‘… I shall write to Boone to-night to tell him that you think you could not get the article done in time for January. I will take it through the press, if you will trust me. Do not fuss yourself, or think yourself pledged….
‘Keble was thrown from his horse, and broke a small bone in his shoulder, but is better. He will not be editor of the Tracts….
‘M. Bunsen has pronounced upon our views, gathered from the Arians (!), with singular vehemence. He says that if we succeed, we shall be introducing Popery without authority, Protestantism without liberty, Catholicism without universality, and Evangelism without spirituality. In the greater part of which censure you doubtless agree!’
The all-but-dying invalid finished the long, able, dispassionate review, entitled ‘Mr. Blanco White: Heresy and Orthodoxy,’ for the printers. It appeared in time, in The British Critic for January, 1836. It ends: ‘We must now, however, leave our argument imperfect, hoping very shortly to recur to it.’ This is the colophon from Hurrell Froude. It is diligent and collected, and keeps the colours boldly flying after a fashion wholly characteristic. The manuscripts went in sections to Newman.
‘In the last five days I have written forty of the enclosed sixty-three pages. If the humour lasts, I may do the rest in a jiffy. I have spent a week with Dr. Yonge…. [He] was not satisfied with the effect of steel, and changed it for I know not what, three days ago; since when I am decidedly stronger. But the Bishop of Llandaff[249] has warned us against confounding succession with causation. If Rogers will bring my Breviary, I shall be obliged. I shall be delighted if Mozley comes with him. They will meet Wilson, though but for a day.’
The Breviary is the celebrated identical book, first studied under Blanco White’s direction, the history of which is briefly given in the Apologia, and which is, to Dr. Abbott, so important an agent in determining Newman’s after-career. It may be assumed that Mr. Rogers forgot to take it, that Christmastide, to Dartington, as it was on the shelves of Hurrell’s rooms at Oriel when he died, and when Archdeacon Froude asked Newman
to choose a keepsake there. It is still at the Oratory in Edgbaston.
A long letter to Newman from the Rev. R. F. Wilson, on Dec. 19, contained, incidentally, no very cheery news of their friend, succumbing to consumption of the throat.
‘It was a great pleasure to me to meet poor Froude, though he looks sadly, and without any abatement of those symptoms which must make his friends most anxious about him, appears weaker [by] a great deal than when he was in Oxford. To me, he was a more interesting person than ever, because I find that his peculiar way of thinking, and manner of expressing himself, which I thought might only belong to him in health and strength, continue just the same. I saw also Rogers there, for a day.’
Froude himself ‘continues just the same,’ on paper. He was busily hoisting sail in the offing, and quite calm about it. ‘I don’t know that it does one any harm,’ he had written eighteen months before, ‘to have the impression brought seriously before one that one is not to see out the changes which seem to be at hand.’