‘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
κόρακες ὣς ἄκραντα γαρύετον Διὸς πρὸς ὄρνιχα θεῖον?’
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.