasons, to hear of Hurrell’s welfare in a field where he himself might once have found his lifework. As long before as 1824, he had been offered the Archdeaconry of Barbados (worth £2000 a year), and declined his only ecclesiastical dignity, as he declined or accepted pretty much everything, for a pious domestic reason: his father was too infirm.

To the Rev. John Keble, Jan. 9, 1834. Barbados.

‘With hands bitten sore by mosquitoes, I set to, upon a sheet of paper which will witness many fresh bites before I get through it. The wretches are flitting about me on all sides, and every moment I am forced to put down my pen and hit at them. People soon cease to care for them: that is my only consolation. The weather here is most delicious, the thermometer averaging eighty-three degrees, and showers flying in all directions. When it rains here, they say: “What a fine day!”… The room I am in has seven windows and four doors, with a thorough draught every way; everything is contrived for getting up thorough draughts: long passages open at both ends, for the everlasting east wind to blow through, and windows on every side of a room where it is possible, or immense doors opposite them, where it is not. I suppose before the hurricane[163] this must have been a house fit for a resident gentleman of high pretensions; now it consists only of two rooms, and a number of sheds erected round them against the walls that remain standing…. The sum which was set aside by Government to repair the injury done here is not allowed to go to the repair of Churches, even though 24,000l. of it is still in hand, which they do not know how to dispose of, and seven Churches are in complete ruins….

‘I have heard some facts which seem to show a good spirit among the clergy…. Mr. ——, about whom you may remember the great row that took place some years since for admitting a black to the Communion in company with whites, has now so completely broken down that feeling, that last Sunday, when I received the Sacrament at his Church, at which near two hundred people were present, all colours were mixed indiscriminately. In the Roman Catholic islands this was always insisted on, and carried with a high hand…. This island is very green, and its plants very exotic-looking, but there is a total want of beauty. For all I have yet seen, the coasts of the Mediterranean are the places “mortalibus Ægris munere concessÆ Divom.” Also, the negro features are so horridly ugly, at least the generality of them: now and then indeed one sees finely-chiselled Egyptian features, and among the others one can distinctly trace the difference of caste in all shades from man to monkey…. You will be shocked at my avowal, that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain that in all matters that seem to us indifferent or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church which has preserved its traditionary practices unbroken. We cannot know about any seemingly indifferent practice of the Church of Rome that it is not a development of the Apostolic ????; and it is to no purpose to say that we can find no proof of it in the writings of the six first centuries; they must find a disproof if they would do anything…. I have been reading the controversy between Law and Hoadly for the first time. Law’s brilliance quite astonished me: I think it the most striking specimen of writing I ever saw. Yet I own now and then he seems rather wild. Surely one could get such splendid compositions into circulation by puffing them? It was a noble end of Convocation to be put down for censuring Hoadly, and the censure looks well as the last record in Wilkins’s Concilia. The sun that set so bright must have a rising!… I have translated all the Becket correspondence, and should go [on] at once to Anselm, if I was not on the point of starting with the Bishop[164] on his Visitation. All I hear makes me wish to go to America, though I do not conceive the views of the clergy in general there to be very high. Preaching goes for everything, and a person that cannot fill his Church gets dismissed. I think that in the present state of religion preaching should be quite disconnected from the Services, and looked on as an address to the unconverted.[165]… We ought to employ itinerant talkers in England; I am sure I could stir up people very much in Devonshire and Cornwall in that way.’

To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Jan. 25, 1834.

‘… I have a very poor account to give you of my studies. I have been here near a month, and have not set to work regularly on anything. Although I have not done anything like regular work, I have picked up a good deal. I have been looking about, here and there…. Does not the Archbishop of Canterbury claim patriarchal authority (qualem qualem) over as large a portion of the globe as ever the Bishop of Rome did? and are not the Colonial Bishops just as much exonerated from their oath of canonical obedience, by proving that there is no universal Bishop recognised in Scripture, as ever Cranmer was?… I have been much surprised to find that the first Latitudinarians were Tories: e.g., Hales, Chillingworth, and that set. How Whiggery has by degrees taken up all the filth that has been secreted in the fermentation of human thought! Puritanism, Latitudinarianism, Popery, Infidelity; they have it all now, and good luck to them.[166] I see the reason Convocation was put down in 1717 was the remonstrance of the Lower House against the Upper, to make them censure Hoadly’s Preservative. The Upper House had a very little while before taken part with the Socinianising Bishops against the Lower. Also, what a curious thing it is to see the popularity of High Churchism among the lower orders at the time of Sacheverell’s trial! These matters have opened to my weak mind a field of thought and inquiry which I have no great chance of following up. If I had 5000l., I would pay all the clever fellows I could find to analyse the pamphlets, etc., of that time, and make a good History of Protestantism. A continuation of Collier[167] would just take in all I desiderate, and if done well, most curious and amusing it would be…. The most sensible people here seem to think it certain, that, after the emancipation of the slaves, no estate will be profitable enough to pay for a manager, so that all English proprietors who from age or habit, etc., are not able to come out and reside on their own property, must sell at a reduced price; also that since this climate, state of society, etc., suits the coloured people better than the whites, it will answer to them to buy at a higher rate than others, so that the islands will by degrees become what they call “brown” islands, and relapse into a semi-savage state by the gradual withdrawal of those who now keep up the tone of acquirement, etc.; that this will happen without any bloodshed, but will destroy the commercial value of the islands, for that not more than one-fifth of the sugar will be grown, and the rest of the land employed in growing sustenance for the idle population.’

To the Ven. Archdeacon Froude, Feb. 6, 1834.

‘… The weather has been very boisterous since I have been here: people say that they should have called the night of Friday 17th [January] a hurricane, if it had been in August or September…. I don’t know whether I may lay any blame on the weather, but certainly my cough has made no progress for the better since I landed. I don’t mean that I am worse, for I certainly have gained flesh, but my cough is exactly where it was when I first got into the warm latitudes: an improvement on what it was in England, but no more. The temperature of the air is quite delightful, but there is nothing to interest one out-of-doors: horridly ugly faces, most uninteresting scenery, an extremely shabby town, the population of which may, in point of morals, be called almost the sink of humanity; and then the vulgar names of all the places (I forget them as fast as I hear them), and money-making associations, which intrude into everything one sees and hears, offer a sad contrast to last winter’s work. But I don’t mention this out of grumbling, only as a reason why I am not more out-of-doors: the fact is, I spend my time in-doors very agreeably indeed. The Bishop stands very high in my estimation as a man of imperturbable equanimity among great trials to his temper, and the footing on which all his clergy are with him is a model.… The Bishop’s library is capital—much better than I expected; and as the daily expectation of setting off on the Visitation has kept me from going to work on anything regular, I have been dipping about, to my great amusement.… They say that if the growth of sugar were discontinued the island would produce sustenance enough for a very much larger population, almost without any cultivation. The vegetation is really wonderful. The guinea corn grows near fifteen feet high: and in the sugar crop there seems to be a mass of solid vegetable matter thrown up, as much as there is in a copse of ten years’ growth. It is an impenetrable thicket of rank iris: the cane part is just like the knotty root of an iris straightened out, and rising six or seven feet out of the ground; its colour is the richest yellow-green that can be conceived.

‘Feb. 6.—At anchor off Nevis,—between it and St. Christopher’s, which the Protestants have vulgarised into St. Kitt’s. The Bishop is ashore confirming, and I have stayed to fetch up leeway. Since Monday, Jan. 26, when we started on our voyage, I have been in quite a new state of things…. I have a very uncomfortable hot, dark berth, which I could go into amusing details about, if it was worth the trouble; but “beggars must not be choosers,” as they say, so I may think myself well off to have any berth at all. The first place we got to was Antigua. About seven in the morning I came on deck, and found we were close to it: quite unlike Barbados; it put me in mind of Ithaca, or bits of the Sicilian coast: very beautiful, but on a small scale. While we stood off and on before what seemed an iron-bound coast, a pilot-boat emerged from one-could-not-say-where; and when the pilot was on board, we tacked, and sailed straight against a rock. As we got quite close, it began to appear that the shore was not a continuous line, but that one rock overlapped another, and between these there turned out to be an entrance about a gun-shot wide, which took us into a beautiful little lake, where there was just room to anchor. You will find it in the map, under the name English Harbour. And now I will not go on bothering with descriptions. We landed at the dockyard, where a file of soldiers were drawn up in compliment to the Bishop, and as he stepped out of the boat the batteries saluted. That part of Antigua is exquisitely beautiful; very deep bays and rocks, and pasture and wood and mountains, put the sugar and the niggers quite out of one’s head. The people seem a superior set to what you have elsewhere. I liked some of the clergy much, and the resident proprietors are said to be, with some exceptions, intelligent gentlemen…. We were at Antigua six days; since that we have been at Montserrat and Nevis, both mountainous on a large scale, and generally lost in cloud. Nevis is not unlike Pantelaria. Yesterday we dined at the President’s,[168] and had turtle for the first time.

To the Rev. John Keble, Feb. 8, 1834.

‘Here I am with the Bishop on his Visitation, so that I have the advantage of a good long sea-voyage and some variety of scenery, both [of] which are good for me, though I cannot say they have as yet produced any perceptible effect. I seem to be just as well and no better than I was last summer; in fact, this is nothing else than a protracted summer, and it is unreasonable to expect more from climate here than from the same climate in England. You will see in my letter to [Newman] how I have employed my time in Barbados, and the length that I am being pulled on in anti-Protestantism. Would not Hammond, and Fell, and the rest of those holy humble men of God have altered the Articles?[169]

‘… [Rose?] seems to think anything better than an open rupture with the State, as sure to entail loss of caste on the clergy. Few men can receive the saying that the clergy have no need to be gentlemen….

‘… We have just left St. Christopher’s; it is the most beautiful of any of the islands I have yet seen. Mount Miserere is quite fine; a precipitous granite crag, quite bare, and of a very great height, rising out of the rich woods with which the mountain is clothed up to the top, and stooping over a very deep hollow, which has once been the crater of a volcano. I should have liked much to get up there, but had not time, and besides, they say it is very difficult. The people here seem to have very little curiosity: in fact, few tastes except acquisitiveness…. I see the papers have begun to talk; addresses to the Archbishop are said to be pouring in. I wish I could get my lungs right again to make preachments, and give the Yanks a talking over. We shall be back at Barbados the second week in March, and about then the weather in New York brightens up. I think I have made up my mind not to be in England till the latter end of May, whatever news we have, so I shall certainly have time on my hands, and if I can’t preach I can prose; so I may as well go at any rate. Do ply the people with Tracts on the “safest course” principle: the more I think of it, the more important it seems as the intellectual basis of Church authority…. We have now got a north-west wind, which a few years since would have been almost a miracle in these latitudes. It is generally said that the trade-winds are becoming yearly more irregular, and have been for this last fifty years. It will make a curious change if they cease altogether; certainly nothing can be more irregular than we have had them, both in quantity and direction; it goes from a storm to a calm in no time, and the other night went all round the compass. This puts me in mind of an adventure we had the other evening at Nevis. There is no harbour there, but only a beach to land on, and sometimes a heavy surf. We landed in the morning, in still weather. In the course of the day it came to blow on shore, and we had to embark in the dark, in a very heavy sea breaking on the sands most furiously. The Bishop slept on shore, but the Commodore, the Captain, the Chaplain, and myself were carried on men’s shoulders to the boat, which was lying as near the shore as it could, in the midst of the breakers. I was put in second, and was only wetted by the water in the bottom of the boat, but the two last were fairly soused…. I am sure this stuff is not worth sending across the Atlantic.’

To William Froude, Feb. 12, 1834.

‘… I will try to scrape together stuff for a letter to you. We are becalmed with Saba off our starboard quarter, in the Forte frigate, forty-six guns, Commodore P…. Somehow, this frigate is beyond my comprehension. I am not up to taking an interest in its movements; it is 1150 tons and the sails are so large, and the masts so high, and such an immense lot of ropes, that I see no hope of learning anything about it. When they get up the anchor they have 100 men at the capstan, and if they want to tack quickly they put 300 men to work at once. They do their work to the sound of two fiddles and a fife, instead of the gibber that one is accustomed to in the Ranger and elsewhere; so, as the [Provost?] would say, “I don’t comprehend the style of things.” The day before yesterday we had two adventures. (1) A man was to be flogged, and as I knew that he would be let off out of compliment to the Bishop, I went on deck to see the preliminary ceremony. The whole ship’s crew were mustered, while the fellow stood under guard; then a grating was lashed to the gangway, and his wrists and ankles made fast to it, his jacket having been stripped off in readiness; the officers stood in full dress on one side of him, and the boatswain’s mates on the other; and the Commodore read over the articles of war. I watched the fellow’s countenance closely. At first he seemed very unconcerned, but the ceremony seemed by degrees to work on his imagination, and just before his pardon was announced he seemed in considerable dismay. The thing has stuck in my mind deeper than I expected, and I feel rather sick at thinking of it. The officers say that letting him off did a great deal of harm. Last night ever such a lot were drunk, and I suppose they will catch it in a day or two! Twenty-four hours must elapse between the offence and the punishment. (2) The other adventure was falling in with a man-of-war by night, so that we could not distinguish each other’s colours. On nearing them we heard them pipe to quarters, and on coming up we found them, contrary to etiquette, with their main-deck lighted up, their guns and rigging manned, and with every demonstration of readiness for action; so we had to make similar preparations with all speed: powder was got up, and both sides loaded and shotted, exactly as if we intended to fight. On passing them the Commodore asked what they were, and they would not tell, and nothing more came of it: a beautiful mare’s nest. The officers say it was a Dutch frigate, and that since our ill behaviour to them they have made a point of showing our ships disrespect; however, if a gun had gone off by accident, which might easily have been, as they all have flint and steel locks, it would have ended in a fight, most likely…. From St. Thomas’s we go to Santa Cruz, and from thence to La Guayra, so I shall have a fine cruise altogether; yet somehow I take no interest in the places I see: there is something so unromantic among the English, and so unpleasing about the niggers, that they spoil the scenery altogether. The thing that strikes me as most remarkable in the cut of these niggers is excessive immodesty; a forward, stupid familiarity, intended for civility, which prejudices me against them worse even than Buxton’s[170] cant did…. I want much to hear about your steam-engine…. I begin to think that the Nonjurors were the last of English divines, and that those since are twaddlers. The more I read, the more I am reconciled to the present state of things in England, and prospects of the Church. It seems to be only the fermentation of filth which has long been in existence, and could not be got rid of otherwise…. And now my ideas run slow, and take more trouble writing than they are worth reading; so, with best love to J[ack].’[171]

To the Ven. Archdeacon Froude, April 2, 1834.

‘… We left the island [Santa Cruz] at four o’clock on Thursday, the Bishop having been conveyed to Fredericstadt in the Governor’s carriage and four, escorted by an aide-de-camp, and embarking under a salute. We were under weigh in about an hour, with a breeze east-north-east. On Saturday evening we saw, like a pale blue mist rising above the clouds, the outline of the South American mountains. The next morning, when I came on deck, we were within nine miles of the coast, and the gigantic features of the scenery produced the same effect that we observed between Salerno and Amalfi, viz., of making distant objects seem so near each other. The mountains rose boldly out of the sea, as far as the eye could reach before us and behind us, as we sailed along the coast. Their height varies from 5000 to 9000 feet. One of them (the highest) is a perpendicular precipice for 8000 feet: Humboldt describes it as the most remarkable precipice in the world. However, the effect, as a whole, cannot be compared to that of the Italian or Sicilian coast. The mountains are richly covered with wood from the very bottom to the top, except the peaks of the very highest, which are naked granite, but so high that the rocky features, when diminished by the great distance and rendered indistinct by the haze of the hot air, lose all their raciness; so that there is no variety of colour, but a mass of uniform green, or rather gray, more or less pale according to the distance. We coasted along about twelve miles almost under the shadow of the rocks, yet near nine miles from them. Early in the morning they were visible from top to bottom, but indistinct from the dazzle of the sun, which was behind them. About ten o’clock a line of little misty dots formed at a uniform height above the sea, perhaps 3000 feet. This became denser and denser, till it became one impenetrable cloud, above which we could see nothing. About twelve we anchored at La Guayra, which Humboldt says is the hottest place in the world. The thermometer in the cabin window was ninety degrees. The Bishop and Commodore disembarked that evening and rode over the mountains to Caraccas; I and some of the officers were to follow before daylight. Accordingly, having ordered mules over-night, we got up at half-past three, breakfasted on board, and set out for the shore, two boat-loads. There was a very heavy rolling swell, and the landing-place is a wooden stage upon piles, which does not keep off the sea at all. We lay by anxiously waiting for a lull, and all of us in the first boat succeeded in landing dry on the stage, and running off before a wave had time to reach us; but when the second boat was lying on its oars, in hopes of a lull like ours, a wave far above the size of the rest broke just ahead of them; and really, I never saw such a nervous sight! The boat, in which were ten rowers and several officers, seemed to stand quite upright on its stern, so as to leave us doubtful which way it would fall. The whole was hid for a moment in a mass of spray, except that we could see the blades of the oars sticking out, all in confusion, as the water took them. When the wave passed and the boat righted, they say it was full up to the thwarts. On seeing this Captain H. ordered them to pull off, and sent a shore boat for them, i.e., two niggers in a canoe, which took them out one or two at a time. The last load consisted of the Commodore’s steward, an old Italian for whom I have an affection, and a midshipman. As they were alongside the stage a wave broke outside them; the mid was lucky enough to catch hold in time, but the poor Italian, canoe, niggers, and all, totally disappeared, and were seen again about thirty yards off progressing with the crest of the wave towards the beach, on which all were deposited safe, after a dive of near 600 yards. N.B.—The niggers and Spaniards, when landing themselves, never think of going to the stage, but sitting very steadily in their canoes, wait where the waves begin to break, and only taking care to keep the boat straight, and paddling a little to assist it in getting way at first, they are shot in without any effort, on the crest of the wave, with wonderful velocity, keeping on the downhill side of it all the time, and at last are deposited high and dry. When I saw this first, I could hardly believe my eyes.

‘I shall stay here a fortnight longer at least, and then set off for New York. I am very grateful for your long letters, which come by every packet.’

There follows a letter on April 8, 1834, conjointly addressed:

‘Joannibus Keble et Newman: fratres ignavissimi, ut quid fecisti nobis sic? as St. Thomas says to the Bishop of Poictiers…. The Bishop [of Barbados] is a thorough Z;[172] and I can make no impression on him, though I think I have frightened him. If he had not been as kind to me as one man can be to another, I should be terribly provoked with him sometimes…. You may like to know of my health: I really think I am getting well. I left England in the impression that I was ??????d???, as you may see in a scratched-out passage in one of my letters; since I have conceived hopes, I have become much more careful. I should not wonder, if I stayed here, till[173] I get quite rid of my cough. The Bishop’s library is a great piece of luck. I don’t think I am wasting my time here, independent of my health. I don’t ask how anyone is, for I shall certainly be gone before I can have an answer; and when I shall go to Yankland I do not know…. Valete, et confortamini in Domino.’

The Rev. J. Keble to the Rev. J. H. Newman, April, 1834.

‘… As to Froude, I know, of course, no more than the letters have told us both, and the first was so flattering that I was disappointed at the other; yet, on consideration, I see no additional reason for alarm. It seems much as it used to be, and we cannot be wrong in hoping the best. Anyone who remembers him three or four years ago must acknowledge that to have him now is much more than we could have been sure about. I wish him strong enough, please God, to take duty and wait on some flock. I think he would get more calm and less young in his notions, or rather in his way of putting them, which makes people who do not know him think him not a practical man. What a wise old[174] letter! Well, good-bye.’

On May 2, Hurrell makes to Mr. Keble the frank confession that he is not well enough to return to England, or to travel at all. He never saw the United States. He adds, referring to clauses in the Oriel Statutes, which he seems to have known by heart, ‘Try to satisfy the College that though my Ægritudo is diutina, it may not be incurabilis.’ And he goes on to say that a mathematical instructor is wanted at Codrington College,[175] ‘so I mean to offer myself, on condition of having a room given me, and being allowed to battel.[176] Mind, this is mere castle-building as yet, but it is ten to one it will be realised. In fact, unless I get suddenly and decidedly well before the end of this month, I see no chance against it; so will your worships have the goodness to get together a few sets of the [Oxford] Tracts; also three or four copies of a work[177] which I see much praised in The British Magazine, as coming from the pen of “a scholar, a man of refined taste, and above all, a Christian”; also a copy of an anonymous work called The Christian Year, which I forgot to bring with me; also the parts Autumnalis and Hyemalis of my Breviary; also any newspapers or reviews, or anything else which will throw light on your worships’ proceedings; and send the package to [my father]: let it be a good big one; and mind to send lots of Tracts, for I shall try hard to poison the minds of the natives out here…. There is a most commendable production in the supplemental December number, signed C.[178] Whose is it? he should be cultivated. I should like to see a good one on clergy praying with their faces to the Altar and backs to the congregation. In a Protestant Church the parson seems either to be preaching the prayers or worshipping the congregation…. The climate out here is certainly delicious, though it alters one’s metaphors a little: e.g., the shady side of the hedge would be the cheerful one. The only nuisance is that everything is so inelegant: money and luxury are the people’s sole objects, and their luxuries are only of the kind that can be enjoyed on the instant: no one counts on living here, so there are no porticos, no fountains, no avenues, nothing that makes the south of Europe such a fairyland. Windmills and boiling-houses, treeless fields and gardenless houses, are the only things one sees; except at my dreamed-of residence, Codrington College, where there is a grand avenue of gigantic palms,[179] a delicious spring of the freshest (nothing is cold here) clearest water, and a very tolerably nice flower-garden with mowed turf, and roses that smell, and almost complete seclusion. If I go there I shall turn sentimental, and sit pa?? ???a ?a??ss?? ?t????t??? da???????. I wish I could be in England now, and see a little of “Nature’s tenderest, freshest green,” etc. Out here it is the leafless time….’

One circumstance which would turn Hurrell’s thoughts the more readily to a tutorship was that he could no longer be domestic Chaplain. The Bishop of Barbados had gone on a long visit to England.

Beginning in June of this year, and lasting into October, appeared in The British Magazine,[180] copious excerpts from the ancient Parish Books of Dartington. There is a very high value put now upon all such publications, and a very general interest in them; but one wonders how many readers of the time, brought up on controversy, begrudged the space given to the statistics of bygone village people. Archdeacon Froude sent up copies of his registers to London, in response to the behest of that busy antiquary in the making, his eldest son: that seems an obviously safe deduction.

Newman has something to say to the absentee on June 15.

‘Was it not a strange mishap, that much as you abused me for making you a cat’s paw, yet when the time of danger came, you should get out of the way, and leave innocent me to trouble? So it was: only think how mildly I have always spoken of Arnold, and how bitterly you! Never did I use a harsh word against him, I think, except that once, and then at Rome, and with but one or two friends.[181] Yet even from Rome those few words are dragged forth, and I have to answer for them…. In the next place, my Tracts are abused as Popish; as for other things, so especially for expressions about the Eucharist. Here, as you well know, it was you who were apt to be unguarded, not I. I could tell you much, only it is renewing sorrows, and nothing else, of the plague the Tracts have been to us, and how we have removed them to Rivington’s. That the said Tracts have been of essential benefit it is impossible to doubt. Pamphlets, sermons, etc. on the Apostolic Succession are appearing in every part of the kingdom…. H[enry] Wilberforce engaged to marry Miss S[argent] last December, was afraid to tell me, and left Oxford without; spread abroad I had cut R[yder][182] for marrying. Yet he has not ratted,[183] and will not: so be it. Marriage, when a crime, is a crime which it is criminal to repent of.’

Poor Henry Wilberforce, caught red-handed, did not repent. He had poured forth various misgivings in the ear of the ever sympathetic Rogers. ‘Indeed, though I did not tell Neander (as who would?) yet I did tell his sister, and gave her leave to tell him…. I suppose, however, he will cut me. I cannot help it. At any rate, you must not…. Nor again, am I without a feeling of the danger, as you know, of married priests in these days of trouble and rebuke; but I have taken my line.’

‘It is needless to say,’ adds Miss Mozley in her narrative notes, ‘that “Neander” did not “cut” the writer of this letter, whose firstborn was subsequently his godson.’

But to return to Newman’s letter to Froude, which goes on:

‘I have long come to the conclusion that our time is not come, i.e., that other persons can do the day’s work as well as, or better than we can, our business being only to give them a shove now and then. You send home flaming papers, but, after all, I fall back to what I said last year on your articles about the PrÆmunire. Not that it is not right, very right, to accustom men’s imaginations to the prospect of changes; but they cannot realise the arguments: they are quite beyond them…. This is our gain, and I intend to make use of it…. Meanwhile let us read, and prepare ourselves for better things…. As to Rose, he is a fine fellow, certainly he is, and complains that he has no one, all through London, in whom he can confide. O that you were well enough to assist him in London! You are not fit to move of yourself, but you would act through Rose as spirit acts on external matter through a body. He has everything which you are without, and is so inflammable that not even muscles are more sensitive of volition than he would be of you.’

The ‘flaming papers,’ as Newman calls them, were the disconnected, wide-branching chapters dealing with various aspects of Rationalism in relation to doctrine, composed entirely at Barbados during 1834, and pieced together and published in 1839 from four incomplete manuscripts. Fragmentary as they are, they would, under careful editing, and coupled with the State Interference and Church Discipline, display Froude’s tangential and remorseless intelligence at its very best.

The proposed conjunction of Froude with Rose was less than a dream: a flat impossibility. It is wonderful that Newman, who loved Rose truly in a measure, should never have quite sounded the reasons why he and Froude were not in closer accord and amity. When they were both in their untimely graves, Newman associated their memories as fellow-workers of the Will of God, in his comforting letter to Mr. Rose’s widow. But the two, clearly, were temperamental antipodes, partners in nothing but their stainless zeal, and their uncomplaining battle with long disease.

Once settled as instructor of mathematics to his young theologians, Hurrell pays epistolary dues to his father, and offers some ghostly counsel of a then drastic kind.

To the Ven. Archdeacon Froude, August 22, 1834.

‘… I am now at Codrington College, where Mr. P[inder][184] the Principal, and his wife, have made me very comfortable indeed. I am quite ashamed to think how much trouble they have taken. I have two rooms about thirteen by fourteen each, twelve high; the sitting room looks out on the Atlantic, which is about half a mile off at the bottom of a very steep hill to which the Babbacombe[185] one is nothing. The view is very pretty: the foreground is the Principal’s garden, which is the most English thing in the West Indies, they say: then comes some very rough uncultivated ground, some part of which is quite parkish; and at the bottom a beautiful little bay which just now, while the wind is south, is as still as a millpond.

‘I give two Lectures a day, which is an amusement, and helps me to avoid thinking, which is ruination, I am sure. Some of the youngsters are very stupid, some passable, and one rather clever; so that the work is not monotonous. I have commons from the College kitchen very comfortably, and since I have had the ordering of my own dinner, I have entirely left off animal food. My dinner is a sort of slimy vegetable, the name of which I forget, but which tastes something like an oyster; and custard pudding, and a tumbler of water. At breakfast I eat two eggs, and put lots of butter to my bread; it is only lately that I have got over my dislike to Barbados butter. The first hour after daylight, I work myself with dumb-bells, which is very dull, but they say a good thing; and washing afterwards is a great treat. Also I sometimes undress in the middle of the day, and have a bout at the same dull occupation to get an appetite for dinner; and about half-past five in the evening I get an hour’s walk: so I am doing all I can for myself if nature will but help me, and if my patience will hold out. The disheartening thing is, that if I ate a beefsteak and drank a bottle of porter and six glasses of wine a day, I don’t believe my pulse would rise or my cough increase an atom. However, I hope to give this abstemious plan a fair trial; for unless it weakens me, which I have not yet found, it can do no harm.

‘I wish you did not set your face so pertinaciously against any alteration in the mode of appointing Bishops; that is the real seat of the disorder of the Church: the more I think of it, the more sure I am that unless something is done about it, there must be a separation in the Church before long, and that I shall be one of the separatists. It will not do to say that you see great evils in any proposed new plan: that is a very good argument when the present state of things is good; but when a man is dying, it is poor wisdom in him to object that the plans the surgeons propose for his relief are painful and dangerous. There is another reform, which I have been thinking of lately more than I did before, though I have long thought something should be done about it; and it is one which every clergyman can make for himself without difficulty. I believe it to be the most indispensable of all the duties of external religion, that every one should receive the Communion as often as he has opportunity; and that if he has such opportunity every day of the week, it is his duty to take advantage of it every day of the week. And further, as an immediate corollary from this, I think it the duty of every clergyman to give the serious members of his congregation this opportunity as often as he can without neglecting other parts of his duty. Now at [Dartington] if you had the Communion every Sunday you might make sure of a sufficient number of communicants: and I don’t know of any other duty that you would have to neglect in consequence. Or, at any rate, you might have it every month without the slightest difficulty, and need assign no reason for the change; indeed, people would not find out at first that there was any change. I wish you would turn this over in your mind. I dare say you will think my view overstrained, and very likely it may be a little. Yet the more I think of it, the less doubtful it seems to me. I know that neither N[ewman][186] nor K[eble], when I left England, saw the thing in the light in which it now strikes me; they thought that it was desirable to have the Communion as often as possible, but still that the customs of particular places ought not to be changed without particular reason. But it really does seem to me that the Church of England has gone so very wrong in this matter, that it is not right to keep things smooth any longer. The administration of the Communion is one of the very few religious duties now performed by the clergy for which Ordination has ever been considered necessary. Preaching, and reading the Scriptures, is what a layman can do as well as a clergyman. And it is no wonder the people should forget the difference between ordained and unordained persons, when those who are ordained do nothing for them but what they could have done just as well without Ordination! If you are determined to have a pulpit in your Church, which I would much rather be without, do put it at the west end of the Church, or leave it where it is: every one can hear you perfectly; and what can they want more? But whatever you do, pray don’t let it stand in the light of the Altar, which, if there is any truth in my notions of Ordination, is more sacred than the Holy of Holies was in the Jewish Temple.

‘I have just heard that the postman is going, and so must write for my life. The College is about fourteen miles from Bridge Town, and about in the same latitude on the east side of the island. It is a long handsome stone building, which has been very ill-repaired since the hurricane. It consists of a Hall and Chapel, each about fifty feet long, with a handsome porch between them, and two wings in which the rooms are. I will give you a sketch in my next. The Principal’s house, which is a separate building at the west end, is a very good specimen of a Queen Anne house, only without chimneys. The carving of the staircase and doors is very costly, in cedar. It is so well built that the hurricane hardly hurt it at all. I generally drink tea there; but breakfast and dine in my rooms. I get out of bed as soon as it is light, if they bring me my coffee so soon; else I wait for it. You can’t think how odd one feels at getting up without a cup of it. I did not feel this at first, and perhaps it is only habit now. I breakfast at half-past eight, dine at three: give Lectures from twelve to two; and the rest of the day give my body as much exercise, and my mind as little, as I can. There are about fourteen students here: very little for so expensive an establishment. If I was the Bishop, I should not make it a place for the exclusive education of gentlemen, but should let the respectable coloured people, who had time and inclination to study divinity, come here and prepare for Orders, without insisting on Latin and Greek. These colonies are not ripe for supporting a learned clergy; the wealthy are too irreligious to pay towards the maintenance of anything like a sufficient number to look after the population. The Bishop should take people of the caste in life that the Wesleyan ministers come from, and taking care to keep a tight hand over them, should ordain all who have sufficient zeal and knowledge to undertake the burden. I will not even insist on their giving up their trades; for if a parish priest can keep a school, I am sure he may make shoes without giving up more of his time: and if St. Paul could maintain himself by tent-making while he discharged the duties of an Apostle, I don’t see why other people should not be able to maintain themselves as well, while they do the duties of a parish priest. The notion that a priest must be a gentleman is a stupid exclusive Protestant fancy, and ought to be exploded. If they would educate a lower caste here, they would fill the College directly.’

It was not long after the date of this letter that a restoration, not ‘an addition,’ as Mr. Thomas Mozley says,[187] was made, from Hurrell’s designs and under his superintendence, of Codrington College. The hurricane which had wrought the original havoc spent itself in August, 1831. The great porch between Chapel and Hall, an open passage locally known as the Belfry, was rebuilt, retaining the triple arch below, but not the cupola or small dome which formerly lifted itself over the palm-trees and the bridged waters. The whole remains as our amateur architect left it. Busy as he was, he thirsted for fuller news from home.

To Frederic Rogers, Esq.,[188] Sept. 25, 1834.

‘… By the time you get this, it will be near a year since I have heard a word about you…. Of N[ewman] I heard as late as December 15, 1833: I have just referred to the rascal’s letter. But as to K[eble] and C[hristie] and you and the M[ozleys], I am in utter ignorance on which side the Styx you are all residing…. I have entirely left off animal food, which has cooled me without weakening me; and I have left off writing radicalism, which did myself harm, and no one else any good: for I see neither N[ewman] nor [Rose] will take any of it. Also, above all, I have left off thinking, which, on matured reflection, I am convinced is the great evil of human life…. If the sun was not so intensely hot as to make sitting in the open air intolerable (N.B., there is no shade here), I should take to drawing; but, somehow, there is not much to tempt one in that department. The lights and shades are here a third proportional to the lights and shades of an English summer day, and those on a moonlight night. Everything is one mass of brightness, except for the first and last half-hours of the day. The skies, too, are entirely deficient in that glow which one’s English imagination associates with heat; pale transparency, which one can hardly look at for its brilliance, stares at one on every side, and every part of the sky reflects so much light on every part of the landscape, that you may apply to day what Virgil says of night:

‘The two things which I should like to make drawings of are the bread-fruit tree, and the particular kind of palm which, in the poetical language of the country, they call the cabbage-tree; both of which are certainly very beautiful, the former most especially so; and both so unlike anything English, that I don’t yet understand how to touch the foliage…. I have two very pleasant rooms in the pleasantest spot in the whole island, and battel just as at Oxford, which serves to keep up a pleasant illusion. The College is about four hundred feet above the sea, which is about two-thirds of a mile off, and the aspect of my sitting-room is straight towards England; so that when I am sentimental and dumpish,

p??t?? ?p’ ?t???et?? de???s??a? ????e??? ???.

‘This windward coast is for ever exposed to the full roll of the Atlantic, and its monotonous perturbation wearies one’s imagination, as well as the mud and sand, neither of which does it suffer to repose for a moment. I often wish for what I used to think no very interesting object, the motionless calms of Torbay or Dartmouth.’

‘Rogers heard from Froude yesterday,’ runs a postscript of Newman to Keble on Nov. 10. ‘He says nothing about his health, but is evidently homesick and lonely.’ And two days after, Newman tenderly explains to Hurrell himself: ‘I am not surprised you should be so unjust to me, for I should be so to you under the same circumstances. You see we expected you here with the Bishop of Barbados till the middle of May, and therefore did not send letters. When we found him here without you, we instantly began to write; by accidents which we could not help (e.g., the box was a fortnight on the road to Dartington), it was August before it was off. However, you had news of Oxford up to the minute of its going…. Keble’s father has taken to his bed, and is so ill that Keble does not leave him.’

Meanwhile, Hurrell had pursued his grievance, attacking Mr. Keble with wistful humour, during October. ‘I wish I knew Horace’s receipt for giving the sound of a swan to mute fishes,[189] and I most certainly should administer you a dose. I know you must have a great deal on your hands, so I should be contented with extracting only two pages in as big a hand as an idle undergraduate’s theme: but I really do wish to hear something of you…. Concerning your worship’s self, I have been able to collect that you were in existence on or about the 12th of June last…. [Davison’s?] death was a great surprise to me, and I may almost say a shock, as I had always looked to him to do something great for us…. Do you know, I partly fear that you … are going to back out of the conspiracy and leave me and [Newman] to our fate? I mean to ally myself to him in a close league, and put as much mischief into his head as I can. He has sent me a great many of his pamphlets, etc., which I admire greatly for their ???? and execution; and I have written back to him, pointing out wherein I think him too conservative.’

The deceased colleague may well have been John Davison, who had died on the sixth day of May, 1834; but Hurrell would not have seen the announcement before July. Davison is commonly reckoned as one of the old school, the Oriel Noetics, or Liberals; but there is a contrary impression of him to be drawn from some charming pages in Mozley’s Reminiscences.[190] Newman twice names him with Rose as a steadfast encourager of the earliest Tracts.[191] There is no doubt that he sympathised with the Tractarians more than his indecisive habit would suffer him to testify by deed, and he was much beloved by them. Hurrell’s expectation of ‘something great’ from him would almost inevitably centre about the Scripture Commentary which he was known to be writing and rewriting, but his fastidious self-criticism got the better of that and him, after a most Oxonian fashion, as he directed his widow to burn all his manuscripts. Besides, he was fifty-seven, and naturally preferred an evening siesta on Troy Wall to any chances of war. Newman, looking back, wrote feelingly of him in April, 1842: ‘It is surely mysterious, considering what the world is, how it needs improvement, and, moreover, that this life is the appropriate time for action, or, what is emphatically called in Scripture, work, that they who seem gifted for the definite purpose of influencing and edifying their brethren, should be allowed to do so much less than might be expected…. Left to ourselves, we are apt to grudge that the powers of such a mind as [Mr. Davison’s] have not had full range in his age and country, and that a promise of such high benefits should, owing to circumstances beyond man’s control, have been but partially accomplished.’[192]

Hurrell’s playful use of the word ‘conspiracy’ to indicate the Movement, will be noted. It was habitual with him from the first. It irritated many excellent persons at the time; it irritated Dean Burgon fifty years later. In the chapter devoted to Mr. Rose, in Twelve Good Men, Dean Burgon administers to Hurrell an oblique rebuke. ‘Froude, a man of splendid abilities and real genius, but sadly wanting in judgment and of fatal indiscretion, rendered the good cause the greatest disservice in his power by speaking of the Hadleigh Conference in a letter to a friend as “the conspiracy”: which letter was soon afterward published.’ Yet the word was really employed, and it may have been even invented, a fortnight before the meeting at Hadleigh, by none other than Mr. William Palmer! ‘Now I hope you will be able to join in this little plan and conspiracy,’ he wrote to Mr. Perceval on July 10, 1833. A more recent, and an equally historic use of the word (not ironic in the least, this time), is Archbishop Tait’s, in condemning the publications of the Society of the Holy Cross:[193] ‘to counteract what I feel obliged to call a CONSPIRACY within our own body against the doctrine, the discipline and the practice of our Reformed Church.’

In this later Newman correspondence, as Miss Mozley the Editor of it remarks, ‘R. H. Froude appears more as critic than originator or author. His more intimate friends required his criticism, and rested on his judgment. In his own person, this faculty acted mainly as a check. He often speaks of trial and failure in his own attempts to bring out what was working in his mind; as, for instance: “I have tried to write a criticism on the Apollo [Belvedere], but cannot bring out my meaning, which is abstruse and metaphysico-poetical. I always get bombastic, and am forced to scratch out.” His critical faculty was too masterful to be practised upon himself, but when exercised for the benefit of friends to whom he looked up, he could give free license to a pungent pen, and yet leave the modern reader to understand how anxious those friends might well be to secure his comments, as long as they were attainable. Keble, in his own simple way, sends his papers to his old pupil to be overlooked by him; and Mr. Newman was more at ease with Froude’s imprimatur. Thus, he sends him draughts of papers; for example, “No. 2, Keble’s, No. 1, mine”; with the order: “criticise the whole very accurately in matter and style, and send it back by return of post.” Of course the state of Froude’s health made criticism more possible than authorship, but, also, different intellectual powers and functions are called into play.’[194]

It is certainly noticeable enough, in all the intercourse of these years, between Keble, Newman and Froude, how the ordinary business of the University is completely ignored. It is like necromancy to remember that men were really still hastily reading the Ethics by the fire, and emptying bottles, and, with their pipes, racing off to Shotover, through the white salve-like mud, for a constitutional. ‘The Tracts,’ says Mr. Mark Pattison sadly, ‘desolated Oxford life, and suspended, for an indefinite period, all science and humane letters, and the first strivings for intellectual freedom which had moved in the bosom of Oriel.’ Such Æsthetic havoc was never caused in a city, unless under Savonarola, when all the wonted social graces went to the dust-bin, and works of art made acceptable fagots, and Christ was hailed, without legal precedent, King of Florence.

On November 18, 1834, Newman resumes, in reference to complaints from Hurrell, ‘suffering under intolerable delays incident to distant correspondence in those days’:

‘I am so angry with you, I cannot say! Have we not sent you a full box? That up to Sept. 29 you had not received it, is as hard for us to bear as for you. Why will you not have a little faith?… I suppose all this is for your good. You want a taming in various ways. It is to wean you from your over-interest in politics … so you see you are being taught to unlearn the world, the ecclesiastical as well as the worldly world. A strange thought came across me about you some six weeks ago, when I saw a letter from Tucker[195] of C. C. C., giving an account of his prospects in India. He is not at all an imaginative or enthusiastic man; but really, a religious spirit has sprung up among military men at our stations, and having no angel to direct them to Joppa, they have turned Evangelicals. The various sects there have a leaning towards the Church, and the men of colour are forming centres of operation. My thought was, if your health would not let you come home, you ought to be a Bishop in India….’

What Newman did not confess to his friend was that he had dreamed of their fates as one: he, too, would be a Bishop in India. To his sister Jemima he had written from Tunbridge Wells on October 2: ‘I have been much struck with a most sensible account of the state of India just received here from Mr. Tucker, in almost every word of which (it is full of practical and doctrinal matters), I agree. Though he is a Calvinist, I do believe our differences would, in India, almost be a matter of a few words. He gives a most exciting account of his field of labour, without intending it. At this moment, could I choose, and have all circumstances and providences at my disposal, I would go as an independent Bishop to his part of India, and found a Church there. This, you will say, is an ambitious flight. I am sure some one ought to be sent as Bishop; but the State, the State! we are crippled. I can fancy the day coming when India might be a refuge, if our game was up here.’ Froude agreed. He says elsewhere: ‘The present Church system is an incubus upon the country. It spreads its arms in all directions, claiming the whole surface of the earth for its own, and refusing a place to any subsidiary system to spring upon. Would that the waters would throw up some Acheloides, where some new Bishop might erect a See beyond the blighting influence of our upas trees.[196] Yet I suppose that before he could step in, an Act of Parliament would put its paw upon the ???sf??et??, and include it within the limits of some adjacent diocese. I admire [Mozley’s?] hit about our being united to the State as Israel was to Egypt.’

To return to the letter sent to Barbados on November 18. Around this half-quaint suggestion of young mitred revolutionaries in unhampered Sees, Newman’s love and genius break forth together.

‘It quite amused[197] me for awhile, and made me think how many posts there are in His Kingdom, how many offices, who says to one “Do this, and he doeth it,” etc. It is quite impossible that some way or other you are not destined to be the instrument of God’s purposes. Though I saw the earth cleave and you fall in, or Heaven open, and a chariot appear, I should say just the same. God has ten thousand posts of service. You might be of use in the central elemental fire; you might be of use in the depths of the sea.’

To the editor of the Letters and Correspondence to 1845 we owe, again, this enriching footnote:

‘In Vol. ii. of the Parochial Sermons (Ascension Day, p. 214) there is a passage which throws light on this ardent confident strain, prompted as it is evidently by the failure of hope in his friend’s recovery for service in this present scene. “Moreover, this departure of Christ and coming of the Holy Ghost leads our minds with great comfort to the thought of many lower dispensations of Providence towards us…. This is a thought which is particularly soothing as regards the loss of friends, or of especially gifted men who seem, in their day, the earthly support of the Church…. Doubtless, ‘it is expedient’ they should be taken away; otherwise some great mercy will not come to us. They are taken away, perchance, to other duties in God’s service equally ministrative to the salvation of the elect as earthly service. Christ went to intercede with the Father: we do not know, we may not boldly speculate, yet it may be that Saints departed intercede, unknown to us, for the victory of the Truth upon earth … they are taken away for some purpose surely; their gifts are not lost to us; their soaring minds, the fire of their contemplations, the sanctity of their desires, the vigour of their faith, the sweetness and gentleness of their affections, were not given without an object.”’

Lastly, the long letter closes with a little budget of news welcome to the exile, and with its crowded mention of names unforgotten, familiar fifty years after as they were then.

‘The Tracts now form a thick volume. We have put a title-page and preface to them, and called them Tracts for 1833-4. I think you will like them, as a whole. You go too fast yourself. Williams has been so unwell, we were going to send him out to you; but he has lately mended. I have just engaged with Rivington to publish another volume of Sermons. The first volume was nearly sold off in the course of nine months: one thousand copies. I have not dared all along to indulge the hope that I should be favoured with having you here again; but now really the prospect seems clearing. I do not like to say so, lest I break a spell! Rogers’ eyes are little or not at all better. Gladstone is turning out a fine fellow. Harrison has made him confess that the doctrine of the Apostolical Succession is irresistible.’

A long letter to Newman, on Nov. 23, opens: ‘Do you know, I am hungry and thirsty to hear about you, and whether your health stands, in the midst of your occupations? My father tells me your Sermons are talked of in all directions…. I have entirely left off meat; my dinner is toast, and a basin of very weak chicken broth. Breakfast is my chief meal, and consists of a vast joram[198] of milk and arrow-root. It is an odd thing, [as] milk never used to agree with me, but I find that by putting a good lot of cinnamon into it, I can digest any quantity. I find I must not take exercise so as to put me out of breath, as that increases my cough, yet the more I take the stronger I get; so that I am in a dilemma, which I shall cut by borrowing one of the Bishop’s horses instead of walking. I am perforce as idle as possible, my chief occupation being to keep thoughts out of my head. In this respect I find my friend Sanctus Thomas[199] of infinite use. Dawdling over translations, and picking facts out of allusions just keep one going for the time, without supplying any materials to brood over. If you see Keble, congratulate him on the Yank edition of The Christian Year,[200] which has gone on Oakeley’s[201] plan of putting the fine passages in italics. It is amusing to see the selection which he[202] has made…. As to sentiment, I am heartily tired of this place and climate. I am sure it has been too hot for me, particularly during August, September, and October, the hurricane months. I fancy, too, if there was something more to interest one, I should have been benefited by it. Niggerland is a poor substitute for the limen Apostolorum! However, I do verily believe that if I had stayed in England I should have had a confirmed disease on my lungs by this time…. I have not written a verse since I have been out here, and could not, for the life of me…. If I had the necessary books here, I should like much to get together materials for the Lives of Bishops Andrewes, Cosin, and Overall. They might be made into a nice first volume for a series of Lives of Apostolical Divines of the Church of England: a genus which seems to me to have come into existence about the beginning of James I., and to have become extinct with the Nonjurors…. I wish I could say, as John of Salisbury of Saint Thomas: “Domino Cantuarensi, quoad literaturam et mores, plurimum profuit exilium illud.” But somehow I think I have become even more uncharitable and churlish than I was!’

Hurrell addressed both Christie and Newman on Saint Stephen’s Day. The letter to the former caused immense laughter at Oriel. ‘Even Froude is beginning to joke about matrimony!’ writes James Mozley to his sister. Never was a joke in less danger of becoming practical.

‘When I come home, I mean to rat-and-be-married: i.e., if I can hook in anyone to be such a fool. The great difference between a wife and a friend is that a wife cannot cut one, and a friend can. It is a bad thing pe??ss? f???e??, so I shall certainly rat.[203] I see that … [Henry Wilberforce][204] has … Old [Ryder’s] apostacy I knew of before. [Isaac][205] cannot hold out long, if he is not fallen already. So why should you and I be wiser than our neighbours?[206] Some months ago, before I had repented of my radicalism, I was devising a scheme for you, which was knocked on the head by my finding from The British Magazine that you were ordained by the Bishop of Oxford.[207] For my part, I would rather have had my orders from a Scotch Bishop, and I thought of suggesting the same to you. The stream is purer, and, besides, it would have left one free from some embarrassing engagements.[208] By the by, all I know about any of you is through The British Magazine…. I am very thirsty for more authentic information. Not that I would have you write to me after the receipt of this letter, though; for by that time I shall most likely be on my way back. I shall start as early as I can in April, and I really begin now to think that I shall come back cured. At least people tell me that since the weather has become cooler I have altered for the better in appearance rapidly, and certainly I have in strength…. For the last three weeks, I have had a horse, which I have been cool enough to smug from the Bishop’s stables in his absence;[209] and this, I think, has been of use to me.’

The letter to Newman, as usual, goes deeper, and touches sadly on more intimate matters.

‘… There was a passage in a letter I have just received from my father that made me feel so infinitely dismal, that I must write to you about it. He says you have written to him to learn something about me, and to ask what to do with my money. It really made me feel as if I was dead, and you were sweeping up my remains; and, by the by, if I was dead, why should I be cut off from the privilege of helping on the Good Cause? I don’t know what money I left: little enough I suspect; but, whatever it was, I am superstitious enough to think that any good it could do “in honorem Dei et sacrosanctÆ Matris EcclesiÆ,” would have done something too “in salutem animÆ meÆ.”

‘… My father’s letter was a dismal one altogether. He tells me Isaac[210] is far from well, and Sir George and Lady Prevost obliged to leave England. Also that my poor sister [Phillis] has just sailed for Madeira to escape the winter, for fear of an affection just like mine…. Also that Mr. Keble[211] is supposed to be on his death-bed. About you personally I hear nothing. As for myself, it really seems as if I was going to have a respite. I have still some symptoms which make me fear it may turn out moonshine, e.g., great irritability of pulse, and shortness of wind in walking up hill. But everyone says, and I cannot help observing, that my looks are greatly altered for the better…. Sometimes I seem to myself very ridiculous to give way to such doleful thoughts, considering how very little there is apparently the matter with me; and if it was not for the effect consumption had taken on my … family, I should be ashamed of myself. But the pertinacity of my trifling ailment has sometimes seemed to me like a warning that fate had put its hand on me for the next [world].

‘When I get your letter, I expect a rowing for my Roman Catholic sentiments. Really, I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more,[212] and have almost made up my mind that the Rationalist spirit they set afloat is the ?e?d?p??f?t?? of the Revelations. I have a theory about the Beast and Woman too, which conflicts with yours; but which I will not inflict on you now. I have written nothing for a long time, and only read in a desultory, lounging way; but really, it is not out of idleness, for I find that the less I do the better I am, and so on principle resist doing a good deal that I am tempted to. One of the Bishop’s horses has contributed much to my recovery, as well as amusement. To my great satisfaction, I have found that just beyond the range of my longer walks there is a range of real fine scenery that I had not a dream of.

???e? te s???e?ta ???ass? te ???essa.

‘I start sometimes between three and four, and come back between six and seven, in which interval the thermometer averages between 78° and 76°, and there is generally a roaring wind from the sea…. I wish I knew how you were, and what you are about.’

To the Rev. John Henry Newman, Jan., 1835.

‘I am ashamed of myself for having grumbled at you; your letter[213] almost made me cry! My dumps are my only excuse, and you may guess I have had a good dose of them. Now I am in much better spirits about myself, and flooded with letters to boot, so I ought to be in a good humour; yet I don’t know whether the prospect of being home again soon, and the knowledge of what is going on there, has not made me less contented…. I am sorry to hear such poor accounts of you and Isaac. Keble says you are overworked. So does Christie; yet I would not have you leave any of it except the Deanship. On one or two points I am inclined to grumble at you. You seem to be finessing too deep. Why publish poor Bishop Cosin’s Tract on Transubstantiation?[214] Surely no member of the Church of England is in any danger of overrating the miracle of the Eucharist?… I am more and more indignant at the Protestant doctrine on the subject of the Eucharist, and think that the principle on which it is founded is as proud, irreverent, and foolish as that of any heresy, even Socinianism. I must write you out a sentence of Pascal on this. (My edition is differently arranged from most, so I cannot refer you to it.[215]) Speaking of Isa. xlv. 15, he says: “Il a demeurÉ cachÉ sous la voile de la nature qui nous le couvre, jusqu’À l’Incarnation; et quand il a fallu qu’il ait paru, il s’est encore plus cachÉ, en se couvrant de l’humanitÉ…. Enfin, quand il a voulu accomplir la promesse qu’il fit À ses apÔtres de demeurer avec les hommes jusqu’À son dernier avÈnement, il a choisi demeurer dans le plus Étrange et le plus obscur secret de tous: savoir, sous les espÈces de l’Eucharistie.” And then he goes on to say that deists penetrate the veil of Nature, heretics that of the Incarnation; “mais pour nous, nous devons nous estimer heureux de ce que Dieu nous Éclaire jusqu’À le reconnaÎtre sous les espÈces du pain et du vin.” I believe you will agree with me that this is orthodox…. Also, why do you praise Ridley?[216] Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer? (N.B.—How beautifully the Edinburgh Review[217] has shown up Luther, Melancthon, and Co.! What good genius has possessed them to do our dirty work?) I have also to grumble at you for letting Pusey call the Reformers “the Founders of our Church,” in that excellent and much-to-be-studied paper on Fasting.[218] Pour moi, I never mean, if I can help it, to use any phrases even, which can connect me with such a set. I shall never call the Holy Eucharist “the Lord’s Supper,” nor God’s priests “Ministers of the Word,” nor the Altar “the Lord’s Table,” etc., etc.; innocent as such phrases are in themselves, they have been dirtied: a fact of which you seem oblivious on many occasions. Nor shall I even abuse the Roman Catholics as a Church for anything except excommunicating us. So much for fault-finding…. I am amused to see among your Sermons the Naples one and the Dartington one. I can see the train of thought which suggested the latter.[219] Since then I have never been well, and then came my poor sister’s business, who, by the bye, is now at Madeira…. I have two schemes about the Tracts…. 1st, I should like a series of the Apostolical Divines of the Church of England…. 2nd, I think one might take the Jansenist saints, Francis de Sales,[220] the nuns of Port Royal, Pascal, etc., who seem to me to be of a more sentimental imaginative cast than any of our own, and to give more room for writing ad captandum…. Must it not be owned that the Church of England Saints, however good in essentials, are, with a few rare exceptions, deficient in the austere beauty of the Catholic ????? K[eble] will be severe on me for this, but I cannot deny that Laud’s architecture seems to me typical.’

This is the letter so charmingly annotated for us by Lord Blachford’s anecdote. ‘There’s a Basil for you!’ said Newman, with humorous deprecation, when he read the grudging advice to lay by, in his great weariness, ever so little of his accustomed work. The comparison rose readily to his lips, for he had been busy writing the chapters of his Church of the Fathers, month by month, and he was fresh from the beautiful portraiture of SS. Basil and Gregory Nazianzum.[221] He had called Hurrell his Basil under no mere momentary sense of a certain ineradicable blithe hardness in his friend. Newman, as sensitive and seeing as S. Gregory himself, must have been conscious at the time how mysteriously fragments of modern biography were getting lodged into his Early Christian exegetics: for in truth he and Hurrell were as like Gregory and Basil as their impersonators in a miracle play. The analogy is not irrelevant, and it is the more attractive the more it is followed out, especially as there is in it nothing akin to the painful difference which long severed the loving-hearted great Saints from each other. ‘Basil’ at Dartington pitied no one much, himself least of all; the personal consideration affected him at all times as little as it had affected his mighty archetype, a man of yea and nay, of cloudless vision and unstinted enterprise.

Newman had written: ‘One of the more striking points of Basil’s character was his utter disregard of mere human feeling where the interests of religion were concerned…. This self-sacrifice, which he observed in his own case for the good of the Church, he scrupled not to extend to the instance of those to whom he was related, and for whom he had to act. His brother and his intimate friend, the two Gregories of Nyssa and Nazianzum, felt the keenness and severity of his zeal as well as the comfort of his affection.’ And again: ‘Gregory disliked the routine intercourse of society, he disliked ecclesiastical business, he disliked publicity, he disliked strife …; he loved the independence of solitude, the tranquillity of private life, leisure for meditation, reflection, self-government; study and literature. He admired, yet he playfully satirised Basil’s lofty thoughts and heroic efforts. Yet upon Basil’s death, Basil’s spirit, as it were, came into him…. Was it Gregory or was it Basil that blew the trumpet in Constantinople, and waged a successful war in the very seat of the enemy, in despite of all his fluctuations of mind, misgivings, fastidiousness, disgust with self, and love of quiet? Such was the power of the great Basil, triumphing in his death, though failing throughout his life. Within four or five years of his departure to his reward, all the objects were either realised, or in the way to be realised, which he had vainly attempted and sadly waited for. His eyes had failed in longing: they waited for the Morning, and death closed them ere it came.’ All this amounts to a strange and touching forecast.

Newman writes again most tenderly on Jan. 18, from London.

‘… I could say much, were it of use, of my own solitariness, now you are away. Not that I would undervalue that great blessing, which is what I do not deserve, of so many friends about me: dear Rogers, Williams, ? p??? Keble, and the friend in whose house I am staying (whom I wish with all my heart you knew as Apostolicorum princeps, Bowden); yet, after all, as is obvious, no one can enter into one’s mind except a person who has lived with one. I seem to write things to no purpose, as wanting your imprimatur. Perhaps it is well to cultivate the habit of writing as if for unseen companions; but I have felt it much, so that I am getting quite dry and hard. My dear Froude, come back to us as soon as you safely can; and then next winter, please God, you shall go to Rome, and tempt Isaac, who is very willing, to go with you. But wherever you are (so be it!) you cannot be divided from us.’

Hurrell held an irregular correspondence with some old friends to whom he was warmly attached, and remembered them in his winter leisure.

To the Rev. Robert Isaac Wilberforce,
Feb. 25, 1835.

‘I would give twopence if circumstances should ever so turn up that you could make an occasional residence in Oxford compatible with your clerical duties,[222] and that we could concoct a second edition of old times again. It makes me laugh when I think of your old clipped horse, and how I was choused[223] by John G.; and sundry other matters which come into one’s head when more serious matters ought to be there. I wonder if you are the same fellow now that you used to be? I am afraid my old self is determined to stick by me till the last. But to talk sense: I really do indulge the hope that sometime we may be thrown together again. Undoubtedly you owe a debt to your destinies, which as a mere parish priest you can never repay. Your old project about the Mendicant Orders was the sort of thing: though perhaps something connected with later times would tell more just at present. As to myself, ?e?? ?? ????as? ?e?ta? whether I am ever to be of any use, though I now begin to entertain serious hopes that I shall recover. Perhaps you know that I have been out here, in exile inter nigridas, for this year and a quarter. The first winter I got very little good; and in the summer the heat kept me in a feverish state, which low diet could not counteract; so I began to think it was up with me; ?ta?? ?d?? p????, etc., and I own I felt very doleful: but since the cool weather set in I have made a decided start, which has put me in a better humour; and the cooler it is the better I am; so that I dare say if I had gone to Madeira, or to Rome a second time, I might have been well. I shall not be sorry for an excuse for spending another winter in the south of Europe.

‘While out here I have stuck to my old prejudices as tight as I could; yet I fairly own that I think the niggers less incapable of being raised in the scale of being than I used. I don’t mean that, generally speaking, they are at all fit for the situation in which the law has placed them; but that here and there you see specimens which prove them, unequivocally enough, to be of the race of Adam, is not to be denied. Many of them are clever, and some affectionate and even honest, and if a more judicious system had been pursued, I should not have despaired of seeing them become generally so. As it is, the prospect is even in this island a very gloomy one, and in the others, the state of things seems next to hopeless. In Antigua, where they are quite let loose, they have been playing a very clever trick in many places: which is very characteristic of the negro intellect, sharp enough as to the moment, and absolutely without thought as to the next. In making sugar it is very important that the canes should be squeezed as soon as possible after they are cut: a few hours hurts them, and twenty-four spoils them; so our friends Quakoo and Co. cut away very diligently, and then strike for wages. Here in Barbados they cannot play the same trick, as the magistrates would flog them; and indeed flogging is scarcely less common, and more severe now, than under the old system. In this island, the most melancholy result of the change yet discernible is the condition of the emancipated children under six. The mothers, who have gone on hitherto in their lax amours with a certainty that any consequences that might result would be rather in their favour than otherwise, have been bringing a host of wretched urchins into the world and consigning them over to the estate nurses, sans soin; and now the produce of the last six years is returned upon their hands, unless they will consent to apprentice them; this they will not do, out of spite to their masters, but take the trouble on themselves they will not: so the squalid little wretches starve and die off shockingly; and those that live are locked up in their mother’s house while she is at work, doing nothing but quarrel, growing up in absolute uselessness, and with no chance of improving…. As to the religious prospects of these colonies, I think them very bad indeed. If the Church was thrown on the voluntary system, and left to make its way as the Wesleyans do among the poorer classes, it would make sure as it went, though perhaps the progress might at first seem slow; but now all is mere show and rottenness…. Another difficulty arises from the views of the Clergy: those who have any deference for Church authority are too generally mere Z’s…. Religious instruction out here means marrying the niggers, baptizing them, and teaching them to read.

‘Vivas, valeas, et Apostolicus fias. I shall be back in May.’

Sir James Stephen was very wroth with Froude for his attitude towards the slaves of the West Indian Colonies, deducing that attitude from some allusions of Froude’s own to ‘anti-slavery cant.’ The Editors of the Remains attest that Hurrell did not suffer (as later Mr. J. A. Froude was said to do, from other alleged causes) from negrophobia. But certainly his speech about ‘the niggers’ does not always sound reassuring. Perhaps in this, as in other matters, he leans upon the reader’s general knowledge of him, and requires that to supply the marginal comment.

It is a common jibe against reformers, though not always a true one, that their range of ideas is disproportioned or partial. Members of the Anti-Vivisection Society are supposed to be indifferent to wife-beating. Perhaps, if known, Hurrell’s tendre for his only Roman Catholic, Monsignor Wiseman, and for ‘Roman Catholic sentiments,’ as he calls them, would seem enough to account for his limitations of sympathy on an island where he spent an unwilling year-and-a-half. It is interesting that to a Wilberforce, of all persons, he confides his final impressions, still pessimistic enough, of ‘our brothers carved in ebony.’ The Bill for the total abolition of slavery in the British dominions had received the Royal assent on August 28, 1833, and had come at last into full operation as Froude wrote. He was not wont, in other matters, to judge of the justice of a measure by its practical workings, or by the local material it had to work upon.

Hurrell approaches Keble in his most lucid and mischievous argumentative mood on the same day.

‘I have a miscellaneous jumble of things that I want to talk to you about, if I can but arrange them in any sort of order…. And first, I shall attack you for the expression “The Church teaches” so-and-so, which I observe is in the Tract[225] equivalent to “The Prayer-Book etc. teach[es] us” so-and-so. Now suppose a conscientious layman to inquire on what grounds the Prayer-Book etc., are called the teaching of the Church: how shall we answer him? Shall we tell him that they are embodied in an Act of Parliament? So is the Spoliation Bill. Shall we tell him that they were formerly enacted by Convocation in the reign of Charles II.? But what especial claim had this Convocation to monopolise the name and authority of the Church? Shall we tell him that all the clergy assented to them ever since their enactment? But to what interpretation of them have all, or even the major part of the clergy assented? For if it is the assent of the clergy that makes the Prayer-Book etc. the teaching of the Church, the Church teaches only that interpretation of them to which all, or at least the majority of the clergy have assented; and in order to ascertain this, it will be necessary to inquire, not for what may seem to the inquirer to be their real meaning, but for the meaning which the majority of the clergy have, in fact, attached to them! It will be necessary to poll the Hoadleians, Puritans, and Laudians, and to be determined by [the] most votes. Again, supposing him to have ascertained these, another question occurs. Why is the opinion of the English clergy, since the enactment of the Prayer-Book, entitled to be called the teaching of the Church, more than that of the clergy of the sixteen previous centuries; or, again, than the clergy of France, Italy, Spain, Russia, etc., etc.? I can see no other claim which the Prayer-Book has on a layman’s deference, as the teaching of the Church, which the Breviary and Missal have not in a far greater degree…. I know you will snub me for this…. Surely no teaching nowadays is authoritative in the sense in which the Apostles’ was, except the Bible? nor any in the sense in which Timothy’s was, except that of Primitive Tradition? To find a sense in which the teaching of the modern clergy is authoritative, I confess baffles me.[226] …

‘Next, as to The Christian Year. In the Fifth of November—[as to]

how can we possibly know that it is true to say “not in the hands”?[227] Also, on the Communion … you seem cramped by Protestantism. I desiderate something in the same key with

and

‘“When the life-giving stream,” etc.[228]

So much for quarrelling. I have attacked N[ewman] for some of the Tract Protestantism…. However, the wiseacres are all agog about our being Papists. P. called us the Papal Protestant Church, in which he proved a double ignorance: as we are Catholics without the Popery, and Church-of-England men without the Protestantism…. It seems to me that even if the laity were as munificent as our Catholic ancestors, they could do nothing for the Church, as things are, except in their lifetime. Any Churches they might build, any endowment they might make, would be as likely as not to become in another generation propagandas of liberalism. Certainly we cannot trust the Bishops for patrons…. I don’t feel with you on the question of tithes. They cannot be a legal debt and a religious offering at the same time. When the payment began to be enforced by civil authority the desecration took place…. The Wesleyan system is voluntary … they are the strongest, and most independent of their congregations, of any existing society in the United States, and, I believe, in England….’

To the Rev. J. H. Newman, March 4, 1835.

‘… My dearest [Newman], I suppose by this time you will have learned to think as little of my inconsistent reports as I do when making them! I see [that] on one and the same day I must have sent my father a cheerful account, and you a dismal one. I am forced to say something, but have no data to judge by, and so talk at random. Certain indeed I am that my pulse is still progressively calming, and that now it is scarcely more irritable than it ought to be; but in nothing else can I be sure that I change at all…. Favus distillans labia tua, as someone said to John of Salisbury.[229] What can have put it into your head that your style is dull? The letter you sent me in the box was among the most amusing I ever received. I have now made up my mind to come back [in] the packet after the next, so as to be in England the middle of May, and am not wholly without hope that the voyage may do something for me. The notion of going to Rome with Isaac is very gratifying. I must learn French for it, though; for I have no notion of trusting “Providence,” as I did last time. The sun has already got almost to his full strength, though the earth is of course [only] beginning to collect its stock of caloric, and the experience of last year assures me that the less I have of it the better…. I am most sincerely sorry to hear of Mr. K[eble’s] death.[230] I suppose if there ever was anyone to whom death was like going to bed, it would be Mr. K[eble]. I have written lots of stuff since I have been out here, some of which I must inflict on you on my return; but none of it will do to publish. When I look over anything long after I write it, I see such jumps and discontinuities as make me despair of ever being intelligible. How I wish to see you all again!’

Shortly after this letter was sent to post, Hurrell left Barbados for good. No personal records of him exist there, and all memories of him have faded away. His face was set at last towards another island where his few remaining days could be crammed full of intelligent toil, and played at their full value. From Bristol, on May 17, he was able to announce: ‘Fratres desideratissimi! here I am, benedictum sit nomen Dei, and as well as could be expected. I will not boast, and indeed, have nothing[231] to boast of, as my pulse is still far from satisfactory….

‘When we asked our pilot “Who was Speaker?” he did not know; but after much cross-examining he recollected that he had heard it cried about the street that the old one was turned out; who “the other gentleman” was, he could not tell. Our next informant was the Custom House officer, who boarded over night, when we anchored, to see that nothing was taken out of the ship. All he knew was that “there had been a jabbering” about a change of Ministers.[232] The day is as dull and gloomy as possible; but after the torrid zone, any English May day is “a sight for sair e’en.” … I hope to get a sight of you soon. And now goodbye both! also I[saac] and R[ogers], and all that are within reach.’

This is Newman’s narrative note, drawn, thirty years after, from his own retentive memory:

‘R. H. F. made his appearance in Oxford on Tuesday, May 18. On the morrow occurred the Convocation in the Theatre, when the proposed innovation of a Declaration of Conformity to the Church of England, instead of Subscription to the Articles, was rejected by 459 to 57. It was the last vote he gave…. He left Oxford, never to return, on June 4. During this time Bowden was in Oxford; and for the first and last time saw R. H. F.’

Miss Anne Mozley, too, remembered in old age her only sight of Hurrell Froude.

‘It happened to [me], passing the coach office, in company with Mrs. Newman, to see Froude as he alighted from the coach which brought him to Oxford, and was being greeted by his friends. He was terribly thin, his countenance dark and wasted, but with a brilliancy of expression and grace of outline which justified all that his friends had said of him. He was in the Theatre next day, entering into all the enthusiasm of the scene, and shouting Non placet with all his friends about him. While he lived at all, he must live his life.’

Frederic Rogers was of the company at Convocation who protested against a local Repeal of the Test and Corporation Act. He had no very hopeful feelings about the much-welcomed immigrant, and wrote to his sister from Oriel on May 2:

‘Wilson, Ryder, Wilberforce, Harding, spent several days here, with a quantity of other contemporaries, and Hurrell Froude arrived just in time from Barbados to cut into the middle of it. It quite surprises me how little people change! All these gentry, married and single, were so exactly what they always had been, that I could hardly believe I was not a freshman again. The only painful thing was that I fear Barbados has not done much for Froude. I was quite shocked to see him, but I suppose I had been too sanguine; his wretched thinness struck me more than it had ever done. They say, however, that no one ever gains flesh in the West Indies, but that it tells when they come back: I most earnestly trust it may be so. He talks of spending the winter at Rome again, going straight there, and coming straight back. He certainly cannot spend it in England. I cannot describe the kind of sickness I felt in looking at him when just the first meeting was over. I suppose it is a hopeful sign that his spirits are just as high as they always were; at least, were so when he first came here: for I am afraid we must look for a change in that, as Newman tells me he has heard to-day that his sister who was so ill is given over. I have not seen him since his hearing the news. However, I am getting mopish.’[233]

William Froude was still in Oxford also, having moved into Hurrell’s vacant rooms. Says the Rev. Thomas Mozley, in his most entertaining book:[234]

‘William Froude gave his heart in with his brother’s work at Oriel, though his turn even then was for science…. He was the chemist, as well as the mechanist of the College. His rooms on the floor over Newman’s were easily distinguishable … by the stains of sulphuric acid (I think) extending from the window-sills to the ground. The Provost must sometimes have had to explain this appearance to his inquiring guests, as they could not but observe it from his drawing-room window.’

With Hurrell and William, during these May days, was Anthony Froude, a boy of seventeen, coming up to Oriel with his private Tutor (with whom he was reading in the neighbourhood) in order to see his eldest brother.

‘When I went into residence at Oxford my brother was no longer alive. He had been abroad almost entirely for three or four years before his death; and although the atmosphere at home was full of the new opinions, and I heard startling things from time to time on Transubstantiation and suchlike, he had little to do with my direct education. I had read at my own discretion in my father’s library.’[235]

Anthony matriculated during the early December of this very year, two months before Hurrell died. Perhaps not many College rooms have known three such notable successive occupiers of one family, each of strong idiosyncrasy, and alike in nothing whatever but in personal charm.

The happy three weeks ended, Hurrell set out for Devon, with Mr. Keble for companion part of the way. People who had known him ‘looked horribly black at me, at first,’ until they became ‘accustomed to my grim visage,’ he tells Newman, five days later. Doubtless it was a harrowing thing in the pastoral neighbourhood, this continual spectacle of young faces at the Parsonage visibly withdrawing from the summer air. And another indomitable dying Froude was there, poor Phillis Spedding, the tradition of whose pathetic beauty yet lingers about the Cumberland hillsides whither she came as a bride.

To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Dartington, June 11, 1835.

‘Dulcissime, I got home Friday evening before dark very comfortably. My poor sister is perfectly cheerful, and free from pain, but daily declines in strength. Indeed, she is now very visibly weakened since I first saw her. It is impossible she should live many days. She is quite aware of her state, and seems to be as composed, and almost [as] happy, as if she was going to sleep…. There is something very indescribable in the effect which old sights and smells produce in me here just now, after having missed them so long. Also, old Dartington House, with its feudal appendages, calls up so many Tory associations as almost to soften one’s heart with lamenting the course of events which is to re-erect the Church by demolishing so much that is beautiful! “rich men living peaceably in their habitations.” On my way from Oxford, Keble talked a good deal about Church matters, and particularly about the ancient Liturgies, and my analysis of Palmer,[236] which had put the facts to him in rather a new point of view.’

And he reverts, in his animated vein, to the propaganda never out of his thoughts, saying encouragingly to Newman:

‘I have heard from my sisters and the Champernownes of the efficacy of your opuscula in leading captive silly women. One very curious instance I heard the other day of an exceedingly clever girl who for the last two or three years has been occasionally laid up with a very painful illness, and suffered severely. Nobody that she lives with can have acted as channels for infecting her,[237] as they are all either commonplace sensible people, or Evangelical, or lax. But she has got it into her head that there is a new party springing up in the Church, which she calls “the new men,” and has been pumping my sisters about you, and whether your notions are spreading, etc…. They say she has been working the Dartmouth Evangelicals with your Sermons, and made one of the parsons knock under! I have also heard of a learned lady (a very good and sensible person, by-the-bye), poking away most industriously at your Arians, and saying that her views had been much cleared by it.’

Phillis Spedding did not long survive her return to England. She died at Dartington three days after the date of Hurrell’s letter, on June 14, 1835, in her twenty-sixth year. Her one little child, Edward Spedding, then aged eighteen months, grew up only to attain his majority, and to be buried in January, 1855, at Bassenthwaite, not with his mother. Thomas Story Spedding, living on at the manor which he had so romantically inherited, married again.

Meanwhile, in Littlemore, Mrs. Newman was about to lay the corner-stone of her son’s Early English chapel, with the plans of which the architectural zeal of Mr. Thomas Mozley, the Vicar’s future brother-in-law, had much to do. The rumour that Hurrell Froude had designed it got some currency; and there is a mirth-provoking growl on the subject in the pages of that watchful worthy, the Rev. Peter Maurice of Yarnton, Chaplain of New College.[238] Upon the return of Newman and Froude from Rome in 1833, he says, ‘we soon found that the malaria of the Pontine marshes, the nondescript fogs of the fatherland of all heresy, began to develop their miasmata in a new diagnosis…. That edifice [Littlemore Church] was constructed from outlines and plans sketched out for the architect by an amateur friend of [Newman’s] own: the Rev. R. H. Froude. It was in a particular style of Church architecture which they were plotting to introduce. It was, in fact, the very first Church in modern times[239] that was ever consecrated with a stone altar, a stone cross, and credentia.’

Hurrell, however, at this very time, 1835, was busying himself with artistic needs nearer home. After his death, Archdeacon Froude wrote to Newman in one of his letters, which affectionately begged for a visit: ‘I hear you have a splendid Altar-table at Littlemore. That which dear Hurrell designed, and had executed for my chancel, is now in its proper place.’ This was in December, 1836. Hurrell’s Altar, practically modelled on the High Altar of Cologne Cathedral, has always been preserved as his gift at Dartington, and constantly used; it has undergone no alteration except that it had to be raised for convenience, after Archdeacon Froude’s death, as he was short, and both his successors have been very tall men. It was brought from the old Church to the new. Hurrell also changed the place of the chancel-screen in the Church now destroyed, moving it eastward, from the entrance to the choir, to enclose the rail at the Altar-foot, so that none but communicants passed beyond it: an irregular proceeding for an ecclesiologist. But it seems clear that he meant by the action to emphasise the sacredness of the Altar itself.

He was ever on the move, physically and mentally, in and about his father’s parish. Neighbours and social equals found it a bracing pleasure to see and hear him again, after absence; he had the greatest possible influence with them; those of his own age, fifty years later, and scattered all over England, were still quoting him. He dearly loved children, whom he met upon equal terms. Wherever there were children, Hurrell was always testing their metal, while romping with them. Would they run away from a comrade in danger? Would they throw blame on others? Would they break promises? He knew of what stuff every lamb of them was made, and it has been quite impossible for any of these, either, to forget him. This sweet solicitude, comeliest in one auquel une grÂce particuliÈre a rÉvÉlÉ le prix et la beautÉ de la virginitÉ sacerdotale,[240] played in and out among his graver cares. That, and the old preoccupation with architecture, stood for his best diversions, during his final year. It would appear that he also visited London. The admirable critic of the Movement just quoted lays some stress, in passing, on Hurrell’s interview with Dr. Wiseman; he even surmises that it was caused by spiritual anxieties of one sort or another.[241] But he forgets that Hurrell’s intention then was to return to Rome, and to historical work in the Vatican Library, and that, long before, Dr. Wiseman had promised his aid and interest in obtaining for him facilities for research.

The Gothic plotter (no more Gothic, Mr. T. Mozley thinks, than he should be), was employing his July of 1835 in outdoor devices. He tried to allure Newman as far as Torbay. ‘I am sure the lark will do you good, and the money (£2, 15s.) will not be grossly misspent.’ To which his friend replies on July 20: ‘… I should like of all things to come and see you, but can say nothing to the proposal at present, being very busy here, and being, in point of finances, in a very unsatisfactory state. I am at present at Dionysius and the AbbÉ, whom Oh! that I could despatch this vacation!’

This is the AbbÉ Jager, the Rev. Benjamin Harrison’s Parisian friend, a lively, learned, and apparently provoking controversialist, author of Le Protestantisme aux Prises avec la Doctrine Catholique. Newman received his reply promptly from Paignton, though he put off the visit. ‘Frater desiderate,’ says Hurrell, ‘speak not of finances, since all the people here are ready to subscribe for you; as for the AbbÉ, you can work him here as well as anywhere. It is exquisitely pleasant here: a hot sun with a fresh air is a luxury to which I have long been a stranger. If you were to stay here a fortnight, you might get on with your controversy, and be inspired for the novel! I give out in all directions that you mean to write it, and divulge the plot.’

Miss Mozley thus comments on this inciting of a new literary activity in Newman. ‘There is nothing in the papers before [me] to show that any ground whatever, in fact, existed for the novel Froude here talks of. In the Postscript to Callista, the author speaks of being stopped at the fifth chapter “from sheer inability to devise personages or incidents.” Was the attempt to express the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens in early Christian times already an idea in the author’s mind?’ The intrinsic evidence is certainly strong against the likelihood of Newman’s earlier story, Loss and Gain, or anything remotely resembling it in subject or framework, being contemplated in 1835. Attentive readers of that very Oxonian book will recall, incidentally, that Devonshire becomes the home of the Redings, and may even, without being too fantastic, detect some faint irregular adumbration of Hurrell Froude, Froude deduced as Newman would fain have him, in the phantom figure, so illusive and attractive, of Willis.[242] Perhaps ‘the novel,’ the plot of which Froude was so pleased to divulge, was but an original inspiration of his own. He had long before formed a critical, if rather despiteful interest in fiction, as the unwelcome supplanter of poetry in a decadent age; and perhaps he had invited Newman to write a story as Newman had invited him to dream of the Indian Bishopric: all ad majorem Dei gloriam. At any rate, five weeks before, Froude had mentioned what is apparently the same ‘novel’ as his own affair, in a letter to Newman printed in the Remains but not in the Newman Correspondence. ‘My ideas about the novel,’ he says, ‘are but cloudy, as I have no books of reference to get details out of. Would that the stars may let me return to Oxford before long, to work at things,[243] and rub up my intellects!’ It would be pleasant, were there any sure grounds for it, to associate the profound spiritual passion, as Mr. R. H. Hutton calls it, of Callista, with the emulating and holy friendship of John Henry Newman and Hurrell Froude.

Newman had been bringing forward in print something very dear to both: the monastic ideal. With his usual scrupulousness, he had begun to fear that he was laying too great a burden upon his well-wishers in leaving them to accept and defend a thesis so inexpedient, because so hostile to the spirit of the time; and Hurrell strikes out against the expressed misgiving before ending the letter of July 31 just quoted. His father, as ever, was his standard of wise moderation.

‘… As to your Monasticism articles in The British Magazine,[244] my father read the offensive part in the June one, and could see nothing in it that any reasonable person could object to; and some persons I know have been struck by them. I cannot see the harm of losing influence with people when you can only retain it by sinking the points on which you differ with them. Surely that would be Propter vitam vivendi, etc.? What is the good of influence except to influence people?’ To Mr. Keble, at the same time, Froude expresses a generous envy of Newman’s ‘taking’ utterance (what Newman himself calls his ‘mere rhetorical or histrionic power’), and admits again the difficulty of winning any such command over souls in England, with his own very elliptical genius. ‘I find myself so ignorant of the way to get at people, that I never know what to assume and what to prove!’ Froude’s straightforward case was Jeremy Taylor’s of old, of whom Chillingworth regretfully said: ‘Hee wants much of the ethickall part of a Discourser, and slights too much, many times, the Arguments of those hee discourses with.’

Newman tells his dear sister Jemima, on August 9: ‘I think I shall go down to Froude for ten days. I am very unwilling to do it; but it is so uncertain whether he will be able to come to Oxford at all, that I think I ought to secure seeing him before he goes abroad.’ And again, to the absent comrade, a fortnight after: ‘I am sick of expecting a letter; for the last week I have every day made sure of one, and been disappointed. I cannot help fearing you are not well…. I must (so be it!) come down to you before Vacation ends, to get some light struck out by collision.’ For Newman had been trying to work out alone ‘whether Tradition is ever considered by the Fathers, in matters of faith, more than interpretative of Scripture.’ To Mr. Rogers, at the same time, he speaks of the contemplated move. ‘I have little to show, this Vacation, in point of work done. The time seems to have slipped away in a dream. Perhaps it would be as well to go down to Froude, were it only to adjust my notions to his. Dear fellow! long as I have anticipated what I suppose must come, I feel quite raw and unprepared. I suppose one ought to get as much as one can from him, dum licet.’

Newman himself was again over-busied and ailing. No reader can fail to notice the deepening tenderness of the correspondence between the two during these last months, where yet sportiveness and candour, and a certain mutual deference, keep their old due order. Words go quickly and lightly, without emphasis or strain, as if driven willingly on the rising wind which is the eternal silence.

‘My dearest Newman,’ opens the awaited missive of Sept. 3, ‘I am afraid you will have been grumbling in your heart at me…. But really, I am not to blame, as I have not put pen to paper for a fortnight, except yesterday, when I began a letter to you upside down. I cannot explain what has been the matter with me; but I am sure that the apothecary into whose hands I fell made a fool of himself…. As to our controversies, you are now taking fresh ground, without owning, as you ought, that on our first basis I dished you! Of course, if the Fathers maintain that “nothing not deducible from Scripture ought to be insisted on as terms of communion,” I have nothing more to say. But again, if you allow Tradition an interpretative authority, I cannot see what is gained. For surely the doctrines of the Priesthood and the Eucharist may be proved from Scripture interpreted by Tradition; and if so, what is to hinder our insisting on them as terms of communion? I don’t mean, of course, that this will bear out the Romanists (which is perhaps your only point?), but it certainly would bear out our party in excommunicating Protestants…. You lug in the Apostles’ Creed, and talk about expansions. What is the end of expansions? Will not the Romanists say that their whole system is an expansion of the Holy Catholic Church and the Communion of Saints?’

Finally, on the 10th, arrives Newman’s definite word: ‘I propose coming to you next week,’ coupled with anxious inquiries about his health. Hurrell replies at once:

‘We shall be ready for you whenever you come. Dr. [Yonge] and a young doctor called Hinkson, who has paid much attention to the stethoscope, examined my chest all over; and they both told my father they never examined a chest in which there was more complete freedom from bad symptoms. Yet they say the disorder in my throat is dangerous unless stopped. Dr. Yonge is decided that I am not to go abroad this winter.’

Newman reached Dartington on the 15th, and was most happy there, among scenes and faces ‘loved long since,’ for nearly a month. Every one who has ever come across it remembers the phrase in which he briefly sums up the end of the visit: ‘I left, and took my last farewell of R. H. F. on Sunday, October 11, in the evening, sleeping at Exeter. When I took leave of him his face lighted up, and almost shone in the darkness, as if to say that in this world we were parting for ever.’ The angel, the ‘beautiful young man girded,’ who knew well ‘the way to the country of the Medes,’ had turned homewards, his mission over, and was to walk with Tobit no more.

Travel was an unconscionably slow business then, especially in the south-west. On the following Thursday Newman wrote from Southampton to Mr. Rogers at Oriel:

‘I have just got here from Lyndhurst, and find the Oxford coach full. Nothing therefore is left for me but to go up to London, and try to get to Oxford in that way. Be so good as to make my excuses to College for my non-appearance: it is the first time, I believe, I ever was away any day of an Audit, (except when abroad) since I have been Fellow. I trust I shall be with you to-morrow.

‘Dear Froude is pretty well, but is languishing for want of his Oxford contubernians. I trust I have been of use, in this way, in stimulating his spirits. So strongly do I feel this, from what I see and hear of him, that I mean almost to make myself responsible for some intimate going down to him at Christmas. He is allowed to read now, which is a great comfort. I am to send him a lot of books. It is wonderful, almost mysterious, that he should remain so long just afloat, and as far as it is mysterious, it is hopeful. Really, it would seem as if he were kept alive by the uplifted hands of Moses: which is an encouragement to persevere [in prayer].’

The delayed traveller wrote to Hurrell the day after his arrival at Oxford:

‘St. Luke’s Day, 1835.

‘I have been obliged to come round by London, and having business there, I did not regret it. Rivington will publish a third volume [of Sermons]; and please will you manage to get for me your father’s leave to dedicate it, in a few words, to him? Keble was married on the 10th, and told no one. The College has but heard from him that he resigns his Fellowship on that day, without a year of grace.[245] I engage to undertake and pledge myself to provide a visitor for you next Christmas: Rogers, or [Tom] Mozley, or Williams. But if no one comes, I shall come myself, which would be too great a pleasure: for I cannot put into words, or rather I do not realise to myself, how much the genius loci of Dartington Parsonage draws. I could be very foolish did I allow myself! All my own reminiscences of the place are sad, and I am almost debarred from them; and I seem to have no right, alienigena, to intrude elsewhere.’

Newman adds his parenthesis long, long after. ‘This feeling is expressed in the verses I wrote on my first visit to Dartington, in 1831:

‘There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart.

I have never seen Dartington since I saw Hurrell there.’[246] He shared to the full, as we have seen, Hurrell’s own passion for the place, a place even yet, despite the profane railway along the very bank of the Dart, of romance and peace; but he held his dedicated heart aloof from it in 1835 as in 1831, as a passage in a letter to his elder sister shows: ‘This country [Devon], is certainly overpoweringly beautiful and enchanting, except to those who are resolved not to be enchanted.’

To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Die Omnium Sanctorum, 1835.

‘Carissime: After all this delay I write without being able to report progress;—but don’t be hard on me. For a long time the weather has been so very bad as to confine me entirely to the house, which has dullified me, partly by its inherent dulness, and partly by making me rather worse, to such a degree that, till the last two days, which have rather revived me, I have been up to little more than thinking in my arm-chair, or listening to a novel. Yesterday I got a drive, and to-day a ride, which I hope have done me good; and if I can go on so for a week, I shall be as well as when you went, I have no doubt; and in a diligent humour I am willing to hope…. Don’t be conceited if I tell you how much you are missed here in many quarters. Now you are gone, I clearly see that a step has been gained. Even I come in for my share of the benefit, in finding myself partially extricated from an unenviable position hitherto occupied by me: that of a prophet in his own country….

‘Before I finish this, I must enter another protest against your cursing and swearing[247] [at the end of the first Via Media] as you do. What good can it do?—and I call it uncharitable to an excess. How mistaken we may ourselves be on many points that are only gradually opening on us! Surely you should reserve “blasphemous,” “impious,” etc., for denial of the articles of the Faith.’

This latter passage is well known from its incorporation in the Apologia. Again, Hurrell resumes on the 15th:

‘You will be in a rage with me when I tell you I have not answered [Boone].[248] If I was sure of being able to think and write whenever I chose, I should not have hesitated for a moment to promise the [article] in a week or two. But this is far from my case; and I was in a particularly do-nothing way, the day I got your letter. I don’t know whether you know the sensation of a pulse above 100°? If you do, I think you will admit it not to be favourable to mental exertion. So you see I can’t count on myself, or make promises, and wish much I was not committed at all. As to the review of Blanco White, it is an amusement to me, for which I am grateful to you; but being tied up about time, correcting the proofs, etc., are my bothers. I may, indeed, be up to business-like work soon, and I hope I shall; but I am no prophet. So I have almost a mind to tell Boone that I will let it stand over till the next.’

Newman’s instant reply was reassuring:

‘… I shall write to Boone to-night to tell him that you think you could not get the article done in time for January. I will take it through the press, if you will trust me. Do not fuss yourself, or think yourself pledged….

‘Keble was thrown from his horse, and broke a small bone in his shoulder, but is better. He will not be editor of the Tracts….

‘M. Bunsen has pronounced upon our views, gathered from the Arians (!), with singular vehemence. He says that if we succeed, we shall be introducing Popery without authority, Protestantism without liberty, Catholicism without universality, and Evangelism without spirituality. In the greater part of which censure you doubtless agree!’

The all-but-dying invalid finished the long, able, dispassionate review, entitled ‘Mr. Blanco White: Heresy and Orthodoxy,’ for the printers. It appeared in time, in The British Critic for January, 1836. It ends: ‘We must now, however, leave our argument imperfect, hoping very shortly to recur to it.’ This is the colophon from Hurrell Froude. It is diligent and collected, and keeps the colours boldly flying after a fashion wholly characteristic. The manuscripts went in sections to Newman.

‘In the last five days I have written forty of the enclosed sixty-three pages. If the humour lasts, I may do the rest in a jiffy. I have spent a week with Dr. Yonge…. [He] was not satisfied with the effect of steel, and changed it for I know not what, three days ago; since when I am decidedly stronger. But the Bishop of Llandaff[249] has warned us against confounding succession with causation. If Rogers will bring my Breviary, I shall be obliged. I shall be delighted if Mozley comes with him. They will meet Wilson, though but for a day.’

The Breviary is the celebrated identical book, first studied under Blanco White’s direction, the history of which is briefly given in the Apologia, and which is, to Dr. Abbott, so important an agent in determining Newman’s after-career. It may be assumed that Mr. Rogers forgot to take it, that Christmastide, to Dartington, as it was on the shelves of Hurrell’s rooms at Oriel when he died, and when Archdeacon Froude asked Newman to choose a keepsake there. It is still at the Oratory in Edgbaston.

A long letter to Newman from the Rev. R. F. Wilson, on Dec. 19, contained, incidentally, no very cheery news of their friend, succumbing to consumption of the throat.

‘It was a great pleasure to me to meet poor Froude, though he looks sadly, and without any abatement of those symptoms which must make his friends most anxious about him, appears weaker [by] a great deal than when he was in Oxford. To me, he was a more interesting person than ever, because I find that his peculiar way of thinking, and manner of expressing himself, which I thought might only belong to him in health and strength, continue just the same. I saw also Rogers there, for a day.’

Froude himself ‘continues just the same,’ on paper. He was busily hoisting sail in the offing, and quite calm about it. ‘I don’t know that it does one any harm,’ he had written eighteen months before, ‘to have the impression brought seriously before one that one is not to see out the changes which seem to be at hand.’

He keeps on rallying Newman in his old animated strain, on Dec. 21, winning the quick official contradiction: ‘As to our being out of joint here! No, no; we are doing well.’

‘By Rogers’ account, things don’t go exactly as they ought at Oxford. Golius[250] has rebelled, he says; and Ben Harrison[251] has jibbed; and the Theological meetings go flat; and old Mozley[252] won’t work. Harpsfield is the writer on the Breviary services whose name I could not remember. Rogers says that Sancta Clara is rich. Wilson,[253] for your comfort, is much less tender in the finger’s end than he was last spring, though I hear Keble does complain of his being rather soft. I very much wish to hear of your putting into execution your plan of a campaign in London, and enlarging the basis of operations.

‘… When you write, tell me if you think there was any of the “nasty irony”[254] you used to complain of? I tried to avoid it…. I am entirely confined to the house, which we succeed in keeping very warm, though out-of-doors it is a sharp windy frost.’

Frederic Rogers wrote to Newman from Dartington, where, according to Newman’s arrangement, he was spending Christmas with Hurrell:

‘I am excessively amused at the alternations of treatment Miss Froude is subject to from Hurrell and Mr. B[ogue].[255] In fact, I can hardly help being in a constant half-laughter when anything is going on between Froude and his sister.’

‘Mary Froude,’ adds Newman’s annotating hand in or about 1860, ‘was one of the sweetest girls I ever saw. She was at this time engaged to Mr. B[ogue]. He used to come with a great consciousness of his situation, much gravity, and great reverence for her. Hurrell, on the other hand, treated his sister, in a good-humoured way, as a little child, calling her “Poll,” and sending her about on messages, etc., to Mr. B[ogue’s] seeming scandal and distress. Mary Froude all the while was the very picture of naturalness and simplicity, receiving with equal readiness and equability the homage of the one, and the playful rudeness of the other.’ Mr. Bogue won his bride only to lose her. Her strength had been greatly impaired by her devoted attendance on her favourite brother; nor did she long outlive him. She was the youngest of Archdeacon Froude’s three daughters. The inscription over the vault in the old beautiful churchyard next Dartington Hall, on the slope of the hill, thus includes her name:

‘Also Mary Isabella Froude, wife of the Rev. Richard Bogue, [who] died August 7, 1836, in her 22nd year.’

Shortly after the loss of his young wife, Mr. Bogue bought the patronage of Denbury from the Duke of Bedford, and enlarged the old Rectory House. He was Curate there for a good while to Archdeacon Froude.

‘The most important year in the history of the Oxford Movement was the year 1836,’[256] the Hampden year. The great fight at Arques was coming on, with ‘brave Crillon’ far away. Newman duly wished a Happy New Year to Hurrell at Dartington. Sadly welcome are such conventions, when nothing less may be said, and nothing more can be said. He sends divers comments, with a postscript: ‘T. Mozley cannot come to you. His brother is going to marry my younger sister.’[257] There was the usual prompt answer, touching on the testimonial to Wellington, then Chancellor of the University, as ‘abominable’ and doctrinaire; and on the 16th Mr. Rogers wrote from Bridehead, as he knew well that Newman would be anxious for personal news, as soon as might be:

‘I have left Froude, who professes to remain much as he has been, rather weaker than when you were with him, from never being in the open air, but not worse than he has been from the beginning of his confinement. I am afraid, too, he is not quite in such good spirits as he used to be. You ought to send Harrison down to him, to take lessons on the subject of the Reformers; for certainly he has a way of speaking which carries conviction in a very extraordinary way, over and above the arguments he uses. Did Froude tell you that some good lady who has read you wonders how it is that you and Arnold should have any difference between you, your sentiments and general tone so perfectly agreeing? (!)’

As the young host at Dartington had always loved the younger guest, it is natural to find the praises of the latter in Froude’s notes to Newman. Thus on Jan. 12: ‘Rogers leaves us on Thursday, having been the greatest of acquisitions, in the eyes of everyone.’ ‘The greatest of acquisitions’ of course meant an acquisition to the Cause: Mr. Rogers’ own worth being properly valued, and that valuation added as so much credit to local impressions of the Movement. Hurrell had no merely social triumphs in mind. He had paid Newman, as guest and passive proselytiser, the same compliment.

Again: ‘R[ogers] left us on [Thursday]. We had many arguments and proses,[258] in the former of which he was generally victorious, but in the latter I think I may boast of having succeeded. I do believe he hates the meagreness of Protestantism as much as either of us.’

One who had never spared himself scrutiny and blame could, without affectation, arraign his dying languor as ‘selfishness’ and ‘idleness.’ Poor Hurrell’s capacity for work and perseverance had always been on the heroic scale. ‘These are not times,’ he had written in 1831, ‘in which people who think their own principles right have any business to be shilly-shally … [but] times when it seems almost a sin to be jolly.’ Newman knew how to cheer on that astounding energy, though with an aching heart.

To the Rev. John Keble, Jan. 7, 1836.

‘I am quite ashamed to think how long it is since I got your last letter; but illness makes one selfish, at least mine does, and dislike of writing, or in fact of doing anything, except trying to keep myself as comfortable as possible, has become a ruling passion. Since autumn set in I have done actually nothing except that review of B. White, which N[ewman] committed me about in such a way that I could not back out, and so was forced to go forward whether I would or not. However, I hope to turn over a new leaf as the weather mends, and indeed I begin to feel its reviving influence already. It is now more than two months since I have been out of doors, except in a close carriage, and for the last three weeks I have not been out at all, but have lived in an artificial summer at about the temperature of sixty-five degrees…. I am also prohibited altogether from eating meat, poultry, etc., or any animal food except fish, which, considering that milk does not agree with me, makes my case rather a hard one. On the whole, however, I am very comfortable, if it was not for an occasional twinge of conscience at my total idleness, for which I fear I really have no excuse, as I did not find myself a bit worse when obliged for a week to work as hard as I could for The British Critic. N[ewman] is now trying to hook me in for something else in the same line, and though I doubt not I shall be provoked with myself for having agreed to it, when the time for delivering the MS. draws near, yet I really think that the stimulus is a good thing for me. I am really very much obliged to you for your compliments about Becket,[259] for they really are the only ones I get in any quarter.’

There was no longer the least hope for a patient who had inherited consumption; who had never taken care of himself; whom no change of climate had ever benefited; whose long austerities had done, no doubt, their share of the work. As it was, he had entered his thirty-third year, outliving several of his family. But the treatment to which he was subjected seems radically wrong to those who glory in hygienic science revolutionised since his day. The hot climate, the low diet, the extra clothing while in England, the atrocious dumb-bell exercise, instead of a gentle and uniform strengthening of every muscle in the body, and last of all, the deprivation of fresh air, his one possible alleviation, were so many superfluous death-wounds in the fight. Mr. Keble, like Mr. Rogers and Newman, deplored the shut windows at Dartington, remembering their friend’s lifelong predilection for the open. ‘I am sorry to find they think it necessary to confine him so,’ he sighs to Newman. And then he adds, with a whipped-up miscellaneous optimism: ‘His being able to write is an excellent sign. What have you set him on now?… Thank you for sending me Wilson’s letter: it shows him in a most amiable light. You have all of you made much more than I meant out of that little word of mine of his being “softish.” I only meant that he was not as disposed to hang all Whigs, Puritans, etc., as some might be; but this we charitably attribute to the bad company he has kept in London.’

From Oriel Hurrell had, every few days, a full journal of the party’s doings, interspersed with all manner of private and autobiographical references. Newman, dining with a celebrated Evangelical (Mr., afterwards Sir James Stephen), sketches in the latter’s instructive conversation. ‘It is so hard to [repeat] without seeming to bepraise myself; but since I am conscious I have got all my best things from Keble and you, I feel, ever, something of an awkward guilt when I am lauded for my discoveries. He did not like my Arians, which, if I understood him, jumped about from one subject to another, and was hastily written, though thought out carefully…. He seemed to treat with utter scorn the notion that we were favouring Popery: this age of Mammon and this shrewd-minded nation were in no danger of it…. Further, the most subtle enemy which Christianity has ever had was Benthamism. Now he thought our views had in them that which could grapple with it…. He wanted from me a new philosophy…. Indeed, go where I will, “the fields are ready for harvest,” and none to reap them. If I might choose my place in the Church, I would, as far as I can see, be Master of the Temple. I am sure, from what little I have seen of the young lawyers, I could do something with them. You and Keble are the philosophers, and I the rhetorician’ … the fascinating miscellany of a letter goes on. And another quickly follows, when the writer (who had been named to Lord Melbourne as well as Keble) fears that Keble will refuse the Divinity Professorship at Oxford if it be proffered him, and flies to Froude as to one who can help to prevent that calamity. ‘I dread lest he should decline it. I write to you, that if you agree with me, you may write to him at once. For myself, I should go by your judgement, if such a thing occurred to me…. Carissime, I think I may say with a clear conscience I have no desire for it, and, had I my choice, would decide that the offer should not be made to me. I am too indolent, and like my own way too well, to wish it. I should be entangled in routine business, which I abhor. I should be obliged to economise,[260] and play the humbug, in a way I should detest, and I have no love for the nuisance of house and furniture, adding up bills, settling accounts, hiring servants, and getting up the price of butcher’s meat. I have the unpopularity, the fame, of being a party man, [with] the care of Tracts and the engagements of agitation. I am more useful as I am; but Keble is a light too spiritual and subtle to be seen unless put upon a candlestick.’ There is a most affectionate ending to his letter sent to the post on Candlemas Day. ‘T??se?, f???? ?t??. You could not but get weaker this weather, so confined.’

Meanwhile Hurrell had written ‘the last letter he wrote to me, perhaps the last letter he wrote at all.’ It is dated Jan. 27, 1836; the flow of it, the wonted pace, is gallant as usual, though it held both serious criticism and sad news. ‘You may perhaps have seen in the papers,’ he says to Newman, that my grandmother died, the 14th of this month. She retained her faculties to the last, and seems to have undergone the minimum of suffering which death requires. She was within a month or two of eighty-nine.’ This was his father’s mother, Phillis Hurrell.

‘It is very encouraging about the Oxford Tracts, but I wish I could prevail on you, when the second edition comes out, to cancel or materially alter several. The other day accidentally put in my way the Tract on “The Apostolical Succession in the English Church”; and it really does seem so very unfair, that I wonder you could, even in the extremity of ???????a and fe?a??s?? have consented to be a party to it.[261] The Patriarchate of Constantinople, as everyone knows, was not one “from the first,” but neighbouring Churches voluntarily submitted to it, in the first instance, and then by virtue of their oaths remained its ecclesiastical subjects; and the same argument by which you justify England and Ireland would justify all those Churches in setting up any day for themselves. The obvious meaning of the canon [of Ephesus] is that Patriarchs might not begin to exercise authority in Churches hitherto independent, without their consent.

‘Christie tells me you have had a letter from poor Blanco White, pleased rather than otherwise with [my] review,[262] and mistaking it for yours, and sending you a copy of the book. Poor fellow: I should much like to know in what tone he wrote; it must have been a painful thing answering him…. I don’t gain flesh, in spite of all the milk. Indeed, I suspect that in the last six weeks I have lost a good deal, but the symptoms remain the same.’ It is in this letter that Froude arranges for the continued dedication of the accumulated dues from his own Fellowship to the propagation of the Cause dear to his heart. ‘So spend away, my boy,’ he calls cheerfully to Newman, ‘and make a great fuss, as if your money flowed in from a variety of sources!’ It was his valediction.

Archdeacon Froude, early in February, leaves a blank on the last page of his communication to Newman, ‘for your regular correspondent to fill.’ Then comes the ominous postscript: ‘Hurrell wishes me to say that he has nothing particular to say just now, but that you shall hear from him in three or four days. He has received your two letters. And now (as he will not ask to see what I may write), I will tell you in a few words that my fears for him have increased considerably within the last week. There can be now no doubt that he has been losing ground, that he is much thinner than when Mr. Rogers left us, and as evidently weaker…. He is generally cheerful, sleeps well, and takes a sufficient quantity of food.’

Newman’s thirty-fifth birthday came on February 21, and upon that day, absorbed as he now became in fighting Hampdenism, he penned a loving letter of ‘long, long thoughts’ to his favourite sister Jemima, betrothed to John Mozley. ‘Thank my Mother and Harriet for their congratulations upon this day. They will be deserved, if God gives me grace to fulfil the purposes for which He has led me on hitherto in a wonderful way. I think I am conscious to myself that, whatever are my faults, I wish to live and die to His glory; to surrender wholly to Him as His instrument, to whatever work, and at whatever personal sacrifice, (though I cannot duly realise my own words when I say so). He is teaching me, it would seem, to depend on Him only; for, as perhaps Rogers told you, I am soon to lose dear Froude: which, looking forward to the next twenty-five years of my life, and its probable occupations, is the greatest loss I could have. I shall be truly widowed; yet I hope to bear it lightly.’

At intervals of five days, Archdeacon Froude gave Newman his melancholy bulletin. Nowhere is he more admirable than in facing the impending loss of the son who had come to be his pride and glory, and his bosom friend. Says the Rev. Thomas Mozley: ‘There was a sort of stoicism about Archdeacon Froude’s character which sometimes surprised those who had only seen him for a day or two, conversing, or sketching, or sight-seeing. He once rather shocked his clergy by delivering a Charge while a very dear daughter was lying dead in his house: but there was a romantic conception of duty in the act which affords some key to Richard Hurrell’s character.’

Feb. 18, 1836.

‘My dear Hurrell desires me to account to you for his long silence, but … I am sure you must have attributed it to the real cause, and be prepared for a confirmation of the fears I then expressed…. All hope of his recovery is gone; but we have the comfort of seeing him quite free from pain, and in sure trust that the change will be a happy one whenever it shall please God to take him. His thoughts continually turn to Oxford, to yourself, and Mr. Keble; but my heart is too full to add more than his instructions to thank you for all you have written to him, and to say how much he was interested in Mr. Rogers’ most amusing account of the late proceedings in the University.’

Feb. 23, 1836.

‘Your friend is still alive. The morning after I wrote my last, he awoke with a fluttering about the heart and a pulsation at the wrist I could not count. Our apothecary thought he could not live out the day; but our doctor holds out no hope of any change having taken place that should raise our expectations beyond that of a short respite. As he continues free from pain, or any very uncomfortable sensation except that of extreme weakness … I am thankful that he is permitted to remain with us, even for a few days. On no account, my dear Mr. Newman, would I have you come down: no good could come of it. You shall hear again from me in a few days; sooner, if anything occurs that should call for an earlier communication. Hurrell desires me to thank you, and also to say that he is “sorry that he has given you any trouble about those stupid accounts,” to use his own words, and that he “cannot scrape up ideas and strength enough” to write to you himself. Should he, (contrary to all reasonable grounds for hope), get a little about again, do tell Mr. Williams [that] his paying us a short visit will give us great pleasure indeed.’

Feb. 28, 1836.

‘My dear son died this day. Since my last he has been gradually but quietly sinking. After a rather more than usually restless night, he spoke of himself as being quite comfortable this morning, and appeared to hear the Service of the day, and a sermon, read to him with so much attention that I did not think the sad event so near as it has been. About two o’clock, as I was recommending him to take some egg and wine, I observed a difficulty in his breathing. He attempted to speak; and then after a few slight struggles, his sufferings were at an end.’

He was laid to rest on March 3, beside his mother, brother, and sister, close to the Church porch. The burial service was read by the Rev. Anthony Buller, a Devonian and an Oriel man, an old friend who dearly loved him. Apparently neither Newman nor Keble travelled down for the day to Dartington Parsonage, though the former, at least, had arranged to do so from London. But the Archdeacon’s tidings were sent to Oxford, and it was only on the morning of March 1 that Newman learned of his loss. It quite overcame him. ‘He opened the letter in my room,’ writes Thomas Mozley to his sister, ‘and could only put it into my hand, with no remark. He afterwards, Henry Wilberforce told me, lamented with tears (not a common thing for him), that he could not [have seen] Froude just to tell him how much he felt that he had owed to him in the clearing and strengthening of his views.’ Keble, too, at the Hursley Altar, the Sunday after Hurrell’s home-going, which must have been his own first Sunday there as Vicar, broke down completely, and for some minutes could not go on. At Oriel (to overhear again the Rev. T. Mozley addressing his brother John): ‘Froude’s death seems not a gloom, but a calm sadness over the College. Newman showed me his father’s letter written the same day, perfectly quiet and manly, making various arrangements, and telling Newman and his [other] friends to make selections from Froude’s scanty collection of books, to keep for his sake. I suppose Froude never got a book or anything else, in his life, merely for the sake of having it. His absolute indifference to possession was something marvellous. Did I ever tell you that for two years, at least, he has given his Fellowship to Newman, to go towards the Tracts? Yet he was by no means careless about money matters; for he with great pains put the accounts of Junior Treasurer (which I find troublesome enough even now), on an entirely new and simpler plan, to the great convenience of his successor…. I dare say there is no one who has said more severe and cutting things to me, yet the constant impression Froude has always left on my mind is that of kindness and sweetness.’ This testimony, indeed, was general.

On March 2, Newman wrote to his old friend J. W. Bowden, from Oxford:

‘Yesterday morning brought me the news of Froude’s death; and if I could collect my thoughts at this moment, I would say something to you about him; but I scarcely can. He has been so very dear to me, that it is an effort to me to reflect on my own thoughts about him. I can never have a greater loss, looking on for the whole of my life, for he was to me, and he was likely to be ever, in the same degree of continual familiarity which I enjoyed with yourself in our undergraduate days…. It would have been a great satisfaction to me had you known him. You once saw him, indeed; but it was when his health was gone, and when you could have no idea of him. It is very mysterious that anyone so remarkably and variously gifted, and with talents so fitted for these times, should be removed. I never, on the whole, fell in with so gifted a person. In variety and perfection of gifts I think he far exceeded even Keble. For myself, I cannot describe what I owe to him as regards the intellectual principles of religion and morals. It is useless to go on to speak of him: it has pleased God to take him, in mercy to him, but by a very heavy visitation to all who were intimate with him. Yet everything was so bright and beautiful[263] about him, that to think of him must always be a comfort. The sad feeling I have is that one cannot retain in one’s memory all one wishes to keep there; and that as year passes after year, the image of him will be fainter and fainter.’

The long-memoried man who uttered that was only too conscious that he had no portrait of his departed friend.

On the 6th, turning aside from other things, Newman says, in his thrilling undertone, to Keble:

‘… We have indeed had an irreparable loss; but I have for years expected it. I would fain be his heir. When I was with him in October, I so wished to drink out his thoughts, but found they would not flow except in orderly course, as all God’s gifts. It was an idea of Bowden’s, the other day, that as time goes on, and more and more Saints are gathered in, fewer are needed on earth: the City of God has surer and deeper foundations, day by day.’

Some thought of kindred wing crossed at the same time the mind of Charlotte Keble at Hursley. ‘I shall be very glad,’ she says, feelingly, to her sister-in-law Elizabeth on March 9, ‘for poor Mr. Newman to have the comfort of John’s being in Oxford. He seems very much to need it; and nobody, I suppose, can so entirely sympathise with him, both in his distress for the loss, and also in the views and opinions which knit them all three together. I can’t help thinking (at least, one doesn’t know), but that Mr. Froude may in some way or other be of more service now than if he had been kept here longer.’[264]

Perhaps no apology need be made for dwelling on the impression left by Hurrell Froude on the minds of his comrades, above all, on the mind of his best-loved comrade, after he had passed away. This afterglow, this ‘trailing cloud of glory,’ is biographic comment indeed. He had lived so detached a life that it is pleasant to associate him, at the last, with the schwÄrmerei of much tender common human sorrow, with sorrow sure of his own immortal continued interest in all that he had worked for in England: for it helps to show him less as an elf and a ‘kinless loon,’ than as the Saint-errant which, through his thirty-two years, he was.

The heavy blow of his mother’s unexpected death fell on Newman in May. The association of this loss with the sharp foregoing one, and the remembrance of Froude, whom he had known and lived with so happily since they first became colleagues at Oriel, are palpable enough in the brave sigh of that greatly religious soul, breathed in a letter to Harriett Newman, dated June 21, 1836:

‘You have nothing to be uneasy at, so far as I am concerned. Thank God, my spirits have not sunk, nor will they, I trust. I have been full of work, and that keeps me generally free from dejection. If it ever comes, it is never of long continuance, and is even not unwelcome. I am speaking of dejection from solitude. I never feel so near Heaven as then. Years ago, from 1822 to 1826, I used to be very much by myself, and in anxieties of various kinds which were very harassing. I then, on the whole, had no friend near me, no one to whom I opened my mind fully, or who could sympathise with me. I am but returning, at worst, to that state … and after all, this life is very short, and it is a better thing to be pursuing what seems God’s Will than to be looking after one’s own comfort. I am learning more than hitherto to live in the presence of the dead: this is a gain which strange faces cannot take away.’

Less than a year later, a similar strain comes like a music of triumph over sorrow in such a letter to Frederic Rogers, on the death of his sister, as none but Newman could write:

‘This is only a fresh instance of what I suppose one must make up one’s mind to think, and what is consoling to think, that those who are early taken away are the fittest to be taken, and that it is a privilege so to be taken, and that they are in their proper place when taken. Surely God would not separate from us such, except it were best both for them and for us; and that those who are taken away are such as are most acceptable to Him seems proved by what we see: for scarcely do you hear of some especial instance of religious excellence, but you have also cause of apprehension how long such a one is to continue here…. We pray daily: “Thy Kingdom come”: if we understand our words, we mean it as a privilege to leave the world, and we must not wonder that God grants the privilege to some of those who pray for it, … pray for our eventual re-gathering, but our dispersion in the interval. The more we live in the world that is not seen, the more shall we feel that the removal of friends into that unseen world is a bringing them near to us, not a separation. Our Saviour’s going brought Him nearer, though invisibly, in the Spirit.’ It is all reticent and impersonal, but it rises, before his great battle begins, from Newman’s stricken lonely heart. ‘Thou doomed to die,’ as he had said, long before, in his poem, ‘David and Jonathan’:

Last of all, come from his half-unwilling hand the lines well-known to students of sacred verse.

What beauty is in that word ‘refrain,’ a filament of English feeling kept between the quick and the dead! It occurs in a little afterthought of a stanza, which was the only poetic offering of Newman’s pen to Hurrell Froude gone.[265] Never was there so imponderable an obituary; nor ever any more exquisitely in keeping.

For ‘the rest’ was indeed ‘silence.’ A proposal for a monument in S. Mary’s at Oxford, affectionately brought forward by Robert Wilberforce, as due to ‘our incomparable friend,’ ‘that invaluable friend,’ somehow fell through. A special paper for The British Magazine fell through too, neither Newman nor Keble being able, in his first grief, to write it to his own satisfaction. The only actual notice of Froude’s decease occurred in a bare alphabetical list printed in the April number, 1836. ‘Tributes of Respect’ were usual in the Magazine, but he had none. The Annual Biographer and Obituary, published by the Longmans in 1837, does not include him. Nor had he any epitaph, not even when Archdeacon Froude died twenty-three years later, until Dartington Church was taken down, being thought too remote from the village population, in 1878, and the stones used in a re-erection close to the highway below; then the vault was railed in, where it was left in the lonely grassy space, with only the ancient Hall, the grey ivied tower, and the sun-dial for solemn neighbours, and the name and dates of each of the Froude family were cut on the plain slab. They are unaccompanied even by a text, or a Christian symbol. And thus, in the abstention which was his lifelong garment, Hurrell sleeps. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth, March 25, 1903, a great garland of leaves and simple Devon blossoms lay there, with a dedicatory good word from his favourite Book of Daniel: ‘O man greatly beloved! peace be unto thee: fear not; be strong, yea, be strong…. But go thou thy way till the end be; for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.’ It cannot be for ever that ‘Froude of the Movement’ shall lack a less perishable memorial.

In 1836, the ‘vanishing of such a spirit without sign’ was not to be endured. It was the most natural thing in the world that all he had written should be gathered together, that such a lover of books (as Leigh Hunt says somewhere, in one of his happy literary retrospects), should himself become a book. Hurrell became a singular book, as it happened, made up, paradoxically, of matter never prepared by himself for publication; and he and it were put forth as a party manifesto. It may not be uninteresting to review the origin and character of The Remains of the late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, printed by the Rivingtons in 1838 and 1839, and consisting of four volumes octavo. The Editors, whose names do not appear upon the title-page, were the Rev. John Keble and the Rev. John Henry Newman. The latter is generally supposed to have done most of the work; there are published letters of Keble’s to Sir John Coleridge, and of Newman’s to Mr. Frederic Rogers, which go to show that the idea of bringing out the Remains, and the initiatory labour, including the first Preface, were Newman’s. But according to Coleridge’s Memoir, Mr. Keble, as collaborator, wrote by far the greater part of both Prefaces. For the very beautiful second one he was certainly responsible.[266]

Of Part I. of these Remains, Vol. i. is devoted to a Private Journal; Memoranda personal and philosophical; Letters to Friends; one Latin and five English poems; seven pages of remembered miscellaneous sayings; and a diary as Appendix. The companion volume is devoted to Sermons complete and fragmentary; three Essays on subjects connected with arts and sciences, and three on subjects purely ecclesiastical. Part II., Vol. i., has five papers and some fragments, none of which are on secular themes; and the final volume is given up to the History of the Contest between Thomas À Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry II., drawn from original documents and State Papers, left unfinished by Hurrell Froude, and carried on and edited by the Rev. James Bowling Mozley.

The collecting of ‘dearest Froude’s papers’ had begun before April, 1836; they were looked over at Hursley in July; by September, Newman, otherwise busy as he was, writes that he is getting on with the transcriptions, and that James Mozley has been hard at work during the whole Vacation on S. Thomas of Canterbury. Archdeacon Froude sends up his auxiliary supplies in October, from Dartington Parsonage.

‘… I sent off a parcel to you, three days ago, by Henry Champernowne: it contains the text of dear Hurrell’s manuscripts. All your letters to him that I can find are also enclosed. With the latter I must confess I have not parted without regret. They are memorials of your affectionate friendship with one whose image is ever before me, and to which I could never turn without a delightful interest that I cannot describe. His correspondence for many years with myself[267] turns principally on little passing incidents, or relates to matters of private concern; but it is of great value to me as a sort of journal from early boyhood nearly to the time of our separation.’

Lyra Apostolica was issued in November, and several of the critics had taken pains to single out ‘’s’ poems for special commendation, even if at the expense of Keble and Newman: certainly Samuel Wilberforce did so, in his asked-for review, the tone of which was so disconcerting and unexpected to the asker;[268] and The Christian Observer had saluted Hurrell as ‘the most spiritual and least bigoted of the whole set.’ All this was encouraging to the projectors of the Remains, who knew better than outsiders of how keen and high an intellect, how holy an inspiration, their cause had been deprived. Newman’s notes, as the editing progressed, are very sanguine.

To the Rev. John Keble, June 30, 1837.

‘… I have transcribed [R. H. F.’s] Private Thoughts, and am deeply impressed with their attractive character. They are full of instruction and interest, as I think all will feel. I have transcribed them for your imprimatur. If you say Yes, send them to me; I propose to go to press almost immediately. These Thoughts present a remarkable instance of the temptation to rationalism, self-speculation, etc., subdued. We see his mind only breaking out into more original and beautiful discoveries, from that very repression which, at first sight, seemed likely to be the utter prohibition to exercise his special powers. He used playfully to say that his “highest ambition was to be a humdrum,” and by relinquishing the prospect of originality he has but become the more original.’

On July 5, Newman gives to Rogers categorical reasons for his plan of publication.

‘1. To show his … unaffectedness, playfulness, brilliancy, which nothing else would show. His Letters approach to conversation, to show his delicate mode of implying, not expressing, sacred thoughts; his utter hatred of pretence and humbug. I have much to say on the danger which I think at present besets the Apostolical Movement of getting peculiar in externals, i.e., formal, manneristic. Now Froude disdained all show of religion. In losing him we have lost an important correction…. His Letters are a second-best preventative.

‘2. To make the work interesting, nothing takes so much as these private things.

‘3. To show the history of the formation of his opinions. Vaughan[269] was observing the other day that we never have the history of men in the most interesting period of their life, from eighteen to twenty-eight or thirty, while they are forming: now this gives Froude’s.

‘4. To show how deliberately and dispassionately he formed his opinions. They were not taken up as mere fancies: this invests them with much consideration. Here his change from Tory to Apostolical is curious.

‘5. To show the interesting growth of his mind, how indolence was overcome, etc.; to show his love of mathematics, his remarkable struggle against the lassitude of disease, his working to the last.

‘6. For the intrinsic merit of his remarks.

‘If you think the notion entertainable, I wish you could put the MS. into the hands of some person who is a good judge, yet more impartial than ourselves, in order to ascertain his impression of it…. If you and the other agree in countenancing the notion, then send down the MS. to Keble, with an enumeration of [my] reasons for publishing.’

To the Rev. John Keble, July 16, 1837.

‘… Williams has suggested the publication of extracts from Hurrell’s letters. I feared at first they would be too personal as regards others; but then I began to think that if they could be given, they would be next best to talking with him, and would show him in a light otherwise unattainable. Then there are so many clever things in those he sent me: the first hints of principles which I and others have pursued, and of which he ought to have the credit. Moreover, we have often said the Movement, if anything comes of it, must be enthusiastic. Now here is a man fitted above all others to kindle enthusiasm. I have written to William Froude about it, who caught at the idea, which he said had already struck him. Considering the state of the University, everything which can tell against Hampdenism[270] will be a gain.’

Newman continued sanguine.

To J. W. Bowden, Esq., Hursley, Oct. 6, 1837.

‘… I am here for a week to consult with Keble about Froude’s papers, which are now in the press, and require a good deal of attention. You will, I think, be deeply interested in them. His father has put some into my hands of a most private nature. They are quite new even to Keble, who knew more about him than anyone…. All persons of unhackneyed feelings and youthful minds must be taken with them; others will think them romantic, scrupulous, over-refined, etc.’

The ‘papers of a most private nature’ dated chiefly from Hurrell’s twenty-third to his twenty-seventh year. ‘They have taught me,’ Mr. Keble writes to that friend, his own earliest biographer, whom they were to disturb and shock when once in print, ‘they have taught me things concerning him which I never suspected myself, as to the degree of self-denial which he was practising when I was most intimate with him. This encourages me to think that there may be many such whom one dreams not of.’

How Froude came to leave these secret manuscripts behind him is not perfectly clear. Mr. Keble had advised burning them, long before. During the months and even years when there was natural opportunity for disposing of all his affairs, Froude had abstained from destroying his papers. The only explanation is that he was too completely indifferent, in all such matters, to make a move of any sort. He belonged to a journal-keeping age and a journal-keeping family: to write, and to dismiss the writing from memory, were to him easy matters. Neither his kind of memory, nor his degree of self-attentiveness, would have helped him to produce an Apologia. His diaries, properly speaking, have absolutely no egotism: he is merely dramatically concentrated on R. H. F. as a moral ‘dummy’ convenient for observation and correction, and it was quite in keeping with his habit that he should have taken no thought whatever of a testamentary nature, towards the end. He could, of course, have had no suspicion of the ultimate use to which his confessions were soon to be put. Besides, he would harbour no fear of depreciation, but would rather have desired that, even in the grave.

On the fly-leaf of the finished book they placed a sweet motto from the Adeste, sanctÆ conjuges, the midnight hymn appointed for the Office of the Commemoration of Holy Women. It came from the Parisian Breviary, in which Froude had delighted. Newman was editing the Hymns included in it at this very time.

Isaac Williams’ sensitive translation is a fit mate for the Latin:

Such a motto, it might be urged, was both too personal and too deprecatory. The perfect posy for the venture would have been, instead, a word of Felippo di Boni:

The Editors felt, no doubt, that anything like this, for all of its fitness, would have imported a note of unnecessary defiance. To print the Remains at all was certainly war-cry enough.

The first Part, comprising two volumes, appeared at mid-winter, 1838. It was much talked of, as was inevitable, among the interested friends and foes of the High Church party, and it bred the most contrary impressions. Beyond the familiar circle, Froude’s comrades and their followers, what success the book won was a frank succÈs de scandale. Its one tangible result was to urge on Low Church zealots to build the Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford. It was dedicated in 1841; and subconsciously, it was from plinth to finial what Mr. Keble called it, ‘a public dissent from Froude.’[271] Love for Ridley, Latimer, and the great Cranmer who, as F. Rogers once predicated, ‘burned well,’ were less potent in raising that graceful landmark than heated disapprobation of Froude, Newman, and Keble himself. Sic vos non vobis. Hurrell liked ironical situations. Here was one to his hand.

The sale of the Remains was never great; in fact, it was so restricted that the publishers, about seven months after the launching of the first Part, made considerable demur before bringing the second Part out at all. No extra edition was called for; the work has stood, ever since, among the out-of-print rarities of London catalogues. Of the mass of writing which it comprised, sacred or secular, there has been but a single paper reprinted: the remarkable paper on State Interference in Matters Spiritual, issued by Selwood in 1869, with a strongly corroborative Introduction from the pen of that good militant shepherd, the Rev. William J. E. Bennett, Vicar of Frome.

On March 29, 1838, Newman wrote from Oxford to Keble, on the subject then uppermost in their minds.

‘You must not be vexed to have a somewhat excited letter from Edward Churton[272] on the subject of dear Hurrell’s Remains. I doubt not, too, you really will not be so. All persons whose hearts have been with Cranmer and Jewel are naturally pained; and one must honour them for it. It is the general opinion here that the Journal ought to have been published, and is full of instruction. Yesterday morning I had the following pleasant announcement from William Froude: “My father is much pleased with Hurrell’s book. He had been rather alarmed by some comments made upon it in a letter from Sir John Coleridge; but the book itself has quite reassured him. The Preface says exactly what one wished to have said.”’

If Archdeacon Froude felt satisfied, that would atone for much. Mr. Rose’s opinion was next in importance to the Archdeacon’s, to the Oriel men responsible for this particular exercise of it. Fortunately, he was sufficiently favourable, writing to Pusey from King’s College on March 14, 1838, to ask for ‘an account,’ or ‘a sketch’ of ‘poor Froude’s most interesting Remains. I do not know to whom to give them for review. For very few can understand or appreciate his very peculiar excellences. A book so miscellaneous, touching on so very many points is a very hard matter for a regular reviewer.’[273] Apart from these graded expressions of private sympathy, there was censure and even ridicule to bear; and self-earned troubles are proverbially not the sweetest. Violent denunciations arose on all sides, and especially within the bosom of an ungrateful Church. The Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity fulminated from the very University pulpit; the Bishop of Ferns and Leighlin, the most persevering ‘charger’ of all, thundered against ‘that very rash and intemperate young man.’ Even the House of Commons was, on one occasion at least, disturbed by godly zeal exerted against the book. To James Mozley, during July, Newman wrote: ‘You see Lord Morpeth[274] has been upon me in the House, as editor of the Remains. Gladstone has defended me; Sir R[obert] Inglis the University.’[275] And Rogers sends his vivacious message to Newman: ‘What do you think of Gladstone’s exculpation of you? And what of the face Froude would have made at being quoted in the House of Commons as “an accomplished gentleman” by Lord Morpeth?’[276]

The Remains, quickly as it fell out of print, was a storm-centre. Mr. Gladstone, concerned with defending the good faith of the editor-in-chief, yet handled the oppugned work with repeated regrets.[277] He has left it upon record, referring to an earlier year, and echoing the adjectives of Bishop O’Brien just quoted: ‘My first impressions and emotions in connection with [the Oxford Movement] were those of indignation at what I thought the rash intemperate censures pronounced by Mr. Hurrell Froude upon the Reformers.’[278] Newman’s Correspondence[279] gives quite a roll-call of the Bishops, editors, magazines, and private persons ‘opening on us.’ He adds: ‘I can fancy the old Duke sending down to ask the Heads of Houses whether we cannot be silenced.’

Some who took the Remains to heart were more than half sorry that it was published. The real reasons for that measure had been in the Prefaces a little obscured, because largely taken for granted as obvious. So much is clear: the need had been felt of issuing a book to serve as a dead friend’s only monument. But the moment one came to handle his compositions, all warlike, all new, one foresaw the ethical risk of putting them forward, without first educating a public to read them. Mr. Wilson, representing his own earliest feeling, and that of Mr. Keble his Vicar, sympathised, in the very beginning, with Newman over ‘the great difficulty and perplexity you must be in at present, as to what course to take…. We cannot afford by any shock even to throw back into their former upright posture of indifference or suspicion some who are now leaning our way.’ To publish poor Hurrell at all turned out a large diplomatic matter. Confident that he needed only to be known to be loved and trusted, Newman resolved to make him intimately and unmistakably known, and his opinions, in consequence, heeded as they deserved. The Remains is almost the first among modern English books to expose what is sacredly private: we are all used now, whether with diminishing or undiminishing protest, to exhibitions of the spiritual anatomy of humankind. The Editors’ challenge to an Erastian world seemed based on the belief that their cause had bred its perfect flower in Froude, and that only to show him as he was, with his mighty single-hearted zest, his aspirations towards holiness, and his playful gentleness, would be to show also the attaching loveliness of their cause. They proceeded upon one or two syllogisms which had no flaw, but also no application. For, plainly, Froude was impossible to be understanded of the people, and the more he himself was expounded the worse it was for the system which he personified. An eminent critic led the way in dwelling, not on the question so unmistakably thrust forward, of PrÆmunire, but on Hurrell’s confessed and repented glance to see ‘whether goose came on the table at dinner!’ That goose is well known to a number of contemporary persons who have never owned a copy of the Remains, nor heard what ascetic theology has to say of such a thing as concupiscence of the eyes. Hurrell, in a secret hour, had named the goose only to his guardian angel, between whom and himself the sense of humour could hardly come into play. Keble’s humour, and Newman’s likewise, were almost incomparably keen: one knows not how these passages survived the proofreading. It was inevitable, however, that public attention should fasten upon them with disrelish and horror. They were unusual, they were not ‘self-respecting’; they belonged to types outgrown and superseded; in short, they were fatally ‘un-English,’ to that most respectable year 1838. It was bidden to admire a humility and disinterestedness in which it could not believe. A completely non-sentimental religion was a trying spectacle, even to the most religious among Early Victorian readers. A young man ever accusing himself, a young man waiving his own profit, and doing these monstrous things by force of will and habit, all his life, was simply an offence to common morals. Natural virtues are well enough: truth, industry, ambition, family affection, are at least legal: they are not a slap in the face to what is called a Christian community. But a temper fed from hidden springs, and full of austerity and detachment, must ever look to the mass of men like an alien thing, the outcome of hypocrisy or sheer foolishness. Nothing but an outward and visible career passed in nursing the sick in hospitals can, to this day, redeem it.

‘The public,’ says a sociologist,[280] with charming scorn, ‘are acquainted with the nature of their own passions, and the point of their own calamities; can laugh at the weakness they feel, and weep at the miseries they have experienced: but all the sagacity they possess, be it how great soever, will not enable them to judge of likeness to that which they have never seen, nor to acknowledge principles on which they have never reflected. Of a comedy or a drama, an epigram or a ballad, they are judges from whom there is no appeal; but not of the representation of facts which they have never examined, of beauty which they have never loved.’ The good public and anything which savours of the merely supernatural, the good public and the Kingdom of Heaven, in short, are incongruous. But it is only fair to them to quote, again, the word of a far more practical observer, which had, from the first, a bearing on those whom the writer calls ‘the firebrands of the Movement’: ‘I do not say the English are a people of good sense, but I say they abhor extremes, and always fly off from those who carry things too far.’[281] They do indeed. But every conclusion becomes an extreme, and a thing carried too far, where they are concerned.

Froude had always trimmed his sails not so much to the wind, as according to a theory of navigation. It follows that ‘the picture of a mind,’ his mind, such as his friends wished to exhibit it, was not a ‘necessity to the times’: in fact, it was an intrusion upon them. It was in deadly hostility not only to their low ideals, but to their ordinary characteristics and best accepted spirit. Froude, or his unconscious influence, was only too well organised to ‘toss and gore several persons,’ and the self-satisfied Establishment which had honourably reared them. An illustration of existing contraries may not be far to seek. Two good men of mark, born and dying in the roomy Church of England, once expressed, each in his turn, his feeling about his epitaph. Mr. Robert Southey was pleased to say (with what his age considered perfect decorum, with what our age must admit to be perfect truth): ‘I have this conviction: that die when I may, my memory is one of those which will “smell sweet, and blossom in the dust.”’ He also repeated the sentiment in verse. But the testamentary ideas of Richard William Church ran in another mould:

It is safe to predicate that thinking persons who sympathise with the one, revolt from the other. Now the cleavage between the dispositions which brought about these irreconcilable expressions, is the cleavage in the national ideals. What is so sure of blossoming in the dust, although professedly it lay all stress upon the Vicarious Atonement, is Protestantism. The belief in the necessity of the co-operative human will in the scheme of Redemption, although it attain only to an awestruck hope of the Almighty Mercy, is, well—not precisely Protestantism! Between the two moods there is no mutual approach, still less, amalgamation: for between them is set up the Sign to be contradicted. It is to be feared that Hurrell Froude, had he known of an admired poet’s intention for ever to ‘smell sweet,’ could hardly have been restrained from quoting his kinsman Hamlet’s ‘Pah!’ Piety which of malice prepense smells sweet, will like Hurrell Froude no better now than it liked him in the Tractarian twilight. It will be seen that Mr. Southey was not enthusiastic over the Remains.

To put the Remains on the open market was too bold a venture of faith, though they would have served their dialectic purpose well, and found their own readily, even had they been privately issued, even if edited with greater reserve. It was quite natural that Froude should have passed posthumously for a mere agitator given up to triviality and impudence. If it were true that for him living, ‘one constantly trembled, in mixed society,’ what can have possessed his Editors to think that his anarchist voice (the voice, really, of a great constructive critic) would be suffered in a four-volume monologue? All he was, all he thought, separated him by whole elements and universes from the ordinary citizen. Accost between them turned farcical in the act: ‘as if a dog should try to make friends with a fish!’ His disqualifications for the final mission given him were intellectual as well as moral. To name but two among them, he was in love with the ‘Dark’ Ages, the fountainhead of hard logic and thorough craftsmanship, and still more in love with the original document, at a period when historical research was not only unfashionable, but inferentially abhorred; and his animus must needs have seemed ‘Popish’ or worse, when it but led him to handle as self-evident fallacies the darling predilections of centuries of British basilolatry.

It would have been bad enough had his convictions been expressed always in academic terms, such as he himself, after all, did employ pretty constantly in addressing the magazine public. But Hurrell’s ‘little language,’ superadded to his strong opinions, was too much for a day of buckramed dignity. His verbal polity spared neither himself nor the species, and it must have been appalling to others beside the Holy Willies. Moreover, there was such gusto and emphasis in all he said, that the effect was almost that, as it were, of calling a spade a spade, with a plebeian ‘swear-word’ before it. Nobody else in that English generation, not even Welby Pugin, dealt in so elastic a vernacular. But surely, private letters may take what tone and pace they please? Why did it not occur to everyone to allow, in extenuation of this too lively fashion of ‘sparks running to and fro among the reeds,’ that the Rev. Mr. Froude was young, and younger, moreover, than his years? The ideas of personal chronology then current were illiberal. We know that men and women aged thirty were looked upon as fairly venerable figures in the world of our grandfathers, and were bound to have shed the last of the pin-feathers of indiscretion. For purposes of general protest against the common vanities of plumage, primitive attire may with profit be retained: but it is likely to enrage the barnyard. There is a good deal to be said for the speech which suggests to us not Court dress, not even dressing-gown and slippers, but overalls. It puts everything at once on a workmanlike basis. A masterly critic has observed how great a debt Newman owed to Hurrell Froude in the development of his peerless ease and naturalness. To go further, it may truly be said that one caught up the living accent of the other. As a good latter instance, take Newman’s famous passage in the Apologia about ‘seeing a ghost’ when the point raised in an article on the Donatists first arrested him in 1839. The echo is yet clearer in a contemporary letter. ‘It gave me the stomach-ache,’ he says. Such sportive phraseology sounds the majestic capacity of educated human expression. But sportive phraseology had its disadvantages, when it was sent forth broadcast to ‘dictate to the clergy of this country,’ or contribute towards ‘the picture of a mind’ known by the picturers to be chastened and grave. The innumerable chapters of the Remains which were sober as a monochrome were quite overborne, in popular estimation, even where that estimation inclined to friendliness, by some few prancing words or lines. The amice and cope of the stately Muse of Theology symbolised nothing to the carpers who believed that they had once caught a handmaid of hers in the neat no-drapery of the corps de ballet. Indisposed to look below the surface of Froude’s puzzling temperament, they found only effrontery in his clear, terse, vivacious call, and only dulness in his underlying mood, master of statement and definition, and of armoured synthesis. It was not altogether their fault: because his slang, it may as well be admitted, constitutes a defect of character. It was a conscious revolt against all that goes to make up ‘donnishness,’ and in so far an element of strength as well as of comedy; but it was also the makeshift of a man who contemned himself almost to the point of eccentricity, and who often could not bear without a mocking grimace, the serious utterance of his most serious thought. Keble was full of fun, but Keble had no Hurrellisms, no ‘little language.’ With the other, it is the note of a certain spiritual unrest; an impiety against his own nature which all sensitive human nature resents in some degree: the jest, indeed, of a philosopher who never lost courage, but who never found joy. Self-valuation and its calmly pompous accents are understood, and even commended, all over the intellectual world. But this bitter mood, as of a Cabinet Council plus the Court fool, is too strange and new. There are those now, as there were then, whom it shocks and deters.

Closely allied with all this is the question of his so unceremonious dealing with men and things. As we are reminded by his Editors, most of it was impersonal enough, for his mind was set on principles only. ‘I allow hatred is an imperfect state, but I think it is just young people that it becomes’: is a remark from his remembered talk. ‘The most difficult virtue to attain,’ he went on, ‘seems to me the looking on wanton oppressors as mere machines, without feeling any personal resentment.’ This is akin to a curious axiom of Hazlitt’s, which would exonerate almost any cynic and sluggard, that ‘to think ill of mankind, and not to wish them ill, is perhaps the highest genius and virtue.’ Many adherents, unblessed with imagination, of Froude’s own party, might be brought to bay by his Common Room pronouncement that ‘the cultivation of right principles has a tendency to make men dull and stupid.’ (His friend Thomas Mozley goes even farther in the impious generalisation, and accuses Evangelical goodness, ‘mixed with poverty and a certain amount of literary or religious ambition,’ of producing ‘an unpleasant effect on the skin!’) These endearments were, as was but just, not confined by Froude to the elect. He was a hard hitter also against individuals non-Jacobite and non-Apostolical; he made ninepins of living and dead, great and small. On this faculty, however, he was very far from priding himself. No one could be more keenly aware of his sharp tongue than he. Given events as he saw them, and his naked eye to transpierce them, and his store of natural animation fostered in a home atmosphere which was at all times highly charged with criticism, and we have some explanation of his merciless proficiency in adverbs and adjectives, applied impartially to the Bishop Jewels of a past age, or the undergraduates of his own. From the first, he had felt this smartness of speech to be his pitfall. His journals are full of self-accusations, prayers, and resolutions on the subject. ‘To-day, when —— called on me, I was forced to watch myself at every turn, for fear of saying something irreligious or uncharitable.’ … ‘I have again been talking freely of people.’ … ‘Not to go out of my way to say disrespectful things … not to say satirical things either in people’s presence or behind their backs, or to take pleasure in exposing them when they seem absurd, or to answer them ill-naturedly when they have said offensive things.’ … ‘I said I thought —— an ass, when there was not the least occasion for me to express my sentiments about him. And yet I, so severe on the follies, and so bitter against the slightest injuries I get from others, am now presenting myself before my great Father to ask for mercy on my most foul sins, and forgiveness for my most incessant injuries. “How shall I be delivered from the body of this death!”… I see nothing for it but not to talk at all, and let myself be reckoned stupid and glumpy: and this I will do. I must give up talking altogether except where civility absolutely requires it. I am not to be trusted with words.’

All this ‘mortal moral strife’ dates from his earliest manhood. He certainly never relaxed the effort toward humbleness and mental correction; though a superficial reader might question whether he had, at the end, succeeded in attaining any appreciable measure of either. But it is worth while to remember here that his whole effort would be not to let his friends at Oxford become aware of his victory, if he gained it. Sooner than face human approval in these matters, he would say, every day in the week, that he ‘thought —— an ass,’ if only to keep up appearances.

Again, and apart from the amenities, the Remains are not edited in a way to conciliate the unwilling. In one department, they are provokingly presented with raggedly-pieced phrases, names suppressed, and divers eliminations, almost enough to kill interest; in another, they commit to the general scrutiny amorphous themes, repetitions, the mere crude bones of theory, fragments never shaped for the press. Never was it truer, of any book or of any man, that

The just apprehension of such an one is never discoverable from what he may write. To be told that here was an Oxford Fellow of genius and culture, and to be shown, in proof of it, no professional arts whatever, but a stripped argument, and ‘the rigour of the game,’ flying personalities, tonic commonplaces, buried first principles,—this was somewhat disconcerting. Those who knew Hurrell Froude would take pride in the Spartan simplicity of his every page, where sincere words are welded with sincere thought. Those who knew him not might turn away from that as from downright incapacity.

Of Keats, in his marvellous development, Mr. Lowell beautifully says: ‘He knew that what he had to do had to be done quickly.’ So, in a contrasted fashion, with Hurrell Froude, intent not upon his own artistic perfection, but upon the leavening of the national mind. Graces were just what he could best afford to neglect in that too hurried working-hour. He had begun to die at eight-and-twenty, and he was to die unconsummated; therefore speech compacted and anticipative became his sole concern. He is not light reading. His typical sentences, apart from his many paradoxes, move like the Latin axioms which break the heads of unwilling schoolboys in walnut-time. A skeleton style, it must be confessed, has its disqualifications as a miscellaneous entertainer. Anything more unlike the golden, glowing, misleading glide of the language of another Froude with whom this generation is more familiar, can hardly be imagined. Yet it was Hurrell who was the poet. It was Hurrell who, according to all evidence, communicated in even higher degree the extraordinary fascinations of that fascinating family. It is not the least lovely of his attributes that he sacrificed the literary possibilities of a born historian, as he sacrificed everything else, to his holy master-passion, and carried his genius for reigning into a hidden door-keeping of the House of God.

The novelty and unexpectedness inseparable from his original mind appear in print only as by innuendo, and in the conduct of some coherent train of thought. Slyly quiet can be the manner in which he understates, and negatively proceeds through harmless analogies, until, of a sudden, readers find with surprise, and cannot shake off, that ‘sting in their bosoms’ which is referred to in a piercingly apposite phrase, itself of classic origin, of the second Preface (1839) of the Remains. All his papers, at least, of whatever nature, display his faculty, which was like a scout’s or frontiersman’s, of discovering, breaking, and defending border ground. They are remarkable chiefly for their practical far-seeing sagacity. Written over seventy years ago by a mere unconscious young prophet with no conceit of himself, they have an amazing modernity. The keen prescience of the few random secular essays is, however, intensified in the other essays on religious subjects. They ‘look before and after.’ They have not begun to seem out-of-date, nor to label their author as fit only for the never-dusted top shelf. In a day when views of Inspiration and Revelation are no longer Butler’s or Paley’s; when new keys are tried, and new tools taken up, and in the ancient workshops men live and die to a different and far more perplexing spheric music, such staying power, independent of any encouragement of it, is sufficiently remarkable. It gives Hurrell Froude an illustrative importance. His very catchwords have a diverting contemporaneousness; witness his uses of ‘Protestant’ as applied by him to the unloved majority in his Church. The stuff of his intellectual daily life is never altogether the timid, domestic, and amateurish thing which Anglicanism must be, even at its best. In Froude himself there is nothing very cognate to the long development of European Christian thought; but at least he is no slave of conventions, and from that tendency towards shrinkage and encrustation which makes ‘every Englishman an island’ he is always shaking himself free, by a half-unconscious gesture. It is this good chronic revolt, this heroic reaching-forth, which lends to him, in his incompleteness, a sporadic air of greatness. In the spirit, as in the flesh, he was the traveller of the party. His written pages are not, like Newman’s, literature for ever. Their worth is that they show, with loyal plainness, not only Froude’s dedicated interests, but the weight and depth of his selfless intelligence; his bold adventurings and outridings; his habit of looking unflattering deductions in the face; his preoccupation with framework and foundation, and with them exclusively; his instinct for the essential, for major issues, for one or two premises which matter most, on subjects of faith, and for the events of real significance in the history of England which bear upon the Church. This instinct, in him, was spontaneous and uncompanioned. In the whole field of dogma, he first, of the seeking Wise Men of that generation, was drawn towards the ‘Eucharistic doctrine with its huge wealth of meaning, its promises of light, its complicated connection with the body of revealed truth, to a great extent unexplored, a mine of treasures hardly touched’;[282] in the whole field of ecclesiastical discipline, he alone fastened upon the principle of freedom as the divine prerogative of the Church. He inspired another to write of Hildebrand; he himself wrote of the great Becket who was honoured, we know, by Henry VIII. with a hatred highly intelligent and quaintly contemporary; he notes more than once how Henry VIII.’s tyrannising work, yet active, was in many respects the very work attempted by Henry II., against whose ideals S. Thomas of Canterbury flung his influence and his life. On these topics of incalculable importance, Froude laid his pausing finger. He never occupied himself for one moment with accidents and incidentals. Yet it has been said: ‘The Movement brought into action not a few who, like Mr. Richard Hurrell Froude, could never advance beyond the impertinent minutiÆ and the ecclesiastical fopperies which became the badges of their fraternity.’[283] It has been said. Let it pass for ‘funny tormenting.’

Coleridge remarked, in summing up his old friend Charles Lamb,[284] that he had more totality and universality of character than any man he had ever known. In some such terms must be couched the eulogy of Hurrell Froude. He is all of a piece. ‘From his very birth,’ as his mother put it, ‘his temperament has been peculiar.’ He knew his mind, and went his way. He, at least, did not

‘—half-live a hundred different lives.’

He paid for such concentration of purpose with long oblivion. Biography, a purblind creature, took him at his own valuation, as we have seen, and gathered him not to her bosom. The history of all the other Tractarians was written, the history of the men who lived very long, long enough to see as Cardinal Manning once said, the polarity of England changed, when the one among them who died young was given his chance. Until Dean Church, abetted by Lord Blachford, made his worth plain, in the beautiful subduing art of a book where all is charity and serene wisdom, Froude had inhabited shadow-land, and was less than the phantom of his brother’s brother. Eventually no mystic, but a wide-awake, matter-of-fact person, he yet had always a sort of seal upon him of the objective, the remote, the unearthly. Now that he has his station and we have our perspective, these qualities increase rather than diminish. The enfranchised vision of him now is his inner self, more like a harper than a trumpeter. We seem to see the thin tender face ‘shine’ out of night air, as it shone at parting on his friend at Dartington, fifty-four years before it smiled again at him out of the Light. Time is the only crystal which gives us the souls of men and things. Whatever looks like idealisation there must be the literal truth.

Hurrell Froude’s poet-friend Williams calls him

‘Like to himself alone, and no one else.’

But he is unique without being isolated. His habitual mood was a country of far distances, not unlike his own Devon, where the rote is audible from a stern coast, and the desolate tors stand up abrupt and sharp against the white February horizon: a country which gets, in due season, its own merriment of interlying verdure, and builds a most delicate overhanging opal sky. There is in him, though unexpressed, a wholeness and relativity as of this landscape. His saliency and roguery, his affection, his wistful oddity, his extraordinary intensity of life, the endearing charm which has served to keep his memory bright as racing sea-fire, only remind us the more how fully he belongs to the issues to which he gave himself of old. The temptation to think him a good deal like the sworded poets of the Civil Wars, with their scarcely exerted aptitudes for the fine arts, whose names leave a sort of star-dust along the pages of the anthologies, need not blind us to his severer aspect: he is also a good deal like the more militant among the Saints. His first Editors thought so, and say so in that most fragrant and touching Preface of theirs to his volumes printed in 1839. He was wing and talon to them and to their holy hope. ‘Froude of the Movement’: he is that, first and last. Great as is to the mere humanist eye his individual interest, he cannot fairly be separated for a moment from the ideal to which all that was in him belonged; to which he belongs in its present and its yet unrevealed phases; to which he will belong when, as the very vindication of his foregone career, helping to breathe into successive generations the spirit of cleansing scrutiny and renewing faith, Catholicism shall triumph in England.

With that thought, we come suddenly out, as through a black mountain-pass, into a quiet-coloured vista rolling between us and the dawn. It is only too possible, in the beclouded state of fallen man, to mistake some stage of a vast progress for a disconnected trivial episode. But who are they so unblest as to do it in this instance? Chiefly those enemies who belong to the household. It was a convert squire of Leicestershire, the friend of Montalembert, who in the boldness of sanguine charity welcomed the very first Tracts as nothing less than a pledge, given as it were in sleep, of ‘the return of the Church [of England] to Catholic Unity and the See of Peter’;[285] and it was an Oxford Dean, long after, who denied any orthodox future or any legitimate past to the Ritualists of his day, refusing to connect them or their great popularising leaven with the theoretic fathers that begat them. There is little morality in this preference for reducing everything to scraps and segments. Those who dare search for processes rather than for dead issues may at least be respected. To them, in an hour of all Latin degeneracy, the old sap of the strongest of the northern races laughs in a stock long barren but sound. Great outlooks call for great patience, lest they strain the sight; and so with a spiritual event, believed-in, and hardly descried. The lens of controversy will never bring it nearer; only constant prayer, like an eye purged and made new, can peer forward, and rest on the horizon-brink. If Catholicism indeed triumph in England, Hurrell Froude’s cannot ultimately remain a hidden and homeless name. Is it not undeniable that he is to his own communion to-day, exactly what he was long ago, a Hard Saying? Who have fought shy of him, who have even belittled, hushed, buried him, if not they? Has a single one of the vital questions which his restless agitation opened, been settled by the exerted authority of the corporate Church of England? In her immense miraculous increase of ‘Catholic-mindedness,’ who has gone beyond this wild, pathetic, precursive child in groping towards the fulness of Revealed Truth, yet groping in the dark? He loved reality, and entity: they were there next his hand, and he felt them not. He seems never to have surmised the existence beside him of the down-trodden Ecclesia Anglicana of Continental sympathy, which in his brief day timidly lifted up her long-shrouded penal head. But she, on her part, saw him reconstruct, as in a worshipping dream, her every lineament. It was a remark of Mr. Bernard Smith’s[286] which impressed Dr. Wiseman, that ‘my friends at Oxford all think and speak of Catholic practices and institutions as past or possible, not as things actually existing and acting.’ That remark would not need to be made now, when a people who owe nothing to their Tudor organisers have won back by the power of what Sir Thomas Browne calls ‘reminiscential evocation,’ so much of the spirit of the religion which is their heritage. But when it was made, the remark was curiously accurate. Even Froude, in his Becket, cites the never-suspended usage of religious houses in having books read aloud in the refectory, as an English custom of ‘those times.’ As in trifles, so in graver matters: Froude, and the contemporaries never quite abreast of him, knew nothing of the continuity of family habit in the historic Church. Newman tells us that while he was in Italy, (and it can hardly have been otherwise with his friend,) he did not guess at the significance of the burning sanctuary lamps in Churches. ‘Radiantly sure of his position,’ as Canon Scott Holland says, Froude was indeed; he had no personal misgivings; his good faith was intact. Yet even he feared for his ‘Branch’;[287] and he laid stress upon something in himself higher than loyalty. If certain reforms did not follow, he would set up for a ‘separatist.’[288] He did not live long enough to make his choice; but those reforms have not followed. It stands for little that some of his nearest relatives, and especially the one friend whom he had most breathed upon, were constrained to go the ‘separatist’ way; it stands for something more that to a group of able observers of various creeds, he himself has seemed a moving aurora, and not a fixed star of the Anglican heaven. The speculation whether or no Froude would have been ‘out in the ‘45’ has no lasting pertinence; but it has its illicit unavoidable interest. No one who studies him tries to blink it. Some among the distinguished High Churchmen who have written of him are practically unanimous in the conviction that longer lease of life would have made no difference in his views, or that in any case he would have dwelt always in the tents where he died. But the majority, having broached the contrary opinion, encourage it, and lean towards it: of this company are the Nonconformists, the Deists, the Catholics. Dr. Rigg, a profound student of ethics, goes so far as to say ‘there can be no doubt’ that Hurrell Froude would have changed his creed; Dr. Abbott’s strong arraignment implies nothing less; many reviewers of Dean Church’s history propound the question and assent to it; and Mr. James Anthony Froude saw fit to play with it. The men of the ‘extreme Left,’ in this convocation, speak after a non-committal fashion, yet there is no mistaking their longing, partly unexpressed: M. Thureau-Dangin, Cardinal Wiseman, and the rest of their following, seem to be ever thinking what only Canon Oakeley quotes: Cum talis sis, utinam noster esses! They might make, with perfect justice, the indisputable claim that the Remains exerted the deeper influence over those very men whose consciences drove them at last to leave the Church as by Law Established in these Realms: the book bore a confessedly vital part in the formation of William Lockhart, of James Robert Hope-Scott, of Frederick William Faber, of William George Ward. It is curious that the Rev. Thomas Mozley should father the statement, that the Remains ‘never brought any one to Rome.’[289] But he may have had only direct or primary causation in mind. That prickly book, moreover, active as Hurrell himself, may be said, without exaggeration, to have reacted on Newman’s ‘young men’ at Oxford, who first disturbed, and then outstripped, their master. It was the very crux of the complaint against them that, as Newman himself was to say so accurately of Froude, they were ‘powerfully drawn to the MediÆval, not to the Primitive Church.’ We know how the cross-currents, coming from Ward, Oakeley, Dalgairns, and the other extremists, cut across the path of Newman turned anchorite, like a spring freshet from unimagined hills. The ‘new party’ spoken of in Stephens’ Life of Dean Hook,[290] as being ‘as different in its teachings from the original Tractarians as they had been from the Evangelicals,’ were men almost all of whom entered the Catholic Church of the Roman Obedience. They were filled with the idea of the ever-living Interpretative Voice, as against the mere bookish appeal to Christian antiquity. They were strong in zeal, will, and prayer, and self-sacrificing; they were also rash, notional, irrepressibly gay. Newman, whom they so worried, did not suspect their descent; no critic seems to have suspected it since: but were they not the true and immediate seed of Hurrell Froude? If they were not, then, in the language of the heralds, obiit sine prole. How difficult it were to accept that as part of the epitaph of so generative a spirit! No school of thought in any communion, since 1836, has reproduced so markedly the singular physiognomy of the author of the Remains. To them alone he was not in the least ‘dangerous.’ But it is clear that in what has been called the Church of Lord Halifax, there are a thousand young Froudians, a collateral kindred with plenty of trouble before them, flying his crest.

If we know aught about the trend of human character, we know that there was a highly integrant strain in Hurrell Froude; his whole short life was a thirst after the coherence and continuousness of the things of faith. If we know aught about the laws of moral motion, we know that he could neither have gone round in a circle, nor stood still. Like the paradoxical Briton he was, il savait conclure. It is far truer, potentially, of him, than of Newman. Says PÈre Ragey, after the neat and merciless manner of Frenchmen: ‘Pour pousser ses idÉes jusqu’À leurs derniÈres consÉquences, Newman, n’avait eu qu’À suivre la nature mÊme de son esprit. Il Était un de ces esprits (assez rares parmi nos voisins d’outre Manche) qui se laissent conduire par la logique, qui vont jusqu’au bout de leurs idÉes, et qui savent conclure. La vie et les Écrits de Pusey, au contraire, nous montrent en lui un de ces esprits anglais si bien dÉcrits par Taine, qui “restent en chemin et ne concluent pas.” … De plus, il sentait bien qu’il n’Était pas seul. Il avait avec lui plus que des corrÉligionnaires, plus que des collaborateurs, plus que les disciples: il avait avec lui et pour lui l’esprit anglais. Les anglais, tout en admirant beaucoup Newman, et en le plaÇant au-dessus de Pusey, reconnaissent mieux leur esprit dans Pusey que dans Newman.’[291]

Nothing can be safer for all of us conjointly than to answer ‘No’ at once to that pithless query: Would Froude have followed Newman? Froude would never have followed Newman. Nor would the latter have paced up and down for long lonely years in Oriel Lane, and in the Limbus Innocentium at Littlemore, nor invented Oret pro nobis for an anodyne, had Froude been alive. It is the summing-up of a thoughtful review that ‘most readers of the Apologia are under the impression that [Newman] had started on the road to Rome as soon as Froude’s influence succeeded to Whately’s; and that if he were not unfaithful, he had to go on to the end…. Certainly, it does seem as if, after he had lost Froude, Newman was very liable to be perplexed by opposition, to watch for omens, to be at the mercy of accidents.’[292] Nothing gives one such an idea of the immense propelling force which Hurrell Froude was, as the untoward indecision into which Newman soon fell, though he still had Pusey’s fortress-like strength at his side. Even Keble, without the beloved ‘poker,’ burned with a somewhat darker flame. His silent beneficent career at Hursley was a different matter from his career as Oriel captain of artillery; and no careful student can fail to notice that his later spiritual direction tended more and more towards the nebulous. As for Hurrell, he was bound to be astir, living or dead, in one direction or another. Without being prepared to look frankly upon October 9, 1845, as his true field-day, open-minded persons may harbour a sympathetic wonder whether in the English event which crowns it he were quite unimplicated? ‘Was it Gregory or was it Basil, that blew the trumpet in Constantinople?’ When Newman sadly transferred himself to Oscott, in the February of 1846, he would have remembered, after his remembering habit, how strangely, yet naturally, in the Providence of God, he was keeping the tenth anniversary of the loss of his dearest friend, no part of whose office could be filled even by an Ambrose St. John, ‘whom God gave me when He took all else away.’

‘Hurrell Froude lives,’ says Principal Fairbairn epigrammatically, ‘in Newman.’ It would be an interesting task for a biographer to examine and define the measure of response with which ‘the Vicar,’ in his historic seclusion, worked into one scheme his ideas, and the ideas bequeathed to him by the least ‘flinching’ Anglican in the world. Froude had managed to give Newman, (and with no more ceremonial pomp than one infant employs in tossing sea-shells to another,) the norm of every single one of his great theories. This short span beside that old age, this quick, forward-reaching, never-ripened thought beside the ‘long gestation’ of the sublime soul whom we know better, may not unfitly be compared to a keynote struck in a grace-note before the full major chord. The chord owes nothing of its position, or its compotent harmony, to the mere sweet hint which announces it and is instantaneously whelmed in it, but it certainly does owe to it almost all of what may be called its idiomatic beauty. To no educated ear is the chord with that apposition, and the chord without it, conceivably the same.

It is his glory that Froude cannot be severed, early or late, from the superior genius once so ‘fain to be his heir.’ As he stands fast with what Mr. Wilfrid Ward has named ‘that great crisis of spiritual animation, unparalleled in our age and country,’ which has transformed the Church of England, and with his Achates, as that Achates was up to 1845, so he walks on with the white-haired Cardinal of all men’s honour, through whom a torrent of new life streamed, and streams, into the English-speaking children of the Apostolic See, but who

‘—came to Oxford and his friends no more.’

Newman’s unnecessary readiness to acknowledge any moral debt, was surely no small part of his delightful greatness. Never was it better justified than in his lifelong sense of obligation to the clear brain and pure devout heart of a young man of no celebrity, whose full significance is not past, but to come.

To a Catholic, Froude has something yet finer than his ‘totality and universality of character.’ He has the grace of God. He stands in a mysterious place,

and it would be covetous indeed, it might be even impious, to wish to dislodge him. Such as he is, and where he is, he stands pledge enough for Reunion. Meanwhile, let him enjoy the irony for what it is worth, that to compensate for many of his own who esteem him not, many ‘swallowers of the Council of Trent as a whole’ esteem him well. The English Oratory has for him a sort of veneration, as for a little brother lost who had Saint Philip’s very brow and mouth;[293] the Benedictine monks at Buckfast Abbey, near his old home, familiarly remember him, on birthdays, with prayer which is both a gift and a petition; and there are lay hearts which cannot think of his lonely burial-place, in snow-time or in rose-time, without the sense of hearing over it a solemn music from the Purgatorio:

That wonderful prophetic strain, meant for eternity, must linger in the ear of every ‘Roman’ who has learned to love Hurrell Froude.

THE END.

[1] The present Editor once hit upon a copy of the Remains in a bookstall, which had many of these names filled out in pencil; several of them, not all, proved to be accurate, and have been incorporated without acknowledgment to a nameless and deceased annotator.

[2] ‘What is Mysticism?’ in The Faith of the Millions. First Series. By George Tyrrell, S.J. Longmans, 1901, pp. 254-255.

[3] Un Grand Feudataire, Renaud de Dammartin de la Coalition de Bouvines. Par H. Malo. Paris: Champion, 1898.

[4] Reminiscences chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, by the Rev. T. Mozley, M.A. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1882, ii., 42-43.

[5] See p. 75. The incident was recognised by the Rev. T. Mozley when he again saw the sketch, in 1891, as having taken place in the Common Room, not in ‘Newman’s rooms.’

[6] A Study of British Genius, by Havelock Ellis. London; Hurst & Blackett, 1904, p. 53. The passages cited first appeared in The Monthly Review, during 1901.

[7] This, and much of the condensed genealogical information following, is from a paper on the Froudes or Frowdes of Devon in the Reports and Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 1892, written by the Rev. R. E. Hooppell, M.A., LL.D., D.C.L.

[8] Always so spelled, in this family.

[9] Archdeacon Froude, sixty years Rector of his parish, died Feb. 23, 1859. See Gentleman’s Magazine for that year, i., 437, and Boase’s Modern English Biography, i., 1110.

[10] W. Brockedon, F.R.S., F.R.G.S. (b. 1787, d. 1854), was a watchmaker and inventor at Totnes. In 1809 he was enabled by Archdeacon Froude and Mr. Holdsworth, M.P. for Dartmouth, to go up to London to study at the Royal Academy till 1815, when he went abroad and started upon his career.

[11] ‘Poor Att’ [little Anthony Froude], Hurrell wrote in 1828, ‘is such a very good-tempered little fellow that in spite of his sawneyness [i.e., sensitiveness, or softness] he is sure to be liked.’ ‘I,’ he goes on to say, ‘was an ill-natured sawney, and do not at all wish my time at School to come again.’

[12] Eton School Lists, edited by H. E. Chetwynd. Stapleton, 1864.

[13] She married William Mallock, Esq. The distinguished writer, Mr. William Hurrell Mallock, is their son.

[14] The ‘Passon Chowne’ of Mr. Blackmore’s Maid of Sker.

[15] 1826.

[16] ‘To do our best is one part, but to wash our hands smilingly of the consequence is the next part of any sensible virtue.’ The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Scribner, 1899, i., 342.

[17] i.e. extravagant or emotional.

[18] In the now obsolete sense of fanaticism.

[19] Oxford.

[20] ‘Mere’ in Remains.

[21] Archdeacon Froude had come into possession of his Denbury estate, through the three coheiresses of the last feoffee, in 1807, when his eldest son was four years old.

[22] His two elder sisters are always so called in his letters.

[23] Keble quitted Oxford when his mother died, and took sole charge of East Leach, Burthorpe and Southrop parishes, near his father’s home in Fairford. He had one thousand people to look after, in all; the three livings aggregated but £100 a year.

[24] The Rev. S. Baring-Gould, The Book of the West. Devon, i., 319.

[25] Buckland-in-the-Moor, near Ashburton, celebrated for its rocky heights and magnificent views.

[26] Mr. Keble’s first visit.

[27] Milton, as early as 1817, was one of Keble’s own big bold prejudices. It is but fair to Froude to quote, in order that his remark may not be misconstrued, his conviction that ‘it is not perhaps too much to say that [Milton’s] was the most powerful mind which ever applied itself to poetry.’ Like Professor Raleigh in our own day, Froude denied that colossal genius to be, properly speaking, a religious poet at all. See Remains, part i., ii., 318-321, and Note.

[28] The moral philosophers of the ancient world.

[29] Phillis, widow of Robert ffroud.

[30] Torquay.

[31] Peter Elmsley, S.T.P., 1773-1825, then Principal of S. Alban Hall, and Camden Professor of History in the University of Oxford.

[32] A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble, M.A., late Vicar of Hursley, by the Right Hon. Sir J. T. Coleridge, D.C.L. Oxford: Parker, 1869, p. 121.

[33] i.e., poetry.

[34]

(A word which the English translate “Johnny Raw”).’

—‘The Black Mousquetaire,’ Ingoldsby Legends.

[35] There is no old elm tree now on Dartington Parsonage lawn [1902].

[36] Piercefield Park, Chepstow, Monmouthshire, where Elizabeth Smith had lived from 1785 to 1793.

[37] Her translation of the Memoirs of Frederick and Margaret Klopstock form, in most editions, the second volume of Miss Elizabeth Smith’s Fragments. ‘Old Klopstock’: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, 1724-1803, married Margarethe MÖller (Meta) who died in 1758; and in 1791, in his sixty-eighth year, her cousin Johannah von Wenthem.

[38] Dr. Charles Lloyd, 1784-1829; then Canon of Christ Church, and Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, appointed a year later Bishop of Oxford.

[39] The first was Robert Isaac Wilberforce, 1802-1857, second son of William Wilberforce, and the flower of a remarkable family of brothers. He became Vicar of East Farleigh, preceding there his brother Henry, and Archdeacon of the East Riding. He died at Albano in 1857, while preparing for the priesthood at Rome.

[40] Oriel College (College History Series), by David Watson Rannie, M.A. London: Robinson, 1900, p. 185.

[41] Reminiscences chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, by the Rev. T. Mozley, M.A. London: Longmans, 1882, ii., 388.

[42] Merton College lies south-east over against Oriel: the beautiful tower stands up just behind the roof of Hurrell’s rooms.

[43] Hurrell seems to have known and liked his senior, Edward Hawkins (1798-1884, Fellow of Oriel, 1813, Provost, succeeding Copleston, 1828), at this time. But ‘not the least of a Don’ is emphatically not descriptive of him, but of Richard Whately, 1787-1863, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin. ‘No Don was ever less donnish … he revelled in setting conventions at naught,’ etc. Dr. Rigg, in the Dictionary of National Biography, lx., 423-429, inter alia.

[44] John Davison, 1777-1834, Fellow and Tutor of Oriel, afterwards Vicar of Old Sodbury, Gloucester, and Prebendary of Worcester Cathedral. He had a very high repute at Oxford, and, like Whately, was mentioned ‘with bated breath.’

[45] ‘Newman’s relations with Whately largely cured him of the extreme shyness that was natural to him.’ W. S. Lilly, in the Dictionary of National Biography, xi., 342.

[46] Probably Hurrell’s old friend, Robert Isaac Wilberforce, then, like himself, a newly-made Fellow of Oriel. (‘Old’ was Hurrell’s most endearing adjective: he applies it unexpectedly in one letter: ‘old Becket.’) Robert Wilberforce’s temperament was far more studious and calm than that of his genial younger brothers, but apparently he could be ‘funny’ and ‘good-natured’ too. ‘R. Wilberforce was as merry as he generally is,’ writes his hostess, Mrs. Rickards, from Ulcombe, to Miss Jemima Newman, in the autumn of 1827.

[47] Keble.

[48] ‘To’ in Remains.

[49] Isaac Williams, 1802-1865: Scholar of Trinity, afterwards perpetual Curate of Treyddn, Flintshire, and author of The Cathedral.

[50] Sir George Prevost, Bart., 1804-1893, M.A., Oriel, 1827, married Jane, sister of Isaac Williams, 1828. Curate to Thomas Keble at Bisley, 1828-1834: afterwards perpetual Curate of Stinchcomb and Archdeacon of Gloucester.

[51] See p. 236 for Mr. Keble’s rebuke to Hurrell for a verbal flippancy. ‘When at Oxford, I took up Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life, expecting to find it a dull book, as such books generally are, and perhaps laugh at it. But I found Law quite an over-match for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.’ Boswell’s Johnson, edited by George Birkbeck Hill, i., 68.

[52] The Exemplary Life and Character of James Bonnell, Esq. [1653-1699], late Accomptant General of Ireland, by William Hamilton, A.M., Archdeacon of Armagh. The book was first published in 1703.

[53] The common flash going on. R. H. F.’s note.

[54] A foot wanting. R. H. F., ut supra.

[55] Edward Copleston, 1776-1849: from 1814 to 1828 Provost of Oriel, afterwards Bishop of Llandaff. The Hurrells had Copleston blood.

[56] Reminiscences chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, by the Rev. T. Mozley, M.A. London: Longmans, 1882, i., 384.

[57] From the chapter entitled Edward Hawkins, the Great Provost, in Lives of Twelve Good Men, by John William Burgon, pp. 208-209.

[58] ‘Bob.’

[59] William Ralph Churton, Fellow of Oriel, the brilliant and much-loved younger brother of the better-known Edward Churton, Archdeacon of Cleveland. He died at his home in Middleton Cheney, Northamptonshire, during the following month. His Remains were privately printed in 1830, and are dedicated to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, and to nine clergymen, the Oxonians Keble, Ogilvie, Cotton, Perceval, and Froude among them. Their friendship, says the Preface, ‘honoured him in his death’; perhaps they bore together the expenses of publication. There is nothing particularly memorable in the book.

[60] Misprinted ‘situated’ in R. H. F.’s Remains.

[61] John Henry Newman, Letters and Correspondence to 1845. Edited by Anne Mozley. Longmans, 1890, i., 103.

[62] Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th Series. London: Longmans, 1883, p. 235.

[63] Reminiscences chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, by the Rev. T. Mozley, M.A., sometime Fellow of Oriel. London: Longmans, 1882, i., 18.

[64] Sculptor. How recently has ‘statuary’ become an obsolete word!

[65] A print of it appears in the Remains, i., 235.

[66] John Henry Newman, Letters and Correspondence to 1845, i., 8.

[67] The interval of a second in music: an amusing employment of the word, in this sense then, as now, obsolete and rare.

[68] The Christian Year: Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea, line 5, not quite correctly quoted:

[69] Joseph Dornford, 1794-1868, Fellow of Oriel; after a military career, Rector of Plymtree, Devon, and Canon of Exeter Cathedral. He had travelled in Ireland this summer.

[70] The word now has come to imply a sort of hero-worship based on a questionable social motive; but in Froude’s day it meant only those who showed, described, or patronised celebrated places, these being the ‘lions.’

[71] A half-legendary contemporary of S. Columbkille. Sir Walter Scott had crawled into the Hole or Bed at Glendalough in 1825.

[72] Remains of the Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude, part i., ii., 318, Note.

[73] At Greenaway on the Dart, between Dartmouth and Totnes, opposite Dittisham.

[74] The lines were written in some lady’s autograph album during this visit.

[75] The Christian Year: Septuagesima Sunday, closing stanza.

[76] Arthur, eldest son of Arthur Champernowne, Esq., of Dartington Hall, died during this year, 1831, aged 17. His next brother Henry died in 1851, aged 36.

[77] Newman, Letters and Correspondence, ii., 73.

[78] Of course in allusion to the proverb that rain on July 15 (S. Swithun’s Day) means a more or less prolonged downpour.

[79] William I., King of the Netherlands, formerly William Frederick, Prince of Orange.

[80] Thomas Elrington, M.A., D.D., formerly President of Trinity College, Dublin, an active and devoted prelate. He lived until July 12, 1835.

[81] The name of the Bishop who was the great antagonist of the Lollards, Fellow of Oriel in his day, is properly spelled Pecock.

[82] ‘The Time-Spirit of the Nineteenth Century,’ in Problems and Persons, by Wilfrid Ward. Longmans, 1903.

[83] Robert Isaac Wilberforce. His mind was truly profound, and it was ‘authentic,’ to borrow the word beautifully applied to him in a memorial verse of his friend Mr. Aubrey de Vere.

[84] On Justice as a Principle of Divine Governance. University Sermons, VI.

[85] Neander: this playful Hellenising of Newman’s name was general, at one time, among Oxonians of his own circle.

[86] Henry Bellenden Bulteel (1800-1866), a Devonshire man, Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Hurrell’s former contemporary at Eton. He got into difficulties with the Church of England and the University in 1831; after his calling the Heads of Houses ‘dumb dogs,’ from the pulpit of S. Mary’s, Bishop Bagot revoked his licence; he then married a pastry-cook’s sister in the High Street, spent £4000 building the Baptist Chapel in the Commercial Road, and set up as an independent dissenting minister. He was the anonymous author of The Oxford Argo. A good deal laughed at in his day, Bulteel had, according to evidence, the sympathy of Hurrell Froude in his ill fortunes. ‘Froude went about for days with a rueful countenance, and could only say: “Poor Bulteel!”’ Reminiscences, Mozley, i., 228.

[87] James Yonge, M.D., F.C.P., 1794-1870, a graduate of Exeter College, Oxford, and resident at Plymouth, where his practice was famous in its day, all over England.

[88] Of Oriel College.

[89] Hurrell had visited Keble there early in April, and caught a fresh cold.

[90] See p. 257.

[91] Prosperity, in Lyra Apostolica. Edited by H. C. Beeching, M.A. London: Methuen [1900], p. 146.

[92] Mary Sophia Newman, the youngest of the family, died, aged 17, on January 5, 1828.

[93] Histoire de la ConquÊte de l’Angleterre par les Normands. Par Augustin Thierry. Paris: Santelet, 1826. Tomes 1-4, 2^de edition, 8^o.

[94] A sentimental complaining fellow: the ‘dreary prospects’ being the prospects of a single life devoted to moral reforms.

[95] The usurper of the Portuguese crown, third son of King John VI. The English destroyed his fleet off Cape St. Vincent, July 5, 1833.

[96] ‘Stare’ in the Remains.

[97] Six weeks later, an English lady, Miss Frere, writes home from Malta of our three tourists, ‘Archdeacon Froude, his son, and another clergyman’ … ‘all very agreeable.’ She laments the ill-health of Mr. Newman, but adds that ‘the son, on whose account they are travelling, is quite well.’ Works of the Rt. Hon. John Hookham Frere, vol. i., Memoir, by the Rt. Hon. Sir Bartle Frere. London: Pickering, 1874, p. 242.

[98] Newman says, ‘It was at Rome that we began the Lyra Apostolica’ (Apologia, 1890, p. 34); this letter antedates the arrival at Rome by some days. Newman dates the Lyra from Froude’s choosing its motto from the Odyssey on the eve of magazine publication.

[99] The Rev. C. A. Ogilvie? or Frederick Oakeley? or the young Devonian Nutcombe Oxenham, who, like Isaac Williams, his tutor and lifelong friend, was a Scholar of Trinity? The associates of Mr. Williams were almost exclusively of Oriel.

[100] Froude had visited Samuel Wilberforce there, at Brighstone.

[101] ‘We are keeping the most wretched Christmas Day … by bad fortune we are again taking in coals…. This morning we saw a poor fellow in the Lazaret, close to us, cut off from the ordinances of his Church, saying his prayers with his face to the house of God in his sight over the water; and it is a confusion of face to me…. The bells are beautiful here … deep and sonorous, and they have been going all morning: to me very painfully.’ Newman to his sister Harriett, Letters and Correspondence, i., 274.

[102] Major John Longley, afterwards Lieutenant-Governor of Dominica. Charles Thomas Longley, Head Master of Harrow School from 1829 to 1836, became Archbishop of Canterbury. Cythera is Cerigo.

[103] Spiridion or Spiridon, patron of the island, Bishop of Tremithus near Salamis, present at the first General Council of Nice, and at the Council of Sardica. The Greeks keep his feast on the 12th, the Western Church on the 14th of December.

[104] [Mount Scollis in Elis.]

[105] Correspondence, i., 293-300, passim: and p. 332.

[106] The well-known novel by Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, published at first anonymously in 1818. A beautiful edition, marking some revival of popularity, was issued in 1902.

[107] He could jump well, too: ‘a larking thing for a Don!’ as he tells his mother. Letters and Correspondence, i., 159.

[108] Provinces now merged in the kingdom of Roumania.

[109] Life and Letters of Frederick William Faber, D.D., Priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, by John Edward Bowden of the same Congregation. Richards, 1869, p. 78.

[110] A quaint phrase from the Oriel Statutes. They read: ‘Quoniam omnia existentia tendunt ad non esse.’

[111] ‘I am drawn to [Sicily] as by a loadstone. The chief sight has been Egesta: its ruins with its Temple. O wonderful sight! full of the most strange pleasure…. It has been a day in my life to have seen Egesta … really, my mind goes back to the recollection of last Monday and Tuesday, as one smells again and again at a sweet flower.’ Newman to his sister Harriett, Letters and Correspondence, i., 302.

[112] Joseph Severn, Keats’ friend, 1793-1879.

[113] Friedrich Overbeck, 1789-1869. He became a Catholic in 1814.

[114] Rev. Hugh James Rose, founder and editor: 1795-1838, M.A. of Cambridge University, Rector of Hadleigh, Suffolk; Principal of King’s College, London.

[115] ‘On The Hateful Party: probably the Liberal Party of 1833.’ Lyra Apostolica, Beeching’s edition, p. 140. But possibly the reference is to the English Reformers, and the poet’s idea that they should be considered serviceable, in a way, to the very spirit of Catholicism which they did their best to destroy. However, the context of Froude’s letter to Keble, going on to mention, as it does, a current political interest as inspiration (not forthcoming) for the next copy of verses, tends to bear out Mr. Beeching’s theory. Lyra Apostolica began as a separate poetic section of The British Magazine in June, 1833. The poem above is an unconscious expansion of S. Augustine’s Ne putetis gratis esse malos in hoc mundo, et nihil boni de illis agere Deum.

[116] Exactly what this interpretation was is not apparent from Lord Grey’s biographers, nor from his Letters. On this ground, he was suspect, after his significant remark in the House of Lords, on May 7, 1832: ‘I do not like, in this free country, to use the word Monarchy.’

[117] Christian Carl Josias, Baron Bunsen, 1791-1860, Minister Plenipotentiary, and German Ambassador to England from 1841-1854.

[118] Misread, and misprinted ‘ability’ in the Remains.

[119] The first audit at Oriel, Mr. Christie being then, as Froude’s successor, Junior Treasurer of the College.

[120] Afterwards Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.

[121] [All this must not be taken literally, being a jesting way of stating to a friend what really was the fact, viz., that he and another availed themselves of the opportunity of meeting a learned Romanist to ascertain the ultimate points at issue between the Churches.] Note, Remains, 1838, i., 306.

[122] Newman writes to a friend then out of England, R. F. Wilson, Esq., on Sept. 8 following: ‘… If we look into history, whether in the age of the Apostles, St. Ambrose’s, or St. Becket’s [sic], still the people were the fulcrum of the Church’s power. So they may be again. Therefore, expect on your return … to see us all cautious, long-headed, unfeeling, unflinching Radicals.’ Newman, Letters and Correspondence, i., 399.

[123] The contributors to the Lyra numbered but six, in the end. Mr. Christie is not among them.

[124] Sir Edmund Walker Head, Bart., 1805-1868, an accomplished Oriel man, Fellow of Merton, M.A., D.C.L., F.R.S., and K.C.B., Governor-General of Canada, author of a Handbook of the Spanish and French Schools of Painting, and of various philological and literary essays. Hurrell might have named also a young Mr. Gladstone, late of Christ Church, already eminent in the Oxford academic world and beyond it, who spent a good part of this year, 1832-1833, in Italy.

[125] William Whewell, 1794-1866: Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. The particular ‘book’ may be, judging from the context and the date, the Astronomy and General Physics, considered with Reference to Natural Theology.

[126] Adam Sedgwick, 1785-1873: Woodwardian Professor of Geology in the University of Cambridge.

[127] Connop Thirlwall, 1797-1875: historian and Bishop of S. David’s.

[128] Julius Charles Hare, 1795-1855, of Trinity College, Cambridge, afterwards Incumbent of Hurstmonceaux, and Archdeacon of Lewes. Like Thirlwall, he was a familiar friend of Baron Bunsen. For a passing instance of the ‘puffing’ contemned by Froude, see Memorials of a Quiet Life, 1876, iii., 224.

[129] John of Salisbury, afterwards Bishop of Chartres, the companion and biographer of S. Thomas À Becket, and ‘for thirty years the central figure of English learning.’ (Stubbs, Lectures, p. 139.) He was born circa A.D. 1118, and died in the year 1180.

[130] Anglicised Latin, that is: Latin taught with the Continental pronunciation, or any approach to it, being unheard-of in the England of that time.

[131] Remains of William Ralph Churton (Private Impression), 1830, p. 162.

[132] Reminiscences, etc., i., 294.

[133] Froude means the AbbÉ de Lamennais, Lacordaire, Montalembert, and their friends, to whom he was strongly attracted. Lacordaire, newly withdrawn from L’Avenir, was at this time at NÔtre Dame, not yet a Dominican. What a friend he would have been for R. H. F.!

[134] The Absolutions, in the Book of Common Prayer.

[135] [Here, and in many other places, it is the author’s way to bring forward as motives of action for himself and others what were but secondary, and rather the reflection of his mind upon its acts, and that as if with a view to avoid the profession of high and great things. Such, too, is the Scripture way: as where we are told to do good to our enemies, as if ‘to heap coals of fire on their heads,’ and to take the lowest place, in order to ‘have worship in the presence’ of spectators.] Note, Remains, 1838, i., 314.

[136] The motto appears first in The British Magazine, Dec., 1833, followed by: ‘Compare Daniel i., 7.’

[137] Dan. xii., 13.

[138] The reading here, slightly altered and bettered from the copy printed in the Remains, is from Lyra Apostolica, 1836.

[139] Ezek. xxvii., 11.

[140] The text in 1833 has ‘wandering.’ The Rev. H. C. Beeching adopts it, with this Note: ‘Perhaps the line should run: “Far-wandering from the East.”’

[141] In The British Magazine for May 1835 (vii., 518) this poem first appears, and there bears no motto, and has ‘The Exchange’ for title. The title in the Remains is ‘Farewell to Toryism.’

[142] S. Paul, Eph. ii., 8.

[143] The Anglican Revival, by J. H. Overton, D.D. London: Blackie, 1897, p. 206.

[144] James William Bowden, 1798-1844, the most zealous lay participant in the early Movement.

[145] Reminiscences, Mozley, i., 580.

[146] Specimens of the Table-Talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Murray, 1835, ii., 26. The curious inference may be made, in regard to Froude’s Editors, that they did not light upon Coleridge’s passage at first-hand, but that somebody brought it to their attention: they, on their part, had accomplished, by chance, the extraordinary feat of ignoring Coleridge. ‘In extreme old age Newman wrote to a friend: “I never read a word of Kant. I never read a word of Coleridge…. I could say the same of Hurrell Froude, and also of Pusey and Keble.”’ Newman, by William Barry. Literary Lives Series. Hodder & Stoughton, 1904, p. 30. The inclusion of the name of Dr. Pusey, Germanic by temperament and by his line of study, is remarkable.

[147] This was July 9, 1833. The Froudes had never had word by post since he had parted from them, and they knew something had gone wrong.

[148] Arthur Philip Perceval, 1799-1853, of Oriel, brother of Lord Arden, and Vicar of East Horsley; afterwards Royal chaplain, and expounder of High Church principles, on one celebrated occasion, before Queen Victoria.

[149] Nobody but Dean Hook calls him ‘learned,’ and the concession may have been thrown in to balance the depreciatory context. ‘With a kind heart and glowing sensibilities, Mr. Froude united a mind of wonderful power, saturated with learning, and from its very luxuriance productive of weeds, together with many flowers.’ A Call to Union on the Principles of the English Reformation, 2nd ed., 1838, p. 167.

[150] Remains of R. H. F., part i., ii., 307. On the Causes of the Superior Excellence of the Poetry of Rude Ages.

[151] This is not among his published Sermons, but may have gone to make up the mosaic of State Interference papers in the Remains, part ii., i., 184-269.

[152] ‘Snug’ in Remains.

[153] The Queen.

[154] The British Magazine for July, 1833, vol. iii., The Appointment of Bishops by the State. Correspondence under the same title opens in the September number, v., 290 et seq., signed ‘F.’

[155] Newman figures as responsible for it in the valuable Appendix to the third volume of the Life of Dr. Pusey.

[156] Correspondence, i., 421.

[157] John Mitchinson Calvert of Crosthwaite, Cumberland, and of Oriel, M.A., M.D., who knew Froude well, and was his own age.

[158] S. Thomas À Becket’s word for the poor.

[159] The ‘man’ is Jean Bon de St. AndrÉ, Deputy to the Convention for the Department of Lot during the Reign of Terror; he was preferred by Napoleon, and died in 1813. He was present when Earl Howe defeated the French fleet on June 1, 1794, and distinguished himself after the fashion commemorated in the Elegy which appeared in the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine on May 14, 1798, and was the joint production of Canning, Gifford, and Frere:

The stave appears again, of course, in Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, Edited with Explanatory notes by Charles Edmonds, 3rd edition, London, Sampson Low, etc., 1890, p. 187. The New Anti-Jacobin, a brilliant monthly advocating high Tory principles, sprang into life for April and May, 1833, and died. Froude must have been deeply interested in it. Nothing we know of him is more engaging than this very gallant applying to himself of such a quotation at such a time, and for such a reason.

[160] Rev. Anthony Buller, 1809-1881, afterwards Rector of Mary Tavy; ordained at Exeter on Oct. 27 of this year.

[161] The Arians of the Fourth Century.

[162] Mr. Rose’s friend, William Rowe Lyall, 1788-1857, then Archdeacon of Colchester, afterwards Dean of Canterbury. Owing to Mr. Rose’s failing health, the two exchanged livings this year, and Archdeacon Lyall remained at Hadleigh till 1841, Mr. Rose having died in Italy.

[163] Of 1831.

[164] William Hart Coleridge, 1789-1849, brother to George, Master of Ottery Free School; first Bishop of Barbados and the Leeward Islands, 1824, and reorganiser of Codrington College. He resigned in 1841, when the diocese was divided.

[165] ‘Unconnected’ in the text of the Remains, but corrected in the little list of errata.

[166] This, of course, is one of the passages upon which the Editors of the Remains rely to prove negatively their contention that Froude’s Anglicanism was immutably fixed. The ‘Popery’ in this passage is not in its ‘grammatical sense,’ but plainly refers to furtherance of O’Connell’s measures.

[167] Jeremy Collier’s Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, first published in two volumes folio in 1708, 1714.

[168] Lieutenant-Colonel J. Lyons Nixon, L.G.

[169] [If they had had the whole body of the English Church in agreement with them. The sort and amount of alteration which the writer probably contemplated may be seen in Tracts for the Times, Via Media.] Note, Remains, i., 348. So sure was Newman of R. H. F.’s posthumous approbation.

[170] Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1786-1845, M.P., knighted in 1840, prison reformer (brother-in-law of Mrs. Fry), and William Wilberforce’s successor as head of the Anti-slavery party in England.

[171] John Spedding Froude.

[172] A ‘Z’ stood, in Tractarian, for an ‘Establishment man.’

[173] Thus in the Remains, but ‘if,’ by a misprint, in The Newman Correspondence, ii., 33.

[174] Keble was eleven years older than Froude, nine years older than Newman.

[175] Founded by a bequest to the S.P.G. of Christopher Codrington, 1668-1710, the munificent Fellow of All Souls, Oxford; licensed by Queen Anne; opened as a Grammar School in 1742; but not a Collegiate institution for West Indian clergy, as originally intended, until 1830.

[176] To ‘battel’ is a verb purely Oxonian by origin. Battels are a man’s College accounts for supplies from kitchen and buttery, or else all College accounts, inclusive of board, lodging, tuition, rates, and sundries.

[177] The Arians of the Fourth Century; their Doctrine, Temper, and Conduct, chiefly as Exhibited in the Councils of the Church between A.D. 325 and A.D. 384, by John Henry Newman, M.A., Fellow of Oriel College. London: Rivingtons, 1833. The book is dedicated to Keble. The review is in The British Magazine for January, 1834, v., 67. Mr. T. Mozley thinks that The Arians is the landmark of Newman’s progress from Low Church to High Church.

[178] There are two brief papers and a poem signed ‘C.’ in The British Magazine Supplement, Dec. 31, 1833, in vol. iv. The matter referred to is probably that dealing ‘Apostolically’ with Confirmation and First Communion. The Editor has not been able to identify ‘C.’

[179] This still exists, the tallest, (a huge tree in Froude’s time,) being over one hundred feet high.

[180] Vol. v., pp. 667 et seq.; vi., 380 et seq.

[181] ‘Some one, I think, asked in conversation at Rome [1833], whether a certain interpretation of Scripture was Christian. It was answered that Dr. Arnold took it; I interposed: “But is he a Christian?” The subject went out of my head at once.’ Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1890, p. 33.

[182] The Rev. George Dudley Ryder, second son of the Hon. and Rt. Rev. Lord Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. He married in June, 1834, Sophia Lucy, youngest daughter of the Rev. J. Sargent, Rector of Lavington, Sussex, sister of Mrs. Henry and of Mrs. Samuel Wilberforce, and of Mrs. H. E. Manning.

[183] To ‘rat,’ a favourite verb with the two hide-bound purists who used it daily, means obviously to forsake or abandon anything, as rats skurry away from a sinking ship.

[184] The Rev. John Hothersal Pinder, M.A., Cambridge, first Principal, from 1830 to 1835, subsequently first Principal of Wells Theological College.

[185] North-east of Torquay.

[186] Newman, prompted by Isaac Williams, and following Thomas Keble at Bisley, had, unknown to Froude, begun a month before to read the two Church services daily in the chancel of S. Mary’s at Oxford: but a daily Eucharist was then unheard of in the Church of England.

[187] Reminiscences, i., 217.

[188] Frederic Rogers, afterwards Lord Blachford, 1811-1889. He had been Froude’s pupil, and also Newman’s, through a dazzlingly brilliant University career. He occupied Froude’s rooms at Oriel on staircase No. 3 for at least one term during his absence.

[189] In reference to Lib. iv., Carm. iii., 19-20: Ad Melpomenen.

[190] Vol. i., 369-372.

[191] J. H. N., Letters and Correspondence, i., 397-399.

[192] Essays Critical and Historical, by John Henry Cardinal Newman. London: Longmans, 1891, ii., 375.

[193] Chronicle of Convocation, Sessions, July 3-6, 1887. The capitals occur there, as here.

[194] J. H. N., Letters and Correspondence, i., 423.

[195] John Tucker, 1793-1873, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, and at this time Dean; Vicar of West Hendred, Berkshire.

[196] The Note in the Remains, i., 405, calls attention to the circumstance that R.H.F. was speaking of the Church system only; i.e., the Establishment.

[197] Both Newman and Froude often employ this word in a sense now quite obsolete. ‘The notion of diversion, entertainment, is comparatively of recent introduction into the word. To amuse was to cause to muse, to occupy or engage, and in this sense indeed to divert, the thoughts and attention.’ Trench, Select Glossary, 1890, p. 7.

A perfect example of the bygone function of the word occurs in Daniel’s Musophilus, where he condoles with ‘Sacred Religion, mother of form and fear,’ in the days when she must

[198] Joram or jorum is a drinking-bowl.

[199] I.e., the work, then in progress, on The Life and Times of Thomas À Becket.

[200] The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holy-days Throughout the Year. First American Edition. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, MDCCCXXXIV.

[201] Frederick Oakeley, 1802-1880: Tutor and Lecturer of Balioll College, Select Preacher to the University in 1831, Minister of Margaret Chapel (on the site of All Saints, Margaret Street, London W.) 1839-1845, and for the last thirty years of his life priest and Canon of the Archdiocese of Westminster.

[202] The American editor, ‘G. D. W.’ [George Washington Doane].

Among the footnotes is the following: ‘The Editor is accountable, throughout the volume, for the use of the Italic letter. He has adopted that method of designating such lines as possess, in his judgment, peculiar beauty.’ The preface is dated July 1, 1834. More than twenty-five editions had been published in England at this time.

[203] With Froude always, though not with Newman, domesticity spelled desertion of the Cause: to be married was, practically, to ‘rat.’

[204] The British Magazine for September, 1834, had announced the marriage of H. W. Wilberforce, Esq., M.A., Oriel College, to Mary, second daughter of the late Rev. J. Sargent, Rector of Lavington.

[205] Hurrell may well have known the state of poor Williams’ heart in regard to Miss Caroline Champernowne of Dartington Hall: the marriage, however, did not come off until 1842. Mr. Keble is not mentioned in his worshipping disciple’s incriminating list, but he had married Miss Charlotte Clark at Bisley on the tenth of the preceding October. He was then in his forty-fourth year. The engagement was of several years’ standing.

[206] Mr. Christie married in 1847.

[207] John Frederick Christie, M.A., Fellow of Oriel, received Deacon’s Orders in the Cathedral at Oxford, on May 25, 1834, and Priest’s Orders in the same place, on December 20, 1835.

[208] [Such as the necessity of holding by the union of Church and State; of contenting himself with the English liturgical services, etc. Note, Remains, i., 386.] The Editors mistook Hurrell’s word ‘one’ in the text, printing it as ‘me.’

[209] To smug is to confiscate without ceremony.

The Exeter Flying Post, during the last week of the preceding May, had announced the arrival of ‘the Bishop of Barbados and his family, on a visit to Mrs. Coleridge’s father, the venerable Dean of Winchester.’ The ‘thorough Z’ was in delicate health, and it forced him, ultimately, to resign his charge. His only son, a young child in Froude’s time at Barbados, Mr. Rennell Coleridge, has just died at Salston, Ottery St. Mary (May, 1904).

[210] Isaac Williams was long believed to be hopelessly ill, but recovered.

[211] The Rev. John Keble, Sr., Vicar of Coln St. Aldwyn, father and sole educator of John and of Thomas Keble, up to the time of their entering the University. He had inherited what he so splendidly transmitted: the Carolian and Nonjuring tradition.

[212] He was by no means alone in indulging this pious sentiment. On all sides, in 1835, ‘from Newman to Macaulay, from Cobbett to Arnold, the Reformers were receiving scathing criticism.’ The Life-Work of Cardinal Wiseman, in Problems and Persons, by Wilfrid Ward. Longmans, 1903.

[213] Of Nov. 18, 1834. This is a homespun boyish acknowledgement of Newman’s beautiful flight of words, straight to the heart of his friend.

[214] Newman’s note some thirty years later, Letters and Correspondence, ii., 7. ‘N.B.—Froude would not believe that I was in earnest, as I was, in shrinking from the views which he boldly followed out. I was against Transubstantiation.’

[215] In the standard modern edition, PensÉes Fragments et Lettres de Blaise Pascal … par M. Prosper FaugÈre, Paris, Leroux, 1897, the passage occurs in Lettre V. (À Mademoiselle de Roannez), fin d’Octobre, 1656, pp. 52-53.

[216] Probably in a letter. Mr. Christie was at this time devoting himself to Ridley, whom he looked upon, Mr. Mozley tells us, as a Saint and an Authority; his papers appeared later in The British Critic.

[217] Sir William Hamilton’s celebrated (anonymous) article on ‘Admission of Dissenters to the Universities,’ Edinburgh Review, vol. lx., pp. 202 et seq., for October, 1834, includes some telling paragraphs on the Practical Theology (in reference to the countenancing of polygamy) and the Biblical Criticism (boldly destructive) of Luther, Bucer, and Melancthon.

[218] First published as Tract 18: Thoughts on the Benefits of the System of Fasting enjoined by our Church. It is dated Oxford, The Feast of S. Thomas [1834], and signed E. B. P., being the first of the Tracts to bear a signature, by way of disassociating its author from the real Tractarians.

[219] The ‘Dartington one’ is, as we have seen, ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’; the ‘Naples one’ is possibly ‘Religious Emotion,’ Nos. xiv. and xxv. in Parochial Sermons, by John Henry Newman, M.A., Vicar of S. Mary the Virgin’s, Oxford, and Fellow of Oriel College. London: Rivington, 1834.

[220] Did Froude mean to write ‘Gallican’? Saint Francis de Sales as a Jansenist fills a new rÔle.

[221] ‘The Rise and Fall of Gregory,’ chapter ix., in The Church of the Fathers. Reprinted from The British Magazine, by Rivington, 1840, p. 146.

[222] Robert Isaac Wilberforce, as Vicar of East Farleigh, near Maidstone, Kent, was out of Oxford life practically from 1831 to 1849.

[223] Choused means swindled, duped.

[224] Sic.

[225] Unidentified.

[226] He has forgotten, for the moment, his own illuminating word spoken two years before: ‘Surely the promise “I am with you always” means something?’ …

[227] The famous emendation of the thirteenth stanza in the Gunpowder Treason hymn, which now reads in all editions of The Christian Year,—

was made after Keble’s death, by his executors, and in accordance with his own request. The request was based upon that of ‘my dear friend Hurrell Froude,’ over thirty years before. Keble had long held out against the alteration, and for what he thought good cause, even against Pusey, maintaining that ‘Not in the hands’ should be understood as ‘Not [only] in the hands.’ He had precedents and analogies to lean upon. But when Bishop Jeune on February 9, 1866, quoted the original lines in Convocation as against the Real Objective Presence, the poet, then near his end, eagerly effected the change. The ordinary reader may wonder whether a more astounding variant be known to doctrinal statement.

[228] Both quotations are from one of the loveliest and tenderest numbers of The Christian Year: that entitled ‘Holy Baptism,’ stanzas v. and iii.

[229] ‘Someone’ was of course quoting from the Vulgate, the Song of Solomon, iv., 11.

[230] The Rev. John Keble, Sr., died on Jan. 24, 1835, aged 89.

[231] Thus in the Newman Correspondence, ii., 94. In the Remains the reading is ‘little to boast of.’

[232] Froude would not have heard of the famous contest for the Speakership on Feb. 19, 1835, as he left the West Indies in March, or early April. James Abercromby, Esq., of Edinburgh, obtained on that day a majority of ten over Sir Charles Manners Sutton, who thereupon retired in chagrin from public life, and was created Viscount Canterbury.

[233] Letters of Frederic Lord Blachford, edited by George Eden Marindin. London: Murray, 1896, p. 24.

[234] Reminiscences, ii., 14.

[235] ‘The Oxford Counter-Reformation,’ in Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th Series: 1883.

[236] Tract 63, afterwards published, with additions, in the Remains, part i., ii., 383-423.

[237] (With dogma: not with disease!)

[238] The Ritualists, or Non-Natural Catholics. London: Shaw & Co., 2nd edition, 1867, p. 73.

[239] In the Church of England, he means. Catholic altars were, and are, always of stone, the custom of stone altars having been ruled as obligatory at the Council of Epaon, A.D. 517. Dr. Pusey’s dismay will be remembered at the adverse decision given on 31st January, 1845, against stone altar-slabs, as ‘revived’ in S. Sepulchre’s Church at Cambridge. (Liddon’s Pusey, ii., 483.)

[240] La Renaissance Catholique en Angleterre, par Paul Thureau-Dangin de l’AcadÉmie franÇaise. 1re Partie. Paris: Plon, 1899, p. 160.

[241] ‘Que se passa-t-il entre eux? Wiseman ne l’a jamais rÉvÉlÉ.’ Idem, p. 104. M. Thureau-Dangin’s treatment of Froude throughout is exquisite and just, though he contrives to miss a point or two.

[242] Newman warns us in the Preface to Loss and Gain against actual identifications of his scenes and characters; and the warning is just, because there is no warrant for the identifications. But reading between the lines is particularly profitable with every page of Newman’s, dictated by an almost unexampled deliberation and sensitiveness. Reding (for one instance out of many), quitting his beautiful and beloved Oxford, goes early in the morning to kiss the willows along the Water-walks good-bye. It is almost impossible that the man who thinks such a thing should not also be the man who has done it.

[243] ‘Things,’ one is left to infer, which depended more or less on the proximity of the Bodleian, and implied something in the way of historical fiction.

[244] In vol. vii., 1835. The article for June, pp. 662-668, is Letter No. xii. in The Church of the Fathers, and consists of a little essay on S. Augustine, with excerpts from his treatises and private correspondence on the subject of the religious life.

[245] The Statutes excluding married Fellows being still in force.

[246] Years after this was written, late in the seventies, he must have passed near it, going to visit his brother-in-law, the Rev. Thomas Mozley, at Plymtree.

[247] I.e., haranguing against ‘Romanism.’

[248] James Shergold Boone, 1799-1859, an Oxonian, then editor of The British Critic.

[249] Copleston.

[250] The Rev. Charles Portates Golightly, 1807-1885, M.A., Oriel: King of the ‘Peculiars.’

[251] The Rev. Benjamin Harrison, 1808-1887, M.A., Christchurch, afterwards Archdeacon of Maidstone and Canon of Canterbury.

[252] Probably Thomas Mozley, newly appointed Junior Treasurer of Oriel.

[253] The Rev. Robert Francis Wilson, M.A., Oriel, was appointed Mr. Keble’s Curate in 1835, and became his lifelong friend.

[254] In the review of Blanco White’s Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy.

[255] The Rev. John Richard Bogue, a Cambridge graduate, then, or later, Curate of Cornworthy, towards Dartmouth.

[256] Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, by Henry Parry Liddon, D.D., etc. London: Longmans, 1893, i., 359.

[257] John Mozley and Jemima Newman were married on April 28, 1836. Thomas Mozley’s first wife was Harriet Newman, married to him in September of the same year. Not only the Mozleys of the Tractarian group, but two of the Wilberforces (Samuel and Henry), and the two Kebles, married sisters.

[258] A ‘prose,’ in this pleasant sense, seems always, with Oxford men of that date, to mean a disquisition in the nature of a monologue.

[259] Hurrell Froude’s first instalments of the articles embracing translations of S. Thomas À Becket’s original letters (from the Vatican Archives and other original sources) appeared in The British Magazine for November, 1832, ii., 233-242, and had run on pretty regularly ever since.

[260] In the theological sense.

[261] William Palmer (Vigornensis, as he was locally called to distinguish him from his namesake at Magdalen College), and Newman, in lesser measure, were responsible for this Tract, numbered 15.

[262] During this month Blanco White had avowed himself a Unitarian, and quitted Archbishop Whately’s house in Dublin.

[263] By accident, the same adjectives had instinctively occurred in a postscript of Harriett Newman’s, written a month or two before. ‘Who can refrain from tears at the thought of that bright and beautiful Froude?’ she writes. ‘He is not expected to last long.’

[264] Coleridge’s Memoir of John Keble, p. 235.

[265] ‘Separation,’ Lyra Apostolica, Beeching’s edition, p. 17. See p. 331 of this book.

[266] Cholderton (Thomas Mozley’s Rectory), Oct. 3, 1839.—‘Keble’s Preface to the Remains [Part II.], which awaited me here, is very good, as far as I can judge; but somehow I want the faculty of judging anything of Keble’s.’—John Henry Newman, Letters and Correspondence to 1845. Longmans, 1890, ii., 213, 257.

[267] Lost.

[268] Newman. The anonymous review appeared in The Christian Observer for July, 1837, pp. 460-479. The volume bears no number.

[269] Probably Henry Halford Vaughan of Christ Church, 1811-1885; the distinguished jurist; elected Fellow of Oriel in 1835; afterwards Regius Professor of Modern History.

[270] Renn Dickson Hampden, D.D., 1793-1868, received in October, 1836, his famous (Dean Burgon’s adjective was ‘scandalous’) appointment by Lord Melbourne to the Regius Professorship of Divinity in the University of Oxford, against the vehement and prolonged opposition of both Low Church and High Church, to whom ‘Hampdenism’ meant nothing less than the negation of Christian doctrine and the Catholic spirit. Hampden, if not ‘Hampdenism,’ was to be greatly crippled by the Oxford Convocation of the following May.

[271] The Rev. R. C. Fillingham’s wit, wasted on a winter Sunday morning in the Pembroke Street Chapel, Oxford, may be worth hoarding up. ‘The Martyrs died to protest against the ridiculous doctrine of the Real Presence, and the man who preached that doctrine from the pulpit was a traitor, and deserved to be drummed out of the Church. (Applause)…. The new religion of the Church of England was founded in 1833 … in order to save the endowments, and was really a pecuniary dodge. The Martyrs’ Memorial protested against it, and said this new thing was not the religion of the true Church of England. The Memorial protested against dishonesty; it stood as a protest against shams, etc., etc.’—The Oxford Times, Jan. 16, 1904.

[272] The Rev. Edward Churton, 1800-1874, Rector of Crayke, the Spanish scholar, biographer of Joshua Watson.

[273] Lives of Twelve Good Men, by John William Burgon, B.D., late Dean of Chichester. London: Murray, 1891, p. 129.

[274] Afterwards seventh Earl of Carlisle.

[275] Correspondence, ii., 255.

[276] Letters of Frederic Lord Blachford, edited by George Eden Marindin. Murray, 1896, p. 50.

[277] Life of William Ewart Gladstone, by John Morley. Macmillan, 1903, i., 306.

[278] Idem, p. 161.

[279] Remains, vol. ii., 229, 250, and elsewhere.

[280] Mr. Ruskin.

[281] Rose to Pusey, in Burgon’s Lives of Twelve Good Men, p. 125.

[282] ‘A More Excellent Way,’ in The Faith of the Millions. First Series. By George Tyrrell, S. J. Longmans, 1901, p. 5.

[283] Sir James Stephen, ‘The Evangelical Succession,’ in Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography. London: Longmans, 1860, 4th edition, i., 462.

[284] Quoted in The Monthly Repository for 1835, discovered and reproduced in Mr. Bertram Dobell’s Sidelights on Charles Lamb, 1903, p. 325.

[285] Life and Letters of Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, i., 199. Compare the Rev. Spencer Jones’ remarkable article, ‘Who Makes the Division?’ in The Lamp for April or May, 1904. ‘The terminus ad quem of the Oxford Movement, by logical and divine necessity, seems to us to be the return of the Anglican Church to the supreme authority of the Holy See. To it we must come, if we desire to possess a sanctuary once more.’

[286] Canon Smith, Rector of S. Peter’s Catholic Church at Marlow, once the Anglican Rector of Leadenham, died, aged 89, on October 24, 1903, while the first sheets of this book were passing through the press.

[287] It is the saying of a contemporary wit: ‘Did you ever see a clever Anglican who did not worry over his Church? and did you ever see a clever Roman who did?’

[288] See p. 148.

[289] Reminiscences, i., 441.

[290] Life and Letters of Walter Farquhar Hook, D.D., F.R.S., by his Son-in-Law, W. R. W. Stephens. Bentley, 1878, ii., 103.

[291] L’Anglo-Catholicisme, par le PÈre Ragey. Paris: Lecoffre [1897], pp. 4, 7.

[292] Mr. Simcox in The Academy, May 22, 1891, xxxix., 481.

[293] The physical resemblance between R. H. F.’s child-portrait and il buon Pippo, becomes none the less noteworthy when one turns towards what Newman wrote from Rome to his sister about S. Philip Neri, on January 26, 1847. ‘This great Saint reminds me in so many ways of Keble, that I can fancy what Keble would have been … in another place and age; he was formed on the same type of extreme hatred of humbug, playfulness, nay, oddity, tender love of others, and severity.’ John Henry Newman, Letters and Correspondence to 1845, ii., 424.