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.’