Overbeck seems to have attracted Froude purely, or chiefly, on moral grounds, but he found at Rome an abiding object of enthusiasm in the lovely genius of Francesco Francia. One
of his letters to his second brother, from Leghorn, illustrates both his own passion for thoroughness, and the range and zest of his lifelong interest in arts and crafts. He was ‘an ingeniose person,’ and constantly invites the application of that favourite and comprehensive seventeenth-century word.
To William Froude, April 12, 1833.
‘… If you choose, you may easily find out in London what is the particular process by which the red colour of glass is produced from gold, and also in what way they would go to work to give glass a vitrified coat of gold, retaining its own colour; and whether any accident in attempting the latter might effect the former. For it has always struck me as a puzzle how so recondite an idea as that of producing a ruby tint from a yellow metal should come into the heads of the early glass-painters; and it has occurred to me that some such accident as I have guessed at above might be the key to the puzzle, for the practice of giving glass a vitrified coat of gold for the purpose of mosaic work was very common, long before the use of coloured glass in windows had been thought of, and specimens of it are to be seen in Rome of almost every age between [A.D.] 400 and [A.D.] 1000. Please not to forget this question, or be contented with vague answers. It will be likely to take some time and trouble to get at the truth, but it is curious, and there is no hurry, and you will at any rate have more opportunities than I shall. The best red colour that has been produced in modern times has been managed by a French chemist, and there is a wholesale house of his goods somewhere in Holborn. The Pope’s mosaic manufactory in Rome is curious: there are eighteen thousand shades of colour in it, which can be looked out as in a directory. Some of the imitations of pictures which they have made are so perfect that you must look close before you can see joinings and transitions of colour; and they have the advantage over every kind of painting, being mellow from the first and brilliant to the last. In St. Peter’s there are many very fine ones, copies of all the most famous pictures, and they are said to have cost 4500l. a piece. St. Peter’s itself is the great attraction of Rome, worth all the classics put together. I think the dome is built with
all the layers of stone horizontal, so that the principle of the arch applies not to the vertical section, but only to the horizontal. I am not sure of this, but I think so.’
It does not appear, though Newman and Froude saw the Pope’s mosaic manufactory, that they saw the Pope himself, Gregory XVI. They seem to have gained their chief vistas of Roman society through their acquaintance with the Prussian Chargé d’Affaires, Baron Bunsen,[117] and his English wife, at whose house of all hospitality Sir Walter Scott, then near his end, had been the beloved guest less than a year before. Hurrell must have had his own impressions of the excellent Bunsen, with his pleasant Teutonic habit of holding up his finger and hushing the company, before he began to speak. There is no mention of our modest and all-observing pilgrims in the published correspondence either of Bunsen or of Joseph Severn, for 1832-1833.
On April 13, 1833, Hurrell sends to the Rev. John Frederick Christie one of the most discussed letters in the first volume of the Remains.
‘It would not become me to apologise for not having written before, since I much doubt my capacity[118] to produce anything worth the postage. Nevertheless, I have for some time been intending to write to you, and can’t account for having let so much time slip through my fingers. My father and I are now on our way home, having left [Newman] to retrace his steps to Sicily…. I hope to be at Genoa to-morrow morning…. Between [Lyons] and Paris, I hope to visit and make drawings of some of the Abbeys, etc., which are connected with the history of St. Thomas of Cant. “Sixth and lastly,” if the Fates allow, we shall cross from Havre to Southampton by the first steamer in May … soon after which you may expect to see me in Chapel. I congratulate you on having got over your first audit so prosperously;[119] … it is better occupation than
travelling, take my word for it. It is really melancholy to think how little one has got for one’s time and money. The only thing I can put my hand on as an acquisition is having formed an acquaintance with a man of some influence at Rome, Monsignor [Wiseman][120] the head of the [English] College, who has enlightened [Newman] and me on the subject of our relations to the Church of Rome. We got introduced to him to find out whether they would take us[121] in on any terms to which we could twist our consciences, and we found to our dismay that not one step could be gained without swallowing the Council of Trent as a whole! We made our approaches to the subject as delicately as we could. Our first notion was that the terms of communion were, within certain limits, under the control of the Pope … or, that in case he could not dispense solely, yet at any rate the acts of one Council might be rescinded by another; indeed, that in Charles the First’s time it had been intended to negociate a reconciliation on the terms on which things stood before the Council of Trent. But we found, to our horror, that the doctrine of the Infallibility of the Church made the acts of each successive Council obligatory for ever, that what had been once decided could never be meddled with again, in fact, that they were committed finally and irrevocably, and could not advance one step to meet us, even though the Church of England should again become what it was in Laud’s time….
‘… So much for the Council of Trent, for which Christendom has to thank Luther and the Reformers. [Newman] declares that ever since I heard this I have become a staunch Protestant, which is a most base calumny on his part, though I own it has altogether changed my notions of the Roman Catholics, and made me wish for a total overthrow of their system. I think that the only τόπος now is “the ancient Church of England,” and, as an explanation of what one means, “Charles the First” and “the Nonjurors.” When I come home I mean to