The truant Fellow, restored to his father’s Parsonage, was able to send a definite announcement of his future movements, within a fortnight of his leaving Oxford.
To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Sept. 9, 1832.
‘I am afraid poor [Willy] will make no hand of his Second Class. He has no interest, and can pick up none, for what he is about; and all his interleaves and margins are scribbled over with lug sails. You will be glad to hear that I have made up my mind to spend the winter in the Mediterranean, and my father is going with me, the end of November, and we shall see Sicily and the south of Italy. We are both very anxious that you should come with us. I think it would set you up…. I have read M. Thierry’s stuff.[93] His ignorance is surprising. He supposes Oxford to have been a Bishopric in Henry the Second’s time, and he sticks in Saxons ad libitum, quoting authorities with which I am familiar, and where nothing of the sort occurs. My translations have been at a standstill…. Also, I am getting to be a sawney,[94] and not to relish the dreary prospects which you and I have proposed to ourselves. But this is only a feeling: depend on it, I will not shrink, if I buy my constancy at the expense of a permanent separation from home. I think this journey will set me up, and then I shall try my new style of preaching. We must indulge ourselves and other people with a little excitement on such matters, or else the indifferentists will run away with everything!’
William Froude, at Michaelmas, took his First Class in
Mathematics, and a Third in Classics, quite as Hurrell expected. As to the microbe of travel thus featly introduced into the post, it did its work upon the recipient, though not without much hesitation and debate. One of Newman’s arguments against a plan with which, it is plain, he fell violently in love at once, was the state of his own health, involving, possibly, some additional responsibility for Archdeacon Froude. ‘You need fear nothing,’ Hurrell gallantly assures him, ‘on the score of two invalids: I am certainly better now than I have been for more than a year. I bathed yesterday with great advantage, took a very long walk, drank five glasses of wine, and am better for it all. My contemplated expedition is wholly preventative, so don’t be uneasy on that score…. As to my sawney feelings, I own that home does make me a sawney, and that the First Eclogue runs in my head absurdly. But there is more in the prospect of becoming an ecclesiastical agitator than in At nos hinc alii, etc.’
On Monday, December 3, Newman set out on the Southampton coach, reaching Exeter next day, and Falmouth, whence the Maltese packet of 800 tons, called the Hermes, was to sail, early on the Wednesday morning following. He wrote there his poem,
‘Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?’
the first of eighty-five dating from the Mediterranean voyage, the eighty-fifth being the ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ which has endeared to English-speaking pilgrims the Straits of Bonifacio. When the Froudes arrived at Falmouth, Newman had a nocturnal adventure to relate to them. He had been very roundly sworn at by a person, apparently a gentleman, who sat near him on the box. ‘I had opened by telling him he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maid-servant stuck atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain!’ The hasty fellow-traveller afterwards apologised. In the moonlight he had attributed a highly laic motive to Newman’s interference, so the latter explains to his mother. On the 8th of December the Hermes sailed. The three friends were to be together for five months, and their route is minutely
and enchantingly mapped out in the first volume of the Newman Correspondence. The journey held unique experiences, filled with interest, for the two younger men, and they, on their part, seemed to have interested deeply many whom they met. Hurrell kept a log as they moved, for his brothers and sisters, for Mr. Keble, for Mr. Williams, and a few others; and out of it a fairly connected narrative can be extracted, of a colour and form quite other than Newman’s, the better correspondent, but graphic enough. Before starting on his voyage, Hurrell had seen in print, in the first and second volumes of The British Magazine, both his pioneer papers on Gothic Architecture, and the earlier chapters of his history of S. Thomas à Becket; these were followed, in volume iv., by The Project of Henry II. for Uniting Church and State, A.D. 1154.
To the Rev. John Keble, Dec. 12, 1832.