who, while living, influenced Newman much, and after his death, more; “re-touching the faith,” and “deepening every line,” not as Newman’s poem suggested, of himself, but of the poet, his survivor, his second self. When [Froude] died, a book of his, by what most people would call an accident, passed into Newman’s possession. Newman deemed it more than an accident. From that time forward it lay on his study table; and by it, though dead, his friend continued to speak to and to guide him: always in one direction. Rightly does Newman record as one among nine important events of the “cardinal” spring of 1836, “my knowing and using the Breviary.”’
‘Oriel College,’ by David Watson Rannie, M.A. London: F. E. Robinson & Co., 1900.
[By kind permission of D. W. Rannie, Esq., M.A., and of Messrs. Robinson & Co.]
‘The chief aim of the Fellowship [at Oriel] was to test dialectical power; a chief occupation of the Common Room was to practise it…. Newman himself, who did more than any other man to divert the College from criticism to submission, has left a vivid picture … of his own argumentative brusquerie in the congenial atmosphere of the Oriel Common Room. And it is noticeable, both in his case and that of Richard Hurrell Froude, his chief coadjutor in sowing the seed of the coming Tractarianism in College, that their method was essentially dialectic and modern, even though its effect, on themselves and others, was to lead them into “fierce thoughts” against the modern spirit and the modern trend of things. Pusey might bury himself in theology, and Keble might be the singer and sweet saint of a revived devotion; but Newman and Froude, even when the gates of authority seemed about to close on them for ever, were questioners and controversialists and gladiators, striving to rationalise reason out of its own supremacy.
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‘In hurrying on the birth of the new issue, both at Oriel and beyond it, the influence of Richard Hurrell Froude was very great. We have seen that he was elected a Fellow of Oriel in
1826. He was an Oriel man throughout, and had taken a double second in 1824. He was the eldest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes, and the eldest of three eminent brothers, all Oriel men: William, the engineer, born in 1810, and James Anthony, the historian, born in 1818. Hurrell was born in 1803. Always delicate, he fell into consumption early in the Thirties, and died in 1836. But though his career was short and enfeebled, and though there is little of him in print but what the affectionate appreciation of his friends put there, it is certain that Hurrell Froude had in his College an influence both intense and peculiar, which radiated widely, and was answerable for some of the most marked phenomena of Tractarianism. Froude was perhaps the most convinced, the most outspoken, the most throughgoing Mediævalist among the young men who thought the Church of England in an unsatisfactory condition; and he had the incommunicable and inexplicable gift of great personal influence, which, in his case, took the most irresistible of all its forms: that of impressing others with his equal pre-eminence in intellect and character. While the other Tractarian propagandists of the immediate future were recoiling in fear and anxiety from the advance of the Liberal and Erastian tide, Froude was ardently counselling reaction, loudly and scornfully proclaiming the loveliness and rightness of at least a large number of Roman opinions and practices, and laying a zealous axe at the root of the Protestantism of the Church of England.
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‘In fact, one can plainly see that the religious revival which was coming to the English Church was the real cause of the tutorial quarrel at Oriel in 1830. The Tutors had the new wine of it in their veins; they were the subjects of an enthusiasm which they were impelled to communicate, and which was intolerant of restraint; whilst the Provost [Hawkins] was, and was to remain, outside the range of the new ideas. In such a situation compromise was impracticable…. This change had certain important and well-marked results on the College. In the first place, it riveted the authority of Provost Hawkins, and made him for the rest of his life the dominant force in Oriel. In the second place, as the deprived Tutors