To the Rev. John Keble, Jan. 9, 1834. Barbados.
‘With hands bitten sore by mosquitoes, I set to, upon a sheet of paper which will witness many fresh bites before I get through it. The wretches are flitting about me on all sides, and every moment I am forced to put down my pen and hit at them. People soon cease to care for them: that is my only consolation. The weather here is most delicious, the thermometer averaging eighty-three degrees, and showers flying in all directions. When it rains here, they say: “What a fine day!”… The room I am in has seven windows and four doors, with a thorough draught every way; everything is contrived for getting up thorough draughts: long passages open at both ends, for the everlasting east wind to blow through, and windows on every side of a room where it is possible, or immense doors opposite them, where it is not. I suppose before the hurricane[163] this must have been a house fit for a resident gentleman of high pretensions; now it consists only of two rooms, and a number of sheds erected round them against the walls that remain standing…. The sum which was set aside by Government to repair the injury done here is not allowed to go to the repair of Churches, even though 24,000l. of it is still in hand, which they do not know how to dispose of, and seven Churches are in complete ruins….
‘I have heard some facts which seem to show a good spirit among the clergy…. Mr. ——, about whom you may remember
the great row that took place some years since for admitting a black to the Communion in company with whites, has now so completely broken down that feeling, that last Sunday, when I received the Sacrament at his Church, at which near two hundred people were present, all colours were mixed indiscriminately. In the Roman Catholic islands this was always insisted on, and carried with a high hand…. This island is very green, and its plants very exotic-looking, but there is a total want of beauty. For all I have yet seen, the coasts of the Mediterranean are the places “mortalibus ægris munere concessæ Divom.” Also, the negro features are so horridly ugly, at least the generality of them: now and then indeed one sees finely-chiselled Egyptian features, and among the others one can distinctly trace the difference of caste in all shades from man to monkey…. You will be shocked at my avowal, that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain that in all matters that seem to us indifferent or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church which has preserved its traditionary practices unbroken. We cannot know about any seemingly indifferent practice of the Church of Rome that it is not a development of the Apostolic ἦθος; and it is to no purpose to say that we can find no proof of it in the writings of the six first centuries; they must find a disproof if they would do anything…. I have been reading the controversy between Law and Hoadly for the first time. Law’s brilliance quite astonished me: I think it the most striking specimen of writing I ever saw. Yet I own now and then he seems rather wild. Surely one could get such splendid compositions into circulation by puffing them? It was a noble end of Convocation to be put down for censuring Hoadly, and the censure looks well as the last record in Wilkins’s Concilia. The sun that set so bright must have a rising!… I have translated all the Becket correspondence, and should go [on] at once to Anselm, if I was not on the point of starting with the Bishop[164] on his Visitation. All I hear makes me wish to go
to America, though I do not conceive the views of the clergy in general there to be very high. Preaching goes for everything, and a person that cannot fill his Church gets dismissed. I think that in the present state of religion preaching should be quite disconnected from the Services, and looked on as an address to the unconverted.[165]… We ought to employ itinerant talkers in England; I am sure I could stir up people very much in Devonshire and Cornwall in that way.’
To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Jan. 25, 1834.
‘… I have a very poor account to give you of my studies. I have been here near a month, and have not set to work regularly on anything. Although I have not done anything like regular work, I have picked up a good deal. I have been looking about, here and there…. Does not the Archbishop of Canterbury claim patriarchal authority (qualem qualem) over as large a portion of the globe as ever the Bishop of Rome did? and are not the Colonial Bishops just as much exonerated from their oath of canonical obedience, by proving that there is no universal Bishop recognised in Scripture, as ever Cranmer was?… I have been much surprised to find that the first Latitudinarians were Tories: e.g., Hales, Chillingworth, and that set. How Whiggery has by degrees taken up all the filth that has been secreted in the fermentation of human thought! Puritanism, Latitudinarianism, Popery, Infidelity; they have it all now, and good luck to them.[166] I see the reason Convocation was put down in 1717 was the remonstrance of the Lower House against the Upper, to make them censure Hoadly’s Preservative. The Upper House had a very little while before taken part with the Socinianising Bishops against the Lower. Also, what a curious thing it is to see the popularity of High Churchism among the lower orders at the time of Sacheverell’s trial! These matters have opened to my weak mind a field of thought and inquiry which I have no great chance of following
up. If I had 5000l., I would pay all the clever fellows I could find to analyse the pamphlets, etc., of that time, and make a good History of Protestantism. A continuation of Collier[167] would just take in all I desiderate, and if done well, most curious and amusing it would be…. The most sensible people here seem to think it certain, that, after the emancipation of the slaves, no estate will be profitable enough to pay for a manager, so that all English proprietors who from age or habit, etc., are not able to come out and reside on their own property, must sell at a reduced price; also that since this climate, state of society, etc., suits the coloured people better than the whites, it will answer to them to buy at a higher rate than others, so that the islands will by degrees become what they call “brown” islands, and relapse into a semi-savage state by the gradual withdrawal of those who now keep up the tone of acquirement, etc.; that this will happen without any bloodshed, but will destroy the commercial value of the islands, for that not more than one-fifth of the sugar will be grown, and the rest of the land employed in growing sustenance for the idle population.’
To the Ven. Archdeacon Froude, Feb. 6, 1834.
‘… The weather has been very boisterous since I have been here: people say that they should have called the night of Friday 17th [January] a hurricane, if it had been in August or September…. I don’t know whether I may lay any blame on the weather, but certainly my cough has made no progress for the better since I landed. I don’t mean that I am worse, for I certainly have gained flesh, but my cough is exactly where it was when I first got into the warm latitudes: an improvement on what it was in England, but no more. The temperature of the air is quite delightful, but there is nothing to interest one out-of-doors: horridly ugly faces, most uninteresting scenery, an extremely shabby town, the population of which may, in point of morals, be called almost the sink of humanity; and then the vulgar names of all the places (I forget them as fast as I hear them), and money-making associations, which intrude into everything one sees and hears, offer a sad contrast