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.
‘Δαιμόνιε: 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.’