‘Froude stayed in England just long enough to take a present part in the great Movement, and to contribute to it, and then, as he sorrowfully said of himself, “like the man who ‘fled full soon, on the first of June, but bade the rest keep fighting,’” he found himself compelled by his friends to leave England for the West Indies.
‘All these vivid expressions, delivered with the sincerity of a noble child or a newly-converted savage, chimed in with Newman’s state of feeling, and struck deep into his very being, to bring forth fruit. Yet in neither Froude nor Newman could now be discovered the least suspicion of what these outbursts might lead to, for at every point they found Rome irreconcilable and impossible.
* * * * *
‘Froude, who had now bidden farewell to Toryism, much in the same key as he had written of old Tyre and the Cities of the Plain, was contributing to the Tracts, from Barbados, and also freely criticising them when they seemed to him to temporise, or to fall into modern conventionalisms. In fact he was keeping Newman, nothing loth, up to the mark.
‘In May, 1835, he returned from Barbados. On landing, he found a letter from Newman calling him to Oxford, where there were several friends soon to part for the Long Vacation. His brother Anthony was summoned from his private tutor, Mr. Hubert Cornish. Froude came, full of energy and fire, sunburnt, but a shadow. The tale of his health was soon told. He had a “button in his throat” which he could not get rid of, but he talked incessantly. With a positive hunger for intellectual difficulties, he had been studying Babbage’s calculating machine, and he explained, at a pace which seemed to accelerate itself, its construction, its performances, its failures, and its certain limits. Few, if any, could follow him, still less could they find an opening for aught they had to say, or to beg a minute’s law. He never could realise the laggard pace of duller intelligences. I have not the least doubt he did his best to explain Babbage’s machine to his black Euclid
class at Codrington College, and that without ever ascertaining the result in their minds….
‘… Froude was brimful of irony, and always ready to surprise and even shock men of a slower temperament, when he could by a smile smooth or disarm them. As he talked, so he wrote in his letters. The Editors of his Remains were under a temptation, which they construed into a necessity, to reproduce him as he really had been, to the very words and the life, and let his words take their chance. Upon the whole, they were right; for no one ever charged, or could now charge, on Froude, that his expressions had brought anyone to Rome, or could doubt that Froude himself was Anglican to the last….
‘… There had never been seen at Oxford, indeed seldom anywhere, so large and noble a sacrifice of the most precious gifts and powers to a sacred cause. The men who were devoting themselves to it were not bred for the work, or from one school. They were not literary toilers or adventurers glad of a chance, or veterans ready to take to one task as lightly as to another, equally zealous to do their duty, and equally indifferent to the form. They were not men of the common rank, casting a die for promotion. They were not levies or conscripts, but in every sense volunteers. Pusey, Keble, and Newman had each an individuality capable of a development, and a part beyond that of any former scholar, poet, or theologian in the Church of England. Each lost quite as much as he gained by the joint action of the three. It is hard to say what Froude might have been, or might not have been, had he lived but a few more years, and been content to cast in his lot with common mortals bound by conditions of place and time.’
From ‘The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review,’ April, 1840. [By the Rev. T. Mozley.][388]