This ebook is dedicated to
Emmy
friend, colleague, mentor, and role model,
who fell off the planet far too soon.

HURRELL FROUDE

HURRELL FROUDE AS A CHILD
From an unfinished portrait by William Brockedon, A.R.A.

HURRELL FROUDE

MEMORANDA AND COMMENTS

BY

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

WITH SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1904

CARI
COMMILITIS
ACTA
HONORI
ET NOMINI
J·H·N·
IN PACE

PREFACE

THE epistolary matter in the first section of this volume is drawn from material already in print: chiefly from Part I. of The Remains of the Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of Oriel, published by the Rivingtons in 1838, and, incidentally, from John Henry Newman: Letters and Correspondence to 1845, published by the Longmans in 1890: from one notable work, that is to say, which is wholly forgotten, and from another yet recent, of great and unique interest, which has not yet won its full public appreciation. For the unrestricted use of the desired extracts from these books, the Editor’s grateful thanks are due equally to the representatives of the elder branch of the Froude family, and to Cardinal Newman’s literary executor.

The liberal selection from Hurrell Froude’s Letters which appeared in the Remains is invalidated, to modern curiosity, by manifold suppressions and omissions necessary for private reasons then in force. Some clue, however, is to be found, if it be looked for, towards the identification of those to whom his correspondence was addressed. The Editors of the Remains silently adopted, for the Letters, the same system of differentiation as they had already employed, two years before, in regard to the authorship of the collected poems in Lyra Apostolica: that is to say, in both books γ stands for Keble, δ for Newman, ε for Robert Wilberforce, and ζ for Isaac Williams. As Hurrell Froude’s own contributions to the Lyra had appeared over the signature β, it was easy to surmise that Beta in the Remains might refer to his brothers or sisters, and Alpha, by a sort of primacy, to his father: as is certainly the case. But it was more difficult, for instance, to identify η as Mr. Frederic Rogers, or θ as the Rev. John Frederick Christie: for to these

there was no key but that of internal evidence of an elusive sort. The Greek alphabet, in the Remains, served only as a heading to marshal the recipients of the Letters written by Froude; proper names figuring in the course of the Letters were almost in every instance replaced by a blank. The verification of these names will perhaps be accepted, though not all are based on a manuscript reading;[1] and of course no blank has been filled experimentally without due indication of that process. Nor has effort been made, at any point, to fill out sentences, or gaps of any kind, save those caused by the suppression of proper names. This line of procedure, and, indeed, the entire scheme of the rifacciamento, stands subject first and last to the circumstance that the Editor has had no access to the great mass of dated and classified manuscript correspondence now at Edgbaston. As it was impossible to collate the Froude-Newman Letters with the originals, there appeared something supererogatory in reprinting any of the others in their complete form, or including unpublished addenda most kindly placed at the Editor’s disposal, when an exception had to be ruled in regard to the most interesting and most important material of all. Unfortunately, moreover, Froude’s letters to his father, the Archdeacon, to Robert Wilberforce and to Isaac Williams, have perished; and those to Mr. Keble, if existent, had not been recovered by his grandnephew, the Rev. George C. Keble, at the time when this volume went to press. A few letters have been pieced together by comparison of passages, as they stand in the Remains, and in the Newman Correspondence, issued a half-century later. Examination of the fac-simile page of the amusing letter from Barbados, written on December 26, 1834, and of its counterpart in the text here given, copied from that of the Remains, will show that some de-editing might be called for, under the right conditions, in the matter of Hurrell Froude’s edited correspondence. It will be seen, on the whole, that neither close study nor long acquaintance with the subject could keep

the reprinting, as it pressed forward, from degenerating into more or less of a game of guesswork. Yet exclusions and limitations may cast a befitting half-light upon used literature of long ago, which was in itself elliptical, and tends to create new ellipses, inasmuch as its purpose now is to throw stress less on historic or theological issues than on human character. Many given data, or few, yield pretty much the same residuum when the personality which reigns over them is as rich and strong as Hurrell Froude’s. Says one of the most penetrating of modern writers:

‘The art of biography has accustomed those who read to expect … as the word implies, the portrayal of a life, of a process: the record of the growth and unfolding of a soul and character. This it is which interests the subjective temper of our days…. Our mind has learnt that its choicest food need not be sought from afar, but lies scattered with the wild flowers by the wayside, and that nothing is so extraordinary as the ordinary. Thus we have come to care less for a full inventory of the events which make up a man’s life, or for the striking nature of those events in themselves, than for such a judicious selection and setting of them as shall best bring out and explain that individuality which is our main interest. We care less for what a man does and more for what he is; and it is mainly as a key to what he is that we study the circumstances which act upon him, and the conduct by which he reacts upon them.’[2] A selection and setting to explain individuality: such is the aim, such (it is to be feared) is only very partially the achievement, of this book.

Concerning its second section a few remarks may be called for. That section actually had, from the first, in the Editor’s intention, the right of way. It is quite independent, not called into auxiliary play as a mere illustrative collection of pièces justificatives. Many of these essays and reviews have authority; a few have great literary beauty; the Editor’s work, which could not vie with them, has borrowed almost nothing from them, and thus preserved two integrities. Although limits of space forbade the reproduction of any one chapter of appreciable

length quite in its entirety, yet there existed no reason, but only the whim of artistic choice, for the inclusion or exclusion of one part of any paper at the cost of another part. The process of making excerpts, at best, has something of disagreeableness and of danger. Where that process cannot be avoided, it is well, at least, if its lever be not a preconceived theory. An Editor not of Froude’s own religious communion should scruple all the more to interfere in any wise with the witnesses. Such lines or pages as are here scored out are not inaccessible in their original forms. It will be seen that they are not deleted to favour any special plea, but are either somewhat irrelevant to the subject in hand, or a repetition of facts and impressions more succinctly stated in other accompanying papers. Where aught of moment is involved, the fullest and clearest expression of it is in every case allowed to carry the field: e.g., Dean Church’s apologetics concerning Froude’s so-called ‘Romanising’ will be found more satisfactory to the uneasy than the paler defence in the first Preface to the Remains. A broad selective principle has ruled the Editor also in minor matters: e.g., a poem of Froude’s own, imbedded in the text of an early review by Lord Blachford, or a poem of his great friend’s imbedded in an analysis by Mr. R. H. Hutton, are, though coveted, left where they are, and are not transferred to the main narrative sketch. A slight overlapping, as it were, is inevitable: what is super-serviceable sometimes serves more than one pen. Nothing written in English about Hurrell Froude which has colour and individuality, has been altogether passed by, though the present scheme is not in the least bibliographical. On the whole, there is set forth a richly varied testimony: comment buttressed on comment, sometimes, and contradiction against contradiction. Everything about the man calls for criticism, and gets it: his private examen of conscience, his verses, his letters, his traditional sayings, his ecclesiastical theory and religious practice; everything, in fact, except his dreaded arguments. These are conspicuously let alone by those who disapprove of them. They lurk, however, beyond the borders of parley, and they constitute the aggressiveness of one, who but for insistence on them, and whatever they imply, was essentially courteous and gentle. By his commentators

he is incessantly quoted: the ‘party of the second part,’ whoever may be writing, successfully holds the stage. It is always instructive to watch reflections of so simple and boyish, yet powerful a personality, on the complex surface of literary interpretation. We count Hurrell Froude’s a long-forgotten name; yet during the sixty-eight years since he died, more serious students than would seem at first thought likely, have felt for this fighting recluse true attraction, or the equally legitimate attraction of repulsion; and their number bids fair to increase.

‘Even as a broken mirror, which the glass

In every fragment multiplies, and makes

A thousand images of one that was,

The same; and still the more, the more it breaks.’

The apprehension of all he was, if not the whole truth about him, should be, in this synod of philosophical friends and deeply interested foes, no difficult thing to win and hold.

It may not be usual to treat a man of genius like an unglossed manuscript, and to set him forth impartially with all his variants. As dear Izaak says in his innocent-seeming irony, this is, perhaps, to impale him ‘as if you loved him.’ But a free hearing is good law and good art; diverging guesses, contrasted points of view, exercised by the competent, have their uses, especially in England; and some natures and motives bear analysis gallantly well. The reason, at bottom, for so catholic a treatment of Hurrell Froude, is that Hurrell Froude, with his singular detachment and sound humour, would not have disclaimed it: that is, if he had come to know that posterity would fain hear of him again. And there is but one conclusion to be drawn from the spirited discussions about him. As M. Henri Malo was pleased to write, not so long ago, of his historic hero: ‘En somme, quelle que soit l’opinion que l’on ait sur son compte, c’est une figure!’[3]

The sole purpose of this unconventional yet homogeneous volume is to show Froude, the mind and the man, in his inferential

completeness, and without primary reference to that application of his best-cherished principles which meant so much then, and which means so much now. Without primary reference, we say: yet to part him by one hair’s breadth from the Oxford Movement, who would, and who could? A book which aims at being not a disquisition, not even a biography, but simply a convenient rearrangement of obvious data for the study of a temperament, may plead its own voluntary poverty as a general extenuation. In the matter not of exegesis but of mere quantity, no reader will complain of too little!

The chronology of many of the footnotes has been compiled from the Alumni Oxonienses, the Registrum Orielense, and the Dictionary of National Biography. In a book of this nature, appealing chiefly to those who know by heart the golden commonplaces of the educated world, it has not been thought pertinent to ‘overset’ or verify the classical quotations.

Something may be added concerning the illustrations. William Brockedon, before he was famous, once started to paint a life-size head in oil of Hurrell, then aged about eleven. It was left unfinished, and is now in the possession of the young sitter’s namesake and nephew, R. H. Froude, Esq., of Bernstein, Newton Abbot, by whose kindness a half-tone ‘restoration’ of it serves as frontispiece to this book. Outside a casual pencil sketch, it is the only portrait at present known of Hurrell Froude; nor has it ever before been reproduced, save once as a small scratchy characterless detail of a Keble College panorama. The painting was unfortunately abandoned while in its half-chaotic condition: eyebrows and ears are but barely indicated; the entire background, the collar, a portion of the hair growing so wilfully on the large shapely head, remarkable then and always for its even convexity, are a mere disordered wash; and it was difficult to follow, and to fix by process after process, a vision of the beautiful boy, with his melancholy and his racial fire. No idealisation, as need hardly be said, has been attempted. Patience and sincerity, brought to a rather discouraging task, have succeeded, in some measure, in recapturing an imperfect

image, and in having it recognised (so far as a man can be recognised in a child), with gratified pleasure, by the one or two known to the Editor who are the enviable rememberers of Hurrell Froude. The reduction of the original head to an almost miniature size justified itself at once in the disappearance of many blemishes. The print from which the block was made is an outcome of the photographic skill and artistic feeling, now historic in England and beyond it, of Mr. Frederick Hollyer. The ‘casual pencil sketch’ just mentioned figures also in this book, and has in even higher degree the preciousness of a unique thing: for the reproduction is made directly from an unaltered original in a portfolio of 1832. Students of that period in England will recall Miss Maria Giberne, the ‘Queen of Tractaria,’ the animated, romantic, and loyal friend of the Newmans, who followed her art with long devotion, and became, later, Sister Maria Pia in the Visitation Convent at Autun, where she died at a great age. Of her, in her early prime, one who knew her well wrote:

‘[Maria Giberne] was always a most excellent talker and narrator, but her great power lay in the portraits she did in chalks. At a very short sitting, and even from memory, she would draw a portrait which was at least perfectly and undeniably true. I have heard her drawings criticised, and her drapery called conventional, but her faces, to my apprehension, were proof against all criticism. Perhaps they are better in outline than when filled up and tinted…. Her interest in the whole [Tractarian] circle was insatiable, and there was hardly anything she would not do and dare for a sight of one she had not yet seen.’[4]

Given, therefore, Miss Giberne’s ardour in the matter, and her frequently-recurring opportunities as a visitor, it would seem almost certain that she would not have let slip any chance of portraying so noticeable a luminary as Hurrell Froude, often absent, like herself, from Oxford, during 1831-1833, and away from it almost altogether afterwards. Her discovered sketch-books, preserved in the hands of relatives and friends, yield, so far, but a single page in which Froude appears.

She groups and labels him with other conspirators’ at a historic moment,[5] in the one Oxford Common Room which ‘stank of logic.’ Something in the too quiescent gesture of the graceful person ‘on the box,’ as well as in the nature of the circumstance, make one suspect that the whole was drawn not on the spot, nor from memory, but from hearsay at the time. Were such the case, the implication would be that Miss Giberne had a good prior knowledge of Froude’s face and figure, and even that she was not committing these to paper for the first time. This little drawing is the property of her nephew, George Pearson, Esq., of Manchester; it is owing to his courtesy and kindness that it is here made public.

The picture of Dartington Parsonage, the antique house in the vale three miles from Totnes, Devonshire, where Hurrell Froude was born, and where he died, is from a larger water-colour drawing by Arthur Holdsworth Froude, in the possession of his sister, the Baroness Anatole von Hügel. The Parsonage, in its mediæval simplicity, was first sketched by Archdeacon Froude, then the newly-appointed Rector, in 1799; this sketch yet exists on a fly-leaf of the Parish records. He at once rebuilt the whole west wing, planted shrubs and vines, and drained away the pond; but there were no other alterations until after his death and the removal of the family in 1859-60, when his grandson Arthur drew the house from memory. Even now, the porch, and everything to the right of it, upstairs and down, is practically the very same as in Hurrell’s time; elsewhere the gables have disappeared, and the tourelle has changed its place. The Parish Church (of fourteenth century work, like the Hall) is from an old negative by Messrs. Brinley and Son, of Totnes. This view from the south-west shows the low railing over the Froude vault, which lay in the angle of the porch, next the wall. The Church being taken down in 1878, the strong plain Tower was left alone and intact, standing sentinel over the dead; and the large slab shown in the foreground of the modern photograph, covering the burial-place of Hurrell Froude and of his kindred, is

as it looks to-day. The print of Oriel College great quadrangle is from a photograph copyrighted many years ago by Messrs. Henry W. Taunt and Co., of Oxford, and here used by their permission. The inner top tier of three windows next the angle of the Chapel marks the rooms occupied by Froude. They are on the second floor of Staircase No. 3, the door being at the right hand as one mounts the stairs. The beautiful Porch and the whole front have since been renovated, and the tall bold Regnante Carolo again runs around the ruined open stone-work parapet, shown in our illustration, which an Oriel man of the Thirties saw every day as he went in and out of Hall.

It remains only to thank the family of William Froude, Esq., and the Rev. Charles Martin, the present Rector of Dartington; the Rev. G. Kenworthy, Vicar of Bassenthwaite, whose generosity and knowledge have supplied the Editor with many biographical data of the Spedding family; the Rev. T. Herbert Bindley for authentic information about Codrington College; the Rev. J. Christie for much painstaking friendliness, and the use of a page of one of the Theta letters for a fac-simile; the Rev. G. A. Williams, and several other kind correspondents of Tractarian lineage, who have patiently answered inquiries. Lastly, a more intimate acknowledgment is especially due to the Rev. W. H. Carey, of SS. Michael and All Angels, Woolwich; for chiefly through the sense of his steady encouragement, based on an enthusiasm for Hurrell Froude, the Editor’s task, more than once interrupted and laid by, was pushed on to its completion.

Oxford, October, 1904

HURRELL FROUDE

I

SOME MEMORANDA OF HIS LIFE
AND OF HIS IDEALS

FAC-SIMILE SIGNATURE FROM A LETTER OF HURRELL FROUDE TO HIS FRIEND GEORGE DUDLEY RYDER ESQ., (AFTERWARDS REV.), 1832.

(By the kind permission Of the Rev. H. I. D. Ryder, D.D., of the Oratory.)

HURRELL FROUDE

I

SOME MEMORANDA OF HIS LIFE AND HIS IDEALS

THE persons who most compel our interest in this world are not often the great, exemplars of what we call intellectual eminence: they are rather the men and the women of genius. On that ground they win the eye. Vital and unexhausted spirits, under no subjection to results, can afford, if they choose, to die anonymous; and never having established a pact with their times, nor with Time at all, they are contemporary backward and forward as far as thought can reach. Of this strangely numerous company in England, though he be but

—‘a fugitive and gracious light

Shy to illumine,’

stands Newman’s early friend, Richard Hurrell Froude, the lost Pleiad of the Oxford Movement. Akin to some others, names earlier and later, ‘which carry a perfume in the mention,’ he left little to prove and approve himself. Such as he, in the pageant of eternity, are not the tallest harvesters with the most recognisable sheaves. Like Crichton and Falkland and Pergolesi, like Arthur Hallam and Henri Perreyve, he is known to history as it were by a smiling semi-private hint, or a sort of May-orchard coronal which the wind has no power to scatter, rather than by virtue of any personal innings in the complex game of life. He was a mere man of genius. His inheritance was richly varied: of mental currents possible in one cross-bred island, there could hardly be a more spirited blend. ‘The thinkers of the West,’ as an analytic pen has lately written,[6] ‘reveal a certain practical sagacity, a determination

to see things clearly, a hatred of cant and shams, a certain “positive” tendency which is one of the notes of purely English thought.’ Exact in the wider application, the sentence has an almost startling appropriateness when it is narrowed down to fit the one ‘thinker of the West’ (not in Mr. Ellis’s lists) with whom these pages deal. Never to maunder, never to mince matters, never to pet an illusion, never to lay down arms while there are ‘cant and shams’ to fight,—all that is very Devonian; and Hurrell Froude, true at every point, was true Devon in this. His ancestral Speddings, on the other hand, had imagination and a love of letters, and were ironic and opinionative after another fashion. They had also, for generation after generation, as an unexpected corollary, a strong turn for science, and even for mechanical science, as the less bookish Froudes, to offset their hard common sense, were restless and romantic lovers of the open air and of the sea. The shy, critical, solitary, but ardent and adventurous character which belonged not only to our particular Fellow of Oriel, but in some measure to all his nearest kindred, seems to have been inherited equally from the contrasted streams which ran in their blood. All Hurrell’s religiousness, all his poetry and fire and penetrative thought, came straight from his beautiful and highly intelligent mother, whom he lost just as he really came to know her, and whom he worshipped during the rest of his life. His stature, colour, and expression, as also his delicacy of constitution, he received through her.

The Speddings were Anglo-Irish, migrating during the sixteenth century to Scotland, then, early in James II.’s time, to Cumberland. John Spedding and his wife Margaret were seated at Armathwaite Hall, in Bassenthwaite parish, Keswick, when their second daughter Margaret, afterwards Mrs. Froude, was born in 1774. Her elder sister Mary, her brothers John, James, Anthony, and William (in order of their age), comprised with her, her father’s family; and she was but seven when he died. Armathwaite Hall was left in the hands of trustees, who so wasted it that when John Spedding, the son, came of age he found his patrimony gone, and resolved to leave the country to join the army, then in the thick of the

Peninsular War. Meanwhile, four miles away, at the head of Bassenthwaite Lake lay Mirehouse, the owner of which was Thomas Story, Esquire, a bachelor, attached to his Spedding neighbours. In the most opportune and romantic way, he made young John Spedding his heir, just in time to prevent his self-imposed exile, and in 1802 died, and was succeeded by him in the estate. It was thus that the Speddings, who had occupied Armathwaite Hall for over a century, came ultimately to live at the other end of the Lake. John Spedding married Miss Sarah Gibson of Newcastle. They lived to old age, and had a numerous issue. James Spedding, the distinguished scholar, the intimate friend of Tennyson, and leader of the famous Cambridge set ‘The Apostles,’ known afterwards in the world of letters as the vindicator of Bacon, was their third son. He spent most of his life (1808-1881) at Mirehouse, and is buried not far away, in the old churchyard of Bassenthwaite. He and his knew all the Froudes well; visits were constantly interchanged; and it was he who introduced James Anthony Froude, his cousin, and brother-in-law at one remove, as it were, to Carlyle. For James Spedding’s eldest brother, Thomas Story Spedding, married his cousin Phillis Froude, the second daughter of the household at Dartington.

To revert to the elder generation—Margaret Spedding, her own mother’s namesake, born, as we have seen, in 1774, was dearly loved at home for seven and twenty years; at that somewhat mature age (as it was considered in 1802), she married the Rev. Robert Hurrell Froude, Rector of Dartington in Devonshire. His own people were not less interesting, and even more ancient, than hers. Hurrells, an armigerous family, and Froudes, rising yeomen from Kent, had struck deep and wide roots in Devon soil at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. The second of these was probably a place-name, though there are those who derive it from the Icelandic frod, wise, not from the likelier Celtic ffrwd, a rushing stream.[7] We find the race numerous and active, and settled chiefly about

Kingston, and about Modbury, where in the year of Culloden, Richard Hurrell, gentleman, was married to Mistress Phillis[8] Collings. Their daughter, Phillis Hurrell, became the wife of Robert ffroud of Walkhampton, third son of John, to whom descended the Modbury manors of Edmerston and Gutsford; these two lived at Aveton Giffard, and are buried there in the Parish Church, where their monuments still exist. ‘Robert ffroud Armiger’ died young, four years after his marriage, which had for issue one son, and three daughters. Phillis the widow, a person of strong character, lived on for sixty-six years longer, and saw the grave opened, or opening, for nearly all her brilliant and fated grandchildren. Her babes, left fatherless in 1770, were Mary, Margaret, and Elizabeth; her son Robert Hurrell was a posthumous child. The latter was to rise to more than local eminence, known throughout an exceptionally long life as Rector of Dartington, and from 1820 on, as Archdeacon of Totnes in the diocese of Exeter.[9] He matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, in January 1788, aged seventeen, and in due course, in 1795, proceeded Master of Arts. He came from Denbury, of which he was already Incumbent, to his new parish of Dartington, in 1799. Many children were born in Dartington Parsonage to him and to Margaret Spedding his wife, of whom Richard Hurrell Froude, named for his paternal grandfather Richard Hurrell of Modbury, was the eldest. His birth was on March 25, 1803. Certain critics who disliked the aroma, real or imaginary, of the Oxford Movement, seemed to harbour, in after years, a special grudge against Hurrell for his Marian circumstances. It was, as it were, piling offence on offence that he entered the world on the Feast of the Annunciation, and consciously, votively belonged to the College of S. Mary at Oxford. He was privately baptized at home, and with his next brother, carried up the hill to be received in the ancient Church at the Hall gates (again S. Mary’s), on the 17th of April, 1805. Hurrell seems to have been from the first a stormy sort of child,

handsome, and odd, and adored by his relatives. Like the young Persians in their national prime, he learned ‘to ride, and to speak truth.’ He was sent early to the Free School at Ottery S. Mary, where he lived in his master’s house. This was the Rev. George May Coleridge, nephew of that poet who has made classic the lovely neighbourhood to all readers of English. He survived until 1847, dear to all the Froudes. (Perhaps it is not generally known that Mr. James Anthony Froude, then in deacon’s orders, was responsible for Mr. Coleridge’s funeral sermon at S. Mary Church, Torquay.) Hurrell was as happy at his first School as a dreamy rebel boy always subject to moods and to home-sickness could well be. Everything was done, at any rate, to keep him happy. His own memories of the green village, with its great minster and its bright stream, seem to have been pleasant ones. A lady who was but a young child during his last months at Dartington recalls his frank smile at drawing in a lottery a picture of Ottery Church, which she had coveted, lotteries not being abhorred then, as now, by Christian folk. Had the winner known of the little girl’s envy, he would certainly have parted with his treasure on the spot; for he was a born de-collector. Hurrell began, almost as soon as he could hold a pen, to draw well, and to write agreeable letters. At thirteen he was sent to Eton. A year or two before, that is, in or about 1814, he sat for his portrait to that lovable interesting man and capable artist, William Brockedon, Archdeacon Froude’s particular protégé and most grateful friend.[10] It may have been begun as one of many thank-offerings; for some reason, it was left unfinished. Brockedon was a patient person, by all accounts. Perhaps wild little Master Froude, for all his innocent looks, may have been, in the immortal words of Pet Marjorie, ‘whot human nature cant indure.’ The Archdeacon, too, was critical, and thought his friend happiest in sketch-work, and that to finish, with him, was, sometimes, to over-refine. Who could have foreseen that the abandoned canvas was long to take on

unique accidental value to persons then unborn who should be interested in his sitter? For though that childish sitter was to live over a score of years longer, and endear himself to men of a certain school of thought for ever, there was no discoverable hand but William Brockedon’s to tell them how he looked. There was not known until the other day a single other portrait, not so much as a silhouette, of a draughtsman associated with so many, both at home and at College, who could draw.

DARTINGTON PARSONAGE, AS IT WAS THROUGHOUT HURRELL FROUDE’S LIFETIME
From a water-colour drawing by Arthur Holdsworth Froude

The boy, with his half-indolent, half-clairvoyant way of studying, and his high spirits in and out-of-doors, got on fairly well at Eton,[11] though his years there seem to have made no great impress on his mind and character. He developed, perhaps, too slowly, and too much by instinct and intuition, to be much harmed or helped by a Public School. Winthrop Mackworth Praed was one of his memorable contemporaries there; Edward Bouverie Pusey, though in an upper Form, was another.[12] Like Pusey, Hurrell had a talisman and a safeguard in the love of a pious mother. The extreme natural sympathy between them was heightened by the boy’s fickle health, and his unconscious appeal for continued care. One experience of early invalidism and its results, lasting for some time, drew from Margaret Froude an oblique comment or protest which is enough to make one love and admire her womanliness. She drew up a letter to an imaginary correspondent, which was really intended for her tall son himself. It sounds wholly like a page from the Spectator, in Steele’s tenderest whimsical vein; and it would be an ungenerous lad (her Hurrell certainly knew not how to be ungenerous) who would not be touched by the genuine foreboding sorrow breathing through it. Whether it was ever actually left in his way is doubtful; a passage in his Journal may imply that he knew nothing of it until after her death. Its date lies early in 1820.

‘Sir,—I have a son who is giving me a good deal of uneasiness at this time, from causes which I persuade myself

are not altogether common; and having used my best judgment about him for seventeen years, I at last begin to think it incompetent to the case, and apply to you for advice. From his very birth his temper has been peculiar: pleasing, intelligent, and attaching, when his mind was undisturbed, and he was in the company of people who treated him reasonably and kindly; but exceedingly impatient under vexatious circumstances; very much disposed to find his own amusement in teasing and vexing others; and almost entirely incorrigible when it was necessary to reprove him. I never could find a successful mode of treating him. Harshness made him obstinate and gloomy; calm and long displeasure made him stupid and sullen; and kind patience had not sufficient power over his feelings to force him to govern himself. His disposition to worry made his appearance the perpetual signal for noise and disturbance among his brothers and sisters; and this it was impossible to stop, though a taste for quiet, and constant weak health, made it to me almost insupportable. After a statement of such great faults, it may seem an inconsistency to say that he nevertheless still bore about him strong marks of a promising character. In all points of substantial principle his feelings were just and high. He had (for his age) an unusually deep feeling of admiration for everything which was good and noble; his relish was lively, and his taste good, for all the pleasures of the imagination; and he was also quite conscious of his own faults, and, untempted, had a just dislike to them. On these grounds I built my hope that his reason would gradually correct his temper, and do that for him which his friends could not accomplish. Such a hope was necessary to my peace of mind; for I will not say that he was dearer to me than my other children, but he was my first child, and certainly he could not be dearer. This expectation has been realised, gradually, though very slowly. The education his father chose for him agreed with him; his mind expanded and sweetened; and even some more material faults (which had grown out of circumstances uniting with his temper) entirely disappeared. His promising virtues became my most delightful hopes, and his company my greatest pleasure. At this time he had a dangerous illness, which he

bore most admirably. The consequences of it obliged him to leave his School, submit for many months to the most troublesome restraints, and to be debarred from all the amusements and pleasures of his age, though he felt, at the same time, quite competent to them. All this he bore not only with patience and compliance, but with a cheerful sweetness which endeared him to all around him. He returned home for the confirmation of his health, and he appeared to me all I could desire. His manners were tender and kind, his conversation highly pleasing, and his occupations manly and rational. The promising parts of his character, like Aaron’s rod, appeared to have swallowed up all the rest, and to have left us nothing but his health to wish for.—After such an account, imagine the pain I must feel on being forced to acknowledge that the ease and indulgence of home is bringing on a relapse into his former habits. I view it with sincere alarm as well as grief, as he must remain here many many months, and a strong return to ill-conduct, at his age, I do not think would ever be recovered. I will mention some facts, to show that my fears are not too forward. He has a near relation, who has attended him through his illness with extraordinary tenderness, and who never made a difference between night and day, if she could give him the smallest comfort, to whom he is very troublesome, and not always respectful. He told her, in an argument, the other day, that “she lied, and knew she did,” without (I am ashamed to say) the smallest apology. I am in a wretched state of health, and quiet is important to my recovery, and quite essential to my comfort; yet he disturbs it, for what he calls “funny tormenting,” without the slightest feeling, twenty times a day. At one time he kept one of his brothers screaming, from a sort of teasing play, for near an hour under my window. At another, he acted a wolf to his baby brother, whom he had promised never to frighten again. All this worry has been kept up upon a day when I have been particularly unwell. He also knows at the same time very well, that if his head does but ache, it is not only my occupation, but that of the whole family, to put an end to everything which can annoy him.

‘You will readily see, dear Sir, that our situation is very

difficult and very distressing. He is too old for any correction but that of his own reason; and how to influence that, I know not! Your advice will greatly oblige

‘A very anxious parent,
‘M. F.

‘P.S.—I have complained to him seriously of this day, and I thought he must have been hurt; but I am sorry to say that he has whistled almost ever since.’

The kind relative, who was so ungraciously repaid for her goodness, was his aunt Miss Mary Spedding, the eldest of all her family, devoted to her only sister Margaret, and to that sister’s memory; the baby brother, who must have conceived of the wolf as a perseveringly disagreeable animal, was James Anthony Froude, then nearly two years old. A year later, on February 16, 1821, Margaret Froude breathed her lovely soul away, and was laid to rest next the south porch of Dartington Church, where her children’s feet passed in and out on Sunday mornings over the flagstones, between the first spring flowers. ‘The Froudes were eight in family,’ wrote Isaac Williams, on a happy visit long after. On the morrow of their bereavement, this was the junior roll-call in Robert Froude’s desolate Parsonage:

Richard Hurrell, aged not quite eighteen.
Robert Hurrell, aged sixteen years, ten months.
John Spedding, just fourteen.
Margaret, aged twelve years, nine months.
Phillis Jane, nearly eleven and a half.
William, aged ten years, three months.
Mary Isabella, not quite seven and a half.
James Anthony, under three.

Hurrell Froude was admitted Commoner by the University of Oxford and matriculated at Oriel College, within a few weeks of his mother’s death, on April 13, 1821. His delicate health had kept him back: his father and his brothers all matriculated at seventeen. Robert Froude, ‘Bob,’ was then entering upon his Sixth Form at Eton. Little Margaret began at once, under guidance, her tender and long continued task of comforting her father and mothering the motherless. She

found no time to seek her own happiness, till her marriage in 1844,[13] when only her father and herself, William and Anthony, survived. John Spedding Froude died in 1841, thirty-four years old, and, like his two elder brothers, unmarried. Of Phillis, William, Mary, and (James) Anthony, Hurrell’s own annals will have more to say. Beside one of the leafy winding roads of Dartington rose afterwards a little grey almshouse, and over the doorway a stone tablet with this inscription:

‘Impensis Mariae Spedding
pia recordatione sororis suae
Margaretae Froude
haec domus
in perpetuam eleemosynam
extructa est.
Agellum circumjacentem in
eosdem usus erogavit
Henricus Champernowne.

A.D. MDCCCXXXV.’

It must have been building during the last year of Hurrell’s life, and no doubt with his ‘very managing sort of mind’ he worked into it some of his rather primitive Gothic theories. There still is the home which Mary Spedding’s love built, where age and poverty have privacy and peace, and roses at every window, and thankful sweet remembrance of human kindness, as in the ancient time.

Away from home, and without his mother, Hurrell fell silent enough; and his sadness would have hurt and corroded him, had it not been for the exquisite friendship which sprang up between him and his tutor at Oriel. That tutor was John Keble. It is pleasant to think of these two, with their spiritual foreheads and strong chins, in that fashionable Georgian College full of decanters and gold tufts, and ‘rows in quad.’ No one in all England whom Hurrell Froude in his youth was likely to know could have so fostered in him, even by his unconscious presence, whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. According to Mr. J. A. Froude’s Short Studies account, there was no very high level of supernatural religion at Dartington Parsonage. ‘My father,’ he says, ‘was a High

Churchman of the old school. The Church itself he regarded as part of the Constitution, and the Prayer-Book as an Act of Parliament which only folly or disloyalty could quarrel with.’ This theory perfectly harmonised with the wonted order and general practice fixed for a century before. The Royal Arms, flanked by the lamentable monuments of all the local gentry, dominated the chancel; the Squire’s pew had its fat cushions, and a stove in the middle, and was walled away from any view of the ignored Communion-table chastely covered with green baize; plebeian hats were piled in the Font, and there was a ‘national custom of bending forward in Church,’ as an almost too fond concession to Christian etiquette. Truthful observers have given us the whole catalogue in print; and it has been corroborated on every side within living memory. The finer spirits who did not turn infidel must have felt all this ugliness to be dreary and hideous enough, though perhaps necessary to feed the sacred spite against the Middle Ages, so Popishly ‘dark’ with candles and incense-coals, pageants and bright Alleluias, brought into the service of God. But to no one in the Church of England before the Oxford Movement, did it seem an abnormal state of things. Nor was it so, dogma being dead. When poor Hurrell’s decided opinions had formed, he must have felt himself in some domestic difficulty. Ritual was nothing to him except as the language of belief: scant where that is feeble, full where that is steadfast and profound; how it can be anything else to man is not quite apparent to an inquiring mind. As he never lived to work out his beliefs very far, he had no drastic changes to suggest in the local ordinances, but he must have dedicated some uphill work to the excellent parent whom he truly reverenced, and ended by making over into a valuable defender of sacramentalism. The numerous clerical progeny of Squire Western, worthies like the famous fox-hunting ‘Păsson Freüde’[14] of his own blood, in another part of Devon, remained faithful to the Constitution and Parliament, to pay up for the Archdeacon’s partial defection.

Hurrell’s attitude towards the mother for whom his heart ached, and towards those who won his fealty at home, discovered

itself day by day in letters to Mr. Keble, a record of occasional thoughts, and the private journals which he kept for his own conscience to whet itself upon. Sacred as these pages are, they have been printed before in the opening volume of his Remains; and they prove how very far he was from being a mere intellectual theoriser, oblivious of daily duty and common ties. His strife for perfection, a difficult and joyless one at best, began with these. Some excerpts, scattered or consecutive, will serve to show his sincerity and thoroughness: how his thoughts ran; how he fed upon his mother’s memory; with what lowliness he prayed for the divine help, and with what merciless constancy he learned to discipline himself, arraign his own motives, and master the bitter and sovereign science of self-knowledge.

—‘Yesterday I was very indolent, but … my energies were rather restored by reading some of my mother’s journal at Vineyard. I did not recollect that I had been so unfeeling to her during her last year. I thank God some of her writings have been kept: that may be my salvation; but I have spent the evening just as idly as if I had not seen it. I don’t know how it is, but it seems to me that the consciousness of having capacities for happiness, with no objects to gratify them, seems to grow upon me, and puts me in a dreary way. Lord, have mercy upon me.’

—‘Spent the morning tolerably well; read my mother’s journal and prayers, two hours: I admire her more and more. I pray God the prayers she made for me may be effectual, and that her labours may not be in vain, but that God in His mercy may have chosen this way of accomplishing them; and that my reading them so long after they were made, and without any intention of hers, may be the means by which the Holy Spirit will awaken my spirit to those good feelings which she asked for in my behalf. I hope, by degrees, I may get to consider her relics in the light of a friend, derive from them advice and consolation, and rest my troubled spirit under their shadow. She seems to have had the same annoyances as myself, without the same advantages, and to have written her thoughts down, instead of conversation. As yet they have only excited my feelings, and not produced any practical result.’

—‘Read my mother’s journal till half-past twelve: here and there I think I remember allusions. Everything I see in it sends me back to her in my childhood: it gets such hold of me that I can hardly think of anything else. It is a bad way to give a general account of oneself at the end of a day: people at that time are not competent judges of their actions; besides, everyone ought to be dissatisfied with himself always: it is better to give a detailed account like my mother’s by means of which I may hereafter have some idea of what was my standard of virtue, rather than my opinion of myself.’

—‘O Lord, consider it not as a mockery in me, that day after day I present myself before Thee, professing penitence for sins which I still continue to commit, and asking Thy grace to assist me in subduing them, while my negligence renders it ineffectual. O Lord, if I must judge of the future from the past, and if the prayers which I am now about to offer up to Thee will prove equally ineffectual with those which have preceded them, then indeed it is a fearful thing to come before Thee with professions whose fruitlessness seems a proof of their insincerity! But Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and knoweth my thoughts, independently of the actions which proceed from them. “O that my ways were made so direct that I might keep Thy statutes! I will walk in Thy commandments when Thou hast set my heart at liberty.”’

—‘Read my mother’s journal. I hope it is beginning to do me some serious good, without exciting such wild feelings as it did at first.’

—‘I must fight against myself with all my might, and watch my mind at every turning. It will be a good thing for me to keep an exact account of my receipts and spendings: it will be a check on silly prodigality. I mean to save what I can by denying myself indulgences, in order to have wherewith I may honour God and relieve the poor.’

(To Keble, but never sent.)

—‘Perhaps you may think it very odd, but this summer[15] has been the first time I have had resolution to ask for the papers which they found of my mother’s after her death. The

most interesting to me are some prayers, and two fragments of [a] journal, one for the year 1809, I think, and the other in 1815. The prayers seem to have been a good deal later.’

(Not sent either.)

—‘All this summer I have been trying a sort of experiment with myself, which, as I have had no one to talk to about it, has brought on great fits of enthusiasm and despondency, and being conscious at the time of most contemptible inconsistencies, both in my high and dejected feelings, I set to work to keep a journal of them, to answer the purpose of a sort of conversation between my present and my future self: an idea which I got from reading an old journal of my mother’s, which they found after her death, and which I never could make up my mind to look at till this summer.’

—‘I have confessed to myself a fresh thing to be on my guard against. Every now and then I keep feeling anxious that by bringing myself into strict command, I may acquire a commanding air and manner, and am in a hurry to get rid of the punishment of my former weakness. I sometimes try to assume a dignified face as I meet men, and am never content to be treated as a shilly-shally fellow. I must not care the least, or ever indulge a thought, about the impression I make on others;[16] but make myself be what I would, and let the seeming take its course; or, rather, be glad of slights, as from the Lord. This will be a hard struggle. O Lord, give me strength to go through with it!’

—‘I felt as if I have got rid of a great weight from my mind, in having given up the notion of regulating my particular actions, by the sensible tendency I could perceive in them to bring me towards my τὸ καλόν. I had always a mistrust in this motive; and it seems quite a happiness to yield the direction of myself to a Higher Power Who has said: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”’

—‘It seems to me a great help towards making myself indifferent to present things, to conjure up past events, and distant places and people before me: things that happened at Eton, or Ottery, or in the very early times of childhood. I felt again to-day as if … the secret world of new pleasures and wishes to which I am trying to gain admittance, is a mere fancy. I must be careful to check high[17] feelings, [as] they are certain to become offences in a day or two, and must regulate my practice by faith, and a steady imitation of great examples: in hopes that, by degrees, what I now have only faint and occasional glimpses of may be the settled objects on which my imagination reposes, and that I may be literally hid in the presence of the Lord.’

—‘I might not indeed be too penitent, but penitent in a wrong way. Abstinences and self-mortifications may themselves be a sort of intemperance: a food to my craving after some sign that I am altering. They ought not to be persevered in, farther than as they are instrumental to a change of character in things of real importance: … how hard it is to keep a pure motive for anything!… I will refrain, rather, by forcing myself to talk, and attend to the wants of others [at table] than by constantly thinking of myself.’

—‘Made good resolutions about behaviour when I go home. Never to argue with my father, or remonstrate with him, or offer my advice, unless in cases where I feel I should do so to the [Provost?]. For even if it subjects me to unnecessary inconvenience, it would do so equally in both cases; and, if I would submit to it in one case through pusillanimity, I ought in the other for a punishment. It would be a good way to make opposite vices punish each other so, and be likely to cure both in time. In the same way to behave to Bob and my sisters as I would to [College equals?]: to comply with their wishes, and not interfere with their opinions, except where I would with the latter. I must try at home to be as humble, and submissive, and complying, as I can; and here as resolute and vigorous, till I get to be the same in all places and all company. I do not preclude myself from making amendments in this resolution, till I have left Oxford.’

—‘It has turned out a beautiful day, and fasting will cost but little pain. I have just been shocked at hearing that ——’s acquaintance, Mr. ——, had shot himself yesterday. How strongly it reminds me that I understand little of the things invisible which I talk and think about, when the most terrible occurrences having taken place quite close to me affect me so little! I could work up my feelings easy enough, but it is enthusiasm[18] to anticipate in this way the steady effects of moral discipline; even supposing both effects are, whilst they last, the same. I could not help crying violently just now, on reading over my mother’s paper. The ideas somehow mixed up together, and forced on my thoughts what a condition I may be in as to things unseen, and yet be unconscious of it. O God, keep up in my mind a feeling of true humility, suitable to my blindness and the things that I am among.’

—‘I have just been reading over my account of the time I spent at home last summer…. The great root of all my complicated misdeeds seems to have been (1) A want of proper notions respecting my relations to my father. (2) A notion that I was a competent judge how to make other people happy, by giving a tone to their pursuits. (3) A craving after the pleasures which I admire. (4) Arrogant pretensions to superiority. (5) A wish to make my conduct seem consistent to myself and others. The first is the main point, and when I have carried that, the rest will all go easily. The only way we can ever be comfortable is by our all uniting to make his will our law, and what little I can do towards this will be better accomplished by example than by presumptuous advice…. Nor do I see how I can so well repress my arrogance as by always keeping in mind that I am in the presence of one who is to me the type of the Most High.’

(To Keble.)

—‘Among the other lights which have been gradually dawning on me, one from following the guidance of which I hope I may derive great comfort, has made me conscious of the debt of reverence that I owe my father: not only in that, bearing his sacred name, he is proposed to me as a type of the Almighty

upon earth, but that he has, in his high character, so demeaned himself as to become a fortress and rock of defence to all those who are blessed with his protection. Under his shadow I will, by God’s blessing, rest in peace, and will endeavour for the future to esteem his approbation as the highest earthly honour and his love as the highest reward. I feel in this resolution real peace; and while I am conscious of endeavouring to act up to it, will try, as you advise me, to quiet my gloomy apprehensions.’

—‘O my God! I dare no longer offer to Thee my diseased petitions in the words by which wise and holy men have shaped their intercourse between earth and Heaven. Suffer me, with whose vileness they can have had no fellowship, to frame for myself my isolated supplication. O my Father, by Thy power I began to be, and by Thy protection Thou hast continued to me my misused existence: yet I have forsaken Thee, my only Strength, and forgotten Thee, my only Wisdom. I have neglected to obey Thy voice, and gone a-whoring after my own inventions. As soon as I was born, I went astray and spake lies. I loved the delights which Thou hast given me more than Thee who gavest them; and I dreaded the might which Thou hast delegated to man more than Thee the Almighty…. Yet, praised be Thy holy Name, Thou hast not even thus utterly left me destitute; but with hideous dreams Thou hast affrighted me; and with perpetual mortifications Thou hast disquieted me; and with the recollections of bright things fascinated me; and with a holy friend Thou hast visited me. Thou hast sought Thy servant while astray in the wilderness; Thou hast shown me the horrible pit, the mire and clay in which I am wallowing: O mayest Thou, of Thy great goodness, set my feet upon a rock, and order my goings. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Turn Thy face from my sins, and put out all my misdeeds. Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. O give me the comfort of Thy help again, and stablish me with Thy free Spirit…. Bless, O Lord, with Thy constant favour and protection that high spirit whom, as Thy type upon this earth, Thou hast interposed between me and the evils I

have merited. Fill him, O Lord, with the fulness of Thy grace, that, running with patience the race which has been set before him, he may finish his course at Thy good time with joyfulness, and find a rest from his labours in the portion of the righteous.’

—‘I will be cautious about talking of myself and my feelings: what I like; whom I admire; what are my notions of a high character; how few people I find to sympathise with me on any subject; and many other egotistical, mawkish, useless matters, about which I have suffered myself to prate. Also, I will avoid obtruding my advice, and taking high grounds to which I have no pretensions.’

—‘Just now, at breakfast,[19] I felt the inconvenience of not omitting an oath in a story I told of Sheridan. I felt directly that I lost ground, and should be unable to make a stand, if conversation were to take a turn I disliked. I must be watchful and strict with myself in this respect: for, if I comply with my father’s wishes, and enter freely into society, I shall have much harder work to fight off my old shuffling vanity, and shall be drawn, from not feeling my own ground, into foolishness and flash, and everything that is disgusting.’

—‘I used to speculate on the delight of keeping fasts upon the river in fine weather, among beautiful scenery, rather than in my dull rooms at Oxford; but last Friday was a real fine day, yet I did not at all turn it to this account. Though I ate little, it was something very different from my Oxford fasts, and still more so from what I then used to picture to myself, when I should get home. I waste time in preparing boats, and thoughts in speculating on schemes for expeditions, and for improving our appointments. Also, I observe other bad effects resulting from my misconduct, which I cannot but regard as signs that good spirits are deserting me. The other evening I had an argument with my father, almost in a sort of tone which I used to feel ashamed of last summer, and which, in the Christmas vacation, I think I was not even tempted to; and when I caught myself getting untuned, it cost me a [severe[20]] effort to check myself; nor was it till the next morning that all the effects of it subsided, and I

felt quite good-natured and humble again. In this fight I was greatly helped by the experience of former conflicts, and recollecting the ways I had caught myself in self-deceit, so that it gives me some hope as well as humiliation. I pray God that He will not suffer all my feeble efforts to be wasted, and prove quite ineffectual, and that He will enable me to lie down to-night with a better conscience.’

—‘Just now, in riding home from Denbury,[21] I got arguing with my father about the little chance anyone has of doing good, in a way rather inconsistent with our relative condition; yet, when I thought I was going rather too far, could hardly convince myself that, at any particular moment, it was incumbent on me to stop. It is this self-deceiving disposition that I am afraid of.’

—‘I will brace myself and keep my attention on the alert on this S[alcombe?] expedition, by a vow about my food: I will make my meals as simple as I can, without being observed upon; will take no command upon myself, but obey my father’s instructions to the utmost of my power; will try to make no objections or propositions unless called upon; and that no one may be able to put me out of the way [of self-denial] everyone shall have theirs, however disagreeable they may seem to me.’

—‘We returned to-day, and on reading over these resolutions, which I called a vow, I find I have acted very poorly up to them. I believe they have operated as a sort of check upon me in some respects, that I have been less of an epicure and less of an interferer than I should have been else. But yet, quite at starting, I suggested, when my father proposed going ashore, that it would take a longer time than he calculated on: but this was merely a suggestion. And on one of the evenings when we were by ourselves, I argued about people going to Church in a way very inconsistent with our relative situations; neither was I quite cordial in my acquiescence with propositions of my father’s about minor excursions at S[alcombe?] and feel as if I had pressed unpleasantly on him some of my opinions about tides, and names of places.’

—‘Yesterday, I was talking to [Phill?] about [Peg?[22]]; and among other things, when I said how considerate she was about everybody’s wants, and how she was always on the lookout for an opportunity to relieve them, I said (and have reason enough to say it) that things of that sort did not come into my head. But I am afraid I must confess that I was a little annoyed at [Phill? allowing] that she did not think they did! I cannot accuse myself of having been so insincere as to have laid a trap for a compliment; but I was not quite prepared to find that my negligence was such as to obtrude itself on the observation of those who would always make the best of one. O God! give me grace to look on this as a warning voice from Thee, and let the remembrance of it brace my energies for the future…. Also, I yesterday gave way to a covetous inconsistent wish for a beautiful colt that we happened to see, and which my father had half a mind I should get for my own. I feel all these selfish wishes crowding on me, and have no clear decided rule by which to check them. I think I will always ask myself, when I wish for an elegant superfluity, what business I have to be so much better off than my sisters, and will not allow myself anything I can avoid till I have got them all the things they are reasonably in want of.’

—‘Teach me to be ever mindful of the wants and wishes of others, and that I may never omit an opportunity of adding to their happiness; let each particular of their condition be present with me, what they are doing or suffering. I am most fearfully deficient in this mark of a child of God. Protect me from all covetous desires of the pleasant things which money can procure: the D[enbury?] cottage, the new dining-room window, nice furniture, equipage, musical instruments, or any other thing, in order to obtain which I must lessen my means of benefiting others.

—‘I have done many things to-day that I ought to be ashamed of. For instance: I said to the [Provost?] I had not examined carefully an analysis that I had hardly read a word of. I have assumed, too, a harsh manner in examining. I feel too anxious to show my own knowledge of the

subjects on which I am examining. Was very inattentive at morning Chapel, and not sorry to find that there was none in the evening. I believe the day before yesterday I made a bungle in examining W[illy] in Euclid, which made him appear to be doing wrong while he was quite right, but did not discover it in time to rectify it by confession (which I hope I should have done).’

The youth who wrote much else thus singularly and severely of himself, had an almost fierce sincerity. At an early hour, he made up his mind to be in his strength, what many men are said to be in their weakness, ‘nobody’s enemy but his own,’ and he carried out both clauses implied in the contract. Neither at Eton nor at Oxford, with opportunities by the score, did he ever make a single ‘influential’ personal friend; to no position or emolument did he ever aspire, though he was to give unremitting and precious labour to what he believed to be the best cause in the world. ‘Froude and I were nobodies,’ said Newman, two lifetimes later, with a touch of whimsical pride. Like a child of Socrates, our philosopher would fain see how many things there are which he could do without; like a child of Seneca, he would fain enjoy this life, with the zest possible to those alone who are always ready to leave it. Enough of this Journal, most practical in all its self-searching. It appears to concern itself with trivialities only to those who do not realise how relentless is the ascetic spirit, and how small a quarry it will still hunt when all the tigers are met and exterminated. As was said of a greater than Hurrell Froude: ‘Ce diable d’homme a toujours été en se perfectionnant. Il serait devenu honnête homme, si on l’eut laissé vivre.’

When Mr. Keble went down to his curacy at Southrop, at the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1823,[23] Hurrell went with him to read for his B.A. degree, which he took in December of that year. The summer was to him, as to one

of his companions there, Isaac Williams, the turning-point in his career. In those tranquil fields and winding roads and the solemn little village Church, where he found ‘a man wholly made up of love, and religion a reality,’ Hurrell began to see the Last Things: he never could forget the place, the person, and the occasion which meant so much to him in the Providence of God. His third companion, Robert Wilberforce, ‘did not feel towards Keble,’ wrote Isaac Williams, ‘as we did at that time, having been brought up in an opposite school.’ In all the fresh and brave happinesses of nature and of grace which were round Keble like an aureole wherever he went, Hurrell brightened and strengthened visibly.

‘You are my Spring: and when you smile, I grow.’

He learned from him to follow conscience and to fear applause. As soon as he parted from Mr. Keble, their long correspondence began, and the home-loving pupil was proud indeed when the ‘first man in Oxford,’ as Newman enthusiastically called him, came on a visit to Dartington. We know from recent testimony of a delightful pen[24] how dear the neighbourhood became to Mr. Keble, and how often he would wander away from the animated household of his friends to the fourteenth-century priest’s-house hard by at Little Hempston, an almost unique survival, with its small quadrangle, its hall and solar, of Chaucer’s time. The lovely old Vicarage, in its still secluded situation, had taken captive Hurrell’s twenty-year old fancy, as a letter of 1823 to Mr. Keble shows.

‘I will pledge my own peculiar veracity to the following statement: The situation is, I am confident (and on this matter experience has peculiarly qualified me to judge), [by] far the most beautiful place in the world, the focus of irradiated perfection, the favoured haunt of romance and sentiment, the very place which, if you recollect the circumstance, you taxed me with a disposition to romanticity for encomiasing, when I informed you that I had destined it for my κρησφύγετον, where, unmolested, flumina amem silvasque inglorius. The Parsonage is situated in a steep and narrowish glen, which intersects a long line of coppice that overhangs

the Dart for the length of nearly a mile, and rises almost perpendicularly out of the river to the height of about two hundred feet. The stream there is still, clear, and very deep; on the opposite side is Dartington; and a line of narrow, long, flat meadows, interspersed with large oak and ash trees, forms the bank of the river. The steep woods on the Little Hempston side are in the form of a concave crescent (thereby agreeing with Buckland).[25] From the Parsonage to the river is a steep descent through a small orchard; at the bottom of which, on turning the corner which the glen aforesaid makes on its north side with the course of the stream, you come at once on a sort of excavation, of about half an acre, which, terminated by an overhanging rock, forms a break in the line of coppice aforesaid. In this said rock young M. found the hawks’ nests. I think they build there every year. On the opposite side, i.e. the Dartington side, is what was formerly a little island, but now no longer claims that proud title, in the oaks of which I am in hopes we shall soon have an heronry, as they haunt there all the summer. After this I should not so utterly despair of success, if I felt less interested in the event;[26] but as it is, I can hardly hope for so great a gratification.’

Several months later, he is still in the descriptive vein.

‘When I came home I found things looking most dismal. My father had cut all the laurels to the roots, in hopes of making them come up thicker. A field almost outside the windows, which had been put in tillage, was ploughed so extremely ill that we were afraid it would be forced to be tilled with turnips (Dî talem campis avertite pestem!) instead of clover…. The copse also, which overhung the river by the Little Hempston rocks, was in great part gone, “and the place thereof knew it no more.” I hope the rest may be spared.’

The laurels he had planted gave the energetic Archdeacon some trouble. In his old age he had them all swept away, and made a needed if unromantic improvement in the outlook of the beautiful old house. Hurrell’s implicit differences with his

‘knowing, quick, and handy’ father, so many of whose best qualities he shared, hinged laughably often on such things as the culture of trees and the make and management of boats. In all, he did his best to become what the epitaphs of the time call ‘an humble obsequious son.’

Hurrell took only a second class in Classics and Mathematics (disappointing and astonishing everyone who knew him) during 1824. But he had exactly the sort of mind which, sooner or later, would come to grief with any curriculum.

To the Rev. John Keble, March 29, 1825.

‘… Be so good as to write a sermon on “flumina amem sylvasque inglorius,” for the benefit of my father, who objects to our having a four-oar given us, as infallibly tending to debilitate and torpify the mental faculties! I am afraid it is not in my stars to be ever contented; for I confess I do not feel that serene felicity which I pictured to myself last October as my destiny; though my delight is not impaired as to the misery I have escaped. I am sure the ghosts of those who have taken a degree at Oxford will require a double portion of Lethe before they begin “in corpora velle reverti.”

‘March 31. P.S.—I wrote enclosed the day before yesterday, but, as you will perceive, incapacitated it for going by the post without a cover; so I waited for a frank. And, as I am become so prudent as not to like wasting paper, you are indebted to this circumstance for an elongation of my epistle. I don’t recollect whether I told you that I have been reading Clarendon, for which, though I skipped over some parts, I feel much veneration. I am glad I know something of the Puritans, as it gives me a better right to hate Milton,[27] and accounts for many of the things which most disgusted me in his not-in-my-sense-of-the-word poetry. Also, I adore King Charles and Bishop Laud!… You prosed me once for not sending

regards, remembrances, compliments, etc., so let everyone choose which they like best, as I commit to you an assortment of each kind for distribution.

‘“Tuque vale, sedesque juvet meminisse meorum,

Heu, nunquam rediture.”’

To the Rev. John Keble, May 13, 1825.

‘Αἰνότατε: I have been long intending to thank you for your benevolent instructions, which (I don’t know whether I ought to be ashamed or not in confessing it) answered a purpose different from what they were intended for; viz., they convinced me and (what was more to the point) my father, that I knew so little about the matter, and had so little time left, that it was no use to proceed. It certainly was no small satisfaction to me to have so good an excuse for giving up what I had exhausted the entertainment of, and had nothing but the laborious to come. Also, the weather has been so very beautiful this spring, and the delicious blue sky, with hardly a cloud on it for six weeks, so very tempting, that it was hardly possible to help being idle. But somehow my conscience rather misgives me, and what with admonitions now and then from my father, and my lately having taken up with reading sermons, I am become “as melancholy as Moorditch or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe”; so that upon the whole I think I must come to you to be prosed and put into a better way…. By the by, I am now officiating as ethical instructor to B[ob?], in which capacity I have been much humiliated at finding how little I know about the matter; but it makes me get them[28] up, which perhaps I should never have done else. I do not think them at all less prosy and long-winded than I used, and I would bet Bishop Butler against all the ‘stotles in the world. Among other things I am also becoming something of a florist, and something of an architect, in which latter I make some proficiency. I am a powerful coadjutor (though I say it that should not say it), in the completion of D[enbury], which bears a different aspect from when you saw it last. It will be a pretty monastic-looking erection, and if we could but make it old, and buy a ghost or

two, would be somewhat sentimental. For, thanks to my grandmother’s[29] perverseness, she would not have a new house except in the shape of an old one repaired, which superinduced the necessity of so many crooked little passages and such an irregular exterior, that my father had an excuse for doing what would else have seemed fanciful. Talking about architecture, a new town[30] is going to be built down by Torbay, which is to cut out Brighton and every place. The ground where it is to stand is perfectly unencumbered with houses, and covered with trees, so that there is every advantage at starting; and all will be done on a general plan, so that the buildings shall as little as possible interfere with each other. If you know anyone that wishes for a delightful sea-residence, send him there. You must know you narrowly escaped having a poetical effusion from me the other day. I was out in so magnificent an evening; but being, as you know, a man of few words, I found that by the time I had made my verses scan and construe, they would be so remote from an effusion, at least in the quality of being effunded, that it was better to be contented with a prosaic statement: viz., that coming home from Little Hempston the other evening after sunset, and having with some difficulty discovered and scrambled into my boat, which was moored under an old stump at the bottom of the woods, as I proceeded on my course down the river, the sky gradually assumed a portentous appearance, and distant flashes of lightning, growing gradually more distinct, began at regular intervals. Things however are not so constituted as to allow the sublime to amalgamate with the comfortable: according to the decrees of Fate, the storm which had lingered in the upper regions till I had got so far on my way home as to be out of reach of shelter from Dartington House, now came down with such violence as to save me the trouble of running at any rate, by convincing me that whether I was out five minutes or fifteen I should be in an equally bad case. The thunder got very loud, and the lightning was so green and brilliant, that I could see the stiles and gates, and even their latches, like the spectres of the things from which “nox abstulit atra colorem.” Sometimes the flashes lasted for nearly a second, and dazzled me so

that after they were passed I could make no use of the twilight at all. Having got thus far, I feel in the awkward situation of having told a story without a point, and feel inclined to resort to the usual remedy, and apply to my invention to help me out of the scrape with a marvellous conclusion. Perhaps however you may be contented with a moral: so here goes. As good never comes unalloyed with evil, so that very evil often serves to give it a relish which it might otherwise be destitute of. I could not have reckoned this as an adventure, if I had not been forced to change my clothes when I came home.’

To the same ‘holy friend’ for whom Hurrell privately says on his knees his heartfelt thanksgiving, he writes often, from the first, in a mood of bantering and almost irreverent freedom.

To the Rev. John Keble, 1824.

‘… Now I proceed to vindicate my character from the unwarrantable aspersions you have been pleased to throw upon it. Be it known then that since the first of May I have read the four first books of Herodotus, three of Ethics, two of Thucydides, Œdipus Tyrannus, Eumenides, Ἱκέτιδες, and a book of Homer; and all this not carelessly, but with Scapula and Matthiæ. And though there are several posing places in the Æschylus and Herodotus with which I shall in course of time bother you, still upon the whole I flatter myself that in a short space I shall be at least equal to Peter Elmsley,[31] and I would advise you to prepare the examining masters for the reception of such a luminary…. My father, I must assure you, has received no favourable impression of your moral organisation from the injudicious exposure which you made in your last letter. But I will urge the matter no further; … the shortness of the time during which your ἐνέργεαι have been discontinued may not yet have allowed the annihilation of the ἕξις. I shall rest in hope that this timely admonition may awaken you to a sense of your duty, and reinstate your perceptions of the ἀληθὲς in their full vigour. “Thine by yea and nay, which is as much as to say, as thou usest him.”’

Mr. Keble was settled in 1825 as Curate in sole charge of Hursley, Hampshire.

To the Rev. John Keble, Aug. 16, 1825.

‘… Suaviter ut nunc est inquam: but it was not so with poor [Williams] in the packet, being that he was sick all the way from Portland Head to Plymouth Sound; and was so completely miserable that he would not be spoken to, and kept on groaning out that he would give all he ever expected in the world to be on shore. By this unfortunate circumstance he was prevented from seeing the sun rise over the watery element in the very act of “pillowing his chin upon an orient wave,” and from bearing testimony (which I can do) that there is nothing the least sublime in the mere fact of being out of sight of land, and having nothing but the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky. But what was most melancholy of all, he was unable to get a glimpse of all the glorious coast of the south promontory of Devonshire…. Next day we came upon Southampton, while it was under one of the most imposing magnificent effects possible: a rainbow, lost in a dark cloud which was raining as hard as it could pelt, was resting one of its ends on the woods: and the sun on the waters, and the spires, made the misty smoke that was rising up from the town, quite imposing and sentimental. However, my complacency was much alloyed by the tantalising sight of the beautiful yachts, with their glittering sails, skimming along in the breeze, which had just started up after the violent rain which had fallen, and the melancholy Heu, non mea rushed on me with irresistible force.’

How well he loved a boat! He complains, in one entry of his Journal, that the thought of boats distracts him insufferably during his prayers.

Hurrell was asked to say his say about The Christian Year, then in manuscript. He seems to have been inclined to begrudge the fact that Keble had set himself to write not as a poet for poets, but as a challenging voice to ‘earth-drudging hearts.’ That he appreciated the lasting charm of the book is

quite apparent from the singularly apposite quotation applied to it in the second letter on the subject.

To the Rev. John Keble, Sept. 10, 1825.

‘About the poems—it is really too ludicrous for a fellow like me to sit down deliberately to criticise the taste and philosophy of a production of yours: so that I have no inclination to expose or commit myself, by detailing to you my remarks on particular passages. There are, as you may suppose, many places which, in fun, I would show fight about; and there is something which I should call Sternhold-and-Hopkinsy in the diction, of which I began to note down the first instances I met; but, finding it go through, I concluded it was done on a theory. But though I am not quite such a fool as to think my opinion worth offering in point of criticism, it may not, perhaps, be quite useless to confess it as a matter of fact, with which you may begin an induction as to the probable good you may do by publication. I confess, then, and not without some shame, that you seem to me to have addressed yourself too exclusively to plain matter-of-fact good sort of people … and not to have taken much pains to interest and guide the feelings of people who feel acutely, nor to have given much attention to that dreary visionary existence which they make themselves very uncomfortable by indulging in, and which I should have hoped it was the peculiar province of religious poetry to sober down into practical piety. I know all this may be great nonsense, may be even humbug; for long experience has convinced me how much I can cheat myself as to my real feelings. But that you may see that it has not been concocted since, but was the impression made on me while reading, I will extract a note which I made … I suppose I meant that things like Gray’s Elegy, which turn melancholy to its proper account, by pointing out the vanity of the world without telling us so, seem to me more to answer the purpose. And now I will cease making an ass of myself!… I am half-conscious that the same sort of objections might be made against the Psalms; and though I cannot but think that they will make your poems less generally liked and read, I am far from confident that it may not be better,

upon the whole, for those who attend to them as a religious duty.

‘I can hardly shut up without telling you of such an interesting set of fellows that we heard of in our peregrinations. They were sixteen French fishermen and three boys, who had all come over, in one boat, to get bait on the English coast, and were kept there ten days by the wind: all that time they sat upon the deck knitting stockings and nightcaps; and, when Sunday came, they were just so far out at sea that the people on the coast could hear them singing the Roman Catholic service so beautifully, and in the evening they came on shore, and danced, out of mere jollity, for an hour. They were such grateful fellows, that a gentleman on the coast who had done them some kindness, could hardly get rid of them without his giving them some commission to do for him in France, i.e. to let them smuggle something over for him; and, when they could not remove his scruples as a Justice of [the] Peace, they caught him an immense fish, and were quite disappointed that he would not accept it as a present.’

The great mass of Keble’s letters to his pupil and friend have disappeared: but we have the answer promptly sent to this, and written with his own winning humility. ‘For your telling me exactly what you think about [the verses] I shall hold you in greater honour as long as I live.’ He goes on, sweetly and sagaciously, to explain that The Christian Year but aimed at helping ‘the plain and good.’[32] It will be remembered that the archpriest of letters, Mr. William Wordsworth, once offered to go over The Christian Year, with a view to correcting the English. To that height Hurrell could not rise.

To the Rev. John Keble, Dec. 6, 1825.

‘“Sir, my dear friend,” you cannot tell how much I am obliged to you for your benevolence to my last letter, but that does not make me the less a fool for having expressed myself so; and what provokes me most of all is that I did not give myself fair play by not writing till my opinions had settled;

for as far as my memory goes, I think they are now undergoing a revolution, and that if I were to see the pottery[33] in question again, I should think quite differently of it. There is something about them which leaves (to use the words of our friend Tom Moore)

‘“A sad remembrance fondly kept

When all lighter thoughts are faded.”

And though I cannot account for the fact, I have been much more sensible of this since a re-perusal of Genesis.—I wrote the foregoing not long after the receipt of your letter, but have been such a dawdle that I have not been able to collect materials for finishing it: and the circumstance which now at last helps me out is a melancholy one, no other than the decease of our friend and companion Johnny Raw:[34] who was taken off, some days since, in the staggers. There was something peculiarly doleful in the poor fellow’s exit; and there was a sort of dreariness diffused over all its circumstances, which set it off with almost a theatrical effect. As B[ob] says, it would have not been so much if he had wasted away by a long illness, or if he had heard of his death at a distance; but to have been using and admiring him till within a few days of his decease, to have watched all the stages of his rapid illness, seen him bled, given him his physic (which seemed to distress him very much, though all along the pain he suffered was evidently very great), and, after all, to have got up at two o’clock in the night, when the crisis was to take place, and come into the stable only a minute after his death, where we could just see him, by lantern-light, stretched out on the straw:—were incidents not calculated to excite pleasure. Add to this, it was one of those shivering cold stormy nights which make me feel as if I and the people with me were the only human beings in the world: a fact, by-the-by, which I am not yet sufficient psychologist to account for. And the next day, when we went out to bury him, the weather was just the

same, and there was nothing to excite one cheerful association. Also, it was somewhat staggering to the speculatively inclined, not to be able to discover one single reason why he should not be able to gallop about as well as ever. He was evidently in good condition, his flesh hard, and his limbs sound: and why I should be able to walk any better than he, was more than I could elicit. We buried him under an elm tree in the lawn, and nailed his shoes to it for a monument.[35]

‘… My father has found the Εἰκὼν [βασιλική] among some old books, and I have been reading it. It puts me in mind of a verse in this morning’s Psalms: “Thou shalt hide me privily by Thine own presence from the provoking of all men, Thou shalt keep me secretly in Thy tabernacle from the strife of tongues”; which seems to point out the clearest and most beautiful instance of the moral government of God being begun on earth. I should like to know the Hebrew of the verse before: “O how plentiful is Thy goodness, which Thou hast prepared for them that trust in Thee even before the sons of men.” For if “before” means “in the presence of,” then David is drawing the conclusion I want; but I am afraid it must mean “greater than falls to the lot of the rest of mankind.” … Please to look, when you are in a humour for it, in Medea, 705, where Ægeus says, εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ δὴ φροῦδος εἰμὶ πᾶς ἐγώ. The commentators cited by Elmsley have fumbled much about it, and some of them I do not understand; but may it not mean: “For as to my name continuing in my posterity, in that respect I am clean gone.” If εἰς τοῦτο will bear this signification, it is certainly prettier than as it is commonly explained. I like Hecuba far better than Medea…. Another interval has elapsed, and the leaves, which had held out surprisingly hitherto, have almost totally disappeared, and now we may reckon winter to be fairly set in. I wish I could write verses to perform the obsequies of this delicious summer, the like of which will probably never visit the abodes of mortals again….’

The little implied joke, celibate and Greek, on his own name, is not the least adornment of this charming letter.

At the outset of 1826, Hurrell found at least one modern book to his liking. This was the Fragments in Verse and Prose, by a Young Lady, Miss Elizabeth S—— with Some Account of her Life and Character, by H[enrietta] M[aria] Bowdler, a new edition of which, in two volumes octavo, had just appeared. Elizabeth Smith of Burnhall near Durham, the Oriental scholar, was born in 1776 and died in 1806. Our present standard reference, the Dictionary of National Biography, which highly commends her self-won learning and its methods, adds that ‘her verses have no merit, and her reflections are of the obvious kind, gracefully expressed.’ But the reflections do not seem obvious to some readers, save inasmuch as at first all simple and profound little discoveries of the sort seem so: which is ever their highest praise. The book is but poorly representative, and badly put together: it certainly would give no clear idea, to our own more exacting public, of a personality full of goodness and charm, nor of a remarkable mind with a dozen hobbies, and not one affectation.

To the Rev. John Keble, Jan. 12, 1826.

‘Δαιμόνιε: As I am conscious of being one of those imbecile-minded people who one day admire a thing as if they could never think of anything else, and soon after cease to think of it at all, I must write to you while a little book that I took up the other day accidentally continues uppermost in my thoughts. It calls itself Fragments in Verse and Prose, by a Young Lady; and struck with the sentimentality of the title, I took it up to laugh at it; nor did I find anything in the preface to do away with my preconceived opinion. But on opening the book at random, among some fragments extracted from her private meditations, I began to like her most extremely. The mention of Piercefield,[36] and the initials Miss S., made me remember your having told me of a Miss Smith that lived there, while we were scrambling up the Windcliff. I am sure if you had admired her half as much as I do, you would not have let me go till we had hunted out every corner that she mentions. There is something to my mind very peculiar in all the turn of her thoughts,

and those half-metaphysical, half-poetical speculations which almost put me in mind of my mother. Yesterday I mentioned the book to a person who I was surprised to find knew a great deal about her, and from whom I was still more astonished to hear that I myself knew very well indeed her intimate friend Miss H[unt], to whom most of her letters are addressed….’

And again, a little later, winding up an intimate letter in Latin to Keble, there is more of this pleasant heroine-worship, coupled with some feeling analysis and amusing self-portrayal. Hurrell’s repugnance to things German were a foregone conclusion, had he never expressed it.

‘… I could not find the places you referred me to in Miss Smith, but am happy to find that we sympathise in the extent of our admiration, if not in the sources; though indeed, I am willing to believe, both. But as for old Klopstock, I cannot read about him and his wives;[37] and am rather horrified at Miss S[mith’s] having taken so much trouble about him, or any other sentimental old German. What makes me admire Miss S[mith] so excessively, is more than I can give any intelligible account of: she either does not admire, or is not acquainted with my favourite books; and those that she fancies she admires (for I am sure she does it only in ignorance) are my inveterate enemies. Neither could I fix upon any passages in her own writings which would seem to justify me if I quoted them. But somehow I seem perfectly certain I know her intimately, and that I can trace the feelings in which all she says and does originates; and all this is so consistent, as far as it goes, with what I have imaged to myself as the archetype of human perfection, that I have invested her, in my imagination, with all its attributes….

‘Lloyd’s[38] immense catalogue of books, that he recommends as necessary, has frightened me beyond measure: but I am

getting to be of your opinion, that to be fully occupied is almost necessary, in order to get through life with tolerable ease and comfort….’

Says the Editor of the Newman Correspondence, in entering upon the annals of the year 1826: ‘The Oriel election and Fellowship was this year a momentous one to Mr. Newman, as bringing him into intimacy with the friend whose influence he ever felt powerful beyond all others to which he had been subject.’ Newman writes of the election to his mother on March 31, 1826, in terms of convinced enthusiasm which are not unlike Crabb Robinson’s after encountering for the first time the youthful William Hazlitt. ‘By-the-bye, I have not told you the name of the other successful candidate:[39] Froude of Oriel. We were in grave deliberation till near two this morning, and then went to bed. Froude is one of the acutest and clearest and deepest men in the memory of man. I hope our election will be in honorem Dei et sponsæ suæ ecclesiæ salutem, as Edward II. has it in our Statutes.’ The Oriel electors had their own standards, and gloried in them. Fellowships depended hardly at all on the technical and the prescribed; indications of the scope and accuracy of acquired knowledge passed for next to nothing; but what did count, in Oriel’s golden days, was a man’s whole momentum and equilibrium, his relationship to the intellectual life, his mastery over his own faculties: ‘not what he had read, but what he was like.’ Originality, distinction, was the cachet, and Oriel College was the first in Oxford to throw open her unhampered Fellowships to the entire University. Like Whately, Thomas Mozley, and Newman himself, Froude who stood only moderately high in the books of the University examiners, had been preferred before candidates who were double-firsts. He took, as was but natural, an even more rapturous pleasure in the event than Newman had done. He wrote to Keble, when he was steadying himself under the impact of a lasting good fortune:

‘My dreamy sensations have at length subsided, and I cannot think how I could have made myself such a fool as to be so upset! But it was altogether such a surprise to me, and I knew it would delight my father so much, that I could not stand it all. I do not mean that when the news was announced to me I did not contemplate the possibility of it; for you must know that I am the most superstitious of the species, and that on the first day of the examination I had a sort of indescribable sensation from which I augured the event. But such a confused prophesying as this is so very different from a sober expectation that it served rather to increase than to diminish my surprise at its being realised.’

And again, turning from what he thought an almost unnatural success, he seeks refuge in his own special pun. ‘Crede mihi,’ he confides to Keble on the eve of Candlemas, ‘idem sum ille φροῦδος qui utroque pede claudicans e scholis evasi: me in nulla re scholastica ex illo tempore usque ad hunc diem sentio profecisse.’ In ‘Empty-head’ limping with both feet out of the Schools, we are to recognise an allusion to Hurrell’s unforgotten double-second class. He was too humble to see that for a Romany rye of his sort, a double-second class was really a quite extravagant toll to pay to University conventions.

Oriel soon became a hotbed of revolution, as the consequence of her anti-academical processes of selection. Within two years, troubles began, and Froude, with Newman, R. I. Wilberforce, and Dornford, the other public Tutors, took up and for a long time maintained, against the settled paganism of the College, their own ‘fierce’ views of their duty towards undergraduates. Of this duty Froude and Newman had a particularly clear conviction. Keble had struck, and struck strongly, the pastoral note as early as 1818, and developed it in a letter to Sir J. T. Coleridge.[40] On the other hand, the Provost and the administrators held that intercourse between Tutor and pupil should be a routine of lectures only, and not that and a cure of souls beside. The antagonism lasted for nearly four years, during which Froude’s deep friendship with Newman grew up, and was perfected. The end came with

Hawkins’ express refusal to sanction the further supply of pupils to the would-be spiritual directors who so quietly defied him. They had ‘led the last struggle for the ancient quasi-parental and religious character of the College Tutor.’[41] As the pupils they had went up for degrees and left the University, they fell quite idle, in that respect, by 1831, and with all their smouldering zeal and moral fire within them, the way was open for another onset of the Laudians which was destined to affect the consciences not alone of young Oriel, but of the nation and the age.

Froude’s allotted rooms were directly over Newman’s, in the Chapel angle of the Great Quad of Oriel College. The new Fellow did not, as such, come into residence until after the Easter vacation; during the following month, April, we find him still luxuriating in Devonshire and plunging deep into abstract metaphysics. ‘I have been taken with a fit of writing,’ he confesses to Keble. ‘I am happier than I ever was at Oxford, far: but that is not saying much.’ Apparently, he had posted manuscripts for criticism, and received it as gratefully and as combatively as usual. ‘I am infinitely indebted to you,’ he writes, ‘for your expeditious attention to my concern, and will try my best to set to rights the places you row [about]. However, I still maintain that my end is both relevant and true and my puzzle-headed antithesis a good one; but I bow my head in implicit confidence, as far as practice goes. Distinctions and refinements are growing on me, and I am all in a maze; and it is delightful to have the shadow of a great rock in a weary land to which I may turn for temporary shelter. If I had a year more, I could not make it at all to my satisfaction; so I must make the best of it.’

His note-books for this year and the next are full of the contemned ‘distinctions and refinements.’ In trying to beat out his conceptions of moral growth (a thing he refused to recognise in himself), he jots down some striking and arresting thoughts. Two or three which lie metaphysically not far apart, must suffice for transcription. They show the

coherence, the synthetic power with which Froude’s philosophy knit all worlds into one.

—‘For whatever cause the great Author of Nature contrived that resemblance (as it appears to us) which subsists between the part of His dominions of which He has given us a consciousness, and that other part with which we are acquainted only through our understanding, it seems calculated to assist our conceptions of the one to observe what passes in the other…. The business of our life seems to be to acquire the habit of acting as we should do if we were conscious of all that we know…. It is delightful to see things turn out well whose case seems in some sort to represent to us our indistinct conceptions of our own. Animals fainting under the effect of exercise, and then again recovering their strength which that very exercise has contributed to increase; the slow and, uncertain degrees in which this increase is effected, and yet the certainty in which it is effected: the growth of trees sometimes tossed by winds and checked by frosts, yet, by the evil effects of these winds, directed in what quarter to strike their roots so as to secure themselves for the future, and by these frosts hardened and fitted for a new progress the next summer:—in things of this sort I am so constituted as to see brethren in affliction evidently making progress towards release.’

—‘Some people imagine that there is something blasphemous in the supposition that a finite creature can be conscious in two places at once. This is so far from being true that even our own experience contradicts it. Perhaps there is some absurdity in the very idea which attributes a place to consciousness, or the things capable of it. With regard to ourselves, there is nothing to show us where we are conscious (though most people suppose the conscious thing is somewhere within the body), or that we may not be with equal propriety said to be conscious, or, in other words, to be, wherever anything is of which we are conscious. It seems to me that the question where we are, is one not of fact, but of degree; and that the only facts which make us suppose we are where our body is, give us likewise the same reason for supposing that in the same sense we sometimes are far away from the body.’

—‘Yesterday, before breakfast, while the vacancy produced

by fasting was still on me, and I was reading the Psalms, and craving for a comprehension of the things which I could only look on as words, and was worked up to such a pitch that I felt trying to see my soul, and make out how it was fitted to receive an impression from them,—Merton bell[42] began to go; and it struck me (I cannot tell why) that if such a trifle as that could give me such a vivid idea, my soul must be a most intricate thing; and that when senses were given to the blind part of it, what things would those appear, the apprehension of which I was struggling after! This is as near what passed in my mind as I can find expressions to shape my memory by. This blindness of heart is what, by habit and patience, it is our work practically to remove. We are to shape our souls for its removal, by making it in harmony with the things invisible.’

These passages mark a great point of divergence between the writer and the ‘religious genius’ with whom his memory is identified to all generations. It is something of an anomaly, even, to find the young Froude, and not the young Newman (rather the less practical of the practical pair), developing so strong a habit of purely speculative thought; but it was that which gave him his silent leadership. He combined with his turn for abstractions (yet with scorn shared with Newman for ‘formulas which antedate the facts’) an unexpected power of philosophical application of scientific ideas. All these half-mystical gymnastics of the reflective faculty are going to tell in 1833 and after, when the hour of action strikes, and when, by his already gathered impetus, Hurrell Froude is going to dart ahead in a still level flight, like a gull’s. He will seem external, as if talking more than he thinks, talking somewhat to the bewilderment of those others who can hardly think for his talking. He will be gay; he will be glib; he will pass care-free amid the sweat of horses and men, simply because of these long hard mental vigils, pen in hand, up Oriel Staircase No. 3, while he is hearing Merton bell, and trying to see his soul.

To Keble, who was still at home during the spring of 1826, Hurrell confides impressions of the Newman who had

already conceived so lofty an opinion of him, and had probably not taken pains to conceal it: the Newman who dearly loved, to the last, to be ‘disvenerated.’ Many important Fellows of Oriel, such as Arnold, Hampden, Jelf, Jenkyns, Pusey, were absent from Oxford: hence they lack mention in our critic’s roster.

To the Rev. John Keble, May 25, 1826.

‘I should like to detail to you our [College] proceedings, but no striking features occur to my mind at present; so I will favour you with my general impressions. [Whately?][43] is the only one with whom I have got to be at all intimate; he is not the least of a Don, and I like him very much indeed. [Davison?] is a person for whom I have a very great veneration: but he is such an immense person that I hardly dare bring myself in contact with him.[44] [Newman] is, to my mind, by far the greatest genius of the party, and I cannot help thinking that, sometime or other, I may get to be well acquainted with him: but he is very shy,[45] and dining with a person now and then does not break the ice so quickly as might be wished. I venerate [Davison?] but dislike him: I like [Newman] but disvenerate him. Old [Wilberforce?][46] is very funny, good-natured, and, I think, very much improved. And now for my ill-fated inconsistent self; I have been trying to be

diligent, and have been horribly idle; trying to be contented, and yet constantly fidgety; trying to be matter-of-fact, and have nearly cracked myself with conceited metaphysics. This last is principally attributable to Lucretius, whom I have been reading with considerable attention, and intense admiration; I shall very soon have finished him, as I have got on some way in the Sixth Book. In the end of the Book, about the mortality of the soul, there are some magnificent extraordinary reflections on our longings for something indescribable, and beyond our reach; on our having affections which have no adequate object, and which we long to forget and smother, because we cannot gratify them: [reflections] which make a striking preface to Bishop Butler’s sermons on the Love of God.’

June 15, 1826, was the five hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Oriel College. Perhaps the observance of it served to stimulate Hurrell’s filial piety and his spontaneous regard for the past. Few Fellows of Colleges, then or since, ‘supinely enjoying the gifts of the Founder,’ as Gibbon says, would have offered, after such an occasion, this private prayer, found among Hurrell’s papers:

—‘Almighty God, Father of all Mercies, I beg to offer Thee my deep and unfeigned thanks for all the blessings which Thou hast bestowed upon me; but in addition to those of Thy favours which I enjoy in common with all mankind, I more particularly bless Thy Holy Name for those of which I partake as member of this College; for the means Thou hast given me of daily sustenance, and of a continual admission to Thy house and service, through the pious charity of holy men of old. I bless Thee, O Lord, in that Thou didst put into their heart the desire of erecting to themselves a memorial, and of leaving to posterity a great example in the foundation and endowment of a seminary of religious learning; and I pray Thee that, as it has fallen to my lot to succeed to this their institution, I may fulfil my part in it as I believe they would approve if they could be present with me; that I may not waste in foolish or gross indulgences the means afforded me of obtaining higher ends; or allow myself to consider as my own that time which I receive their wages for dedicating to Thy service, by the

advancement of useful learning, and adorning the doctrine of God our Saviour. But more especially do I beg of Thee to accept my thankfulness for those merciful dispensations of Thy Providence which affect my lot in particular. That it has pleased Thee to bring me into the world under the shadow of my holy mother, in the recollection of whose bright society Thou hast given me, as it were, a consciousness of that blessedness which Thou hast taught us to look for in the presence of Saints and Angels. Also, that my lot has been so cast that I should fall into the way of one[47] whose good instructions have, I hope, in some degree, convinced me of the error of my ways, and may, by Thy grace, serve to reclaim me from them; with whose high friendship I have most unworthily been honoured, and in whose presence I taste the cup of happiness.’

The correspondence with Keble continued implicitly confidential at all times. But Hurrell writes freely at the close of his first Long Vacation as Fellow, and after his return to Oriel, of his scruples and self-dissatisfactions and aspirations: ‘thoughts that do wander through eternity.’

To the Rev. John Keble, Oct. 14, 1826.

‘It will seem rather pompous to announce my determination not to rise till I have got a letter written to you; but unless I start with some such resolution, I shall not be able to get one written at all. I have made three attempts to write … but all of them ran off into something wild, which upon reflection I thought would be better kept to myself. The fact is, that I have been in a very strange way all the summer, and having had no one to talk to about the things which have bothered me, I have been every now and then getting into fits of enthusiasm or despondency. But the result has been in some respects a good one, and I have got to take a very great pleasure in what you recommended to me when we were together at F[airford], the evening before I left you our first summer, i.e. good books; and I feel I[48] understand places in the Psalms in a way I never used to. I go back to Oxford with a determination to set to at Hebrew and the early Fathers,

and to keep myself in as strict order as I can: a thing which I have been making ineffectual attempts at for some time, but which never once entered my head for a long time of my life….

‘I wish you would say anything to me that you think would do me good, however severe it may be. You must have observed many things very contemptible in me, but I know worse of myself, and shall be prepared for anything. I cannot help being afraid that I am still deceiving myself about my motives and feelings, and shall be glad of anything on which to steady myself. Since I have been here I have been getting more comfortable than I had been for a good bit, from the society of I[saac][49] and P[revost][50] whom I get to like more and more every day…. We were to have wandered over North Wales together, but have been obliged to relinquish that scheme for this time, and perhaps it is a good thing, as far as I am concerned, to have a less exciting life for the present. I have had one bit of romance, viz., a walk early in the morning up the Vale of Rydal to Devil’s Bridge. The W[illiamses] wanted us to ride, but I thought I should remember it better by walking…. I shall always like scrambling expeditions as long as I can recollect ours up the Wye. Those few days seem like a bright spot in my existence; or perhaps it would be a more apt similitude to compare it to what you quoted as we were going in the boat to Tintern: “The shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”

‘I daresay you will think this letter rather strange, but it cannot do me any good to bottle everything up; besides, I think there is no pleasure in letters which do nothing but detail matters of fact. I should have liked much better to have seen you; but as I suppose there is no chance of that for some time, I must make the best of it. When I said that I had taken to liking good books, I did not mean that I had read many. I have read over and over again Bishop Taylor’s Holy Living

and Dying, but till I came here I had not gone farther; since, I have read five sermons of Bishop Wilson, one on the History of Christianity, and the others on Profiting by Sermons; also most of Law’s Serious Call, about which I remember what you said to me three years ago.’[51]

To the Rev. John Keble, Nov. 5, 1826.

‘It may seem an odd sort of thing to say, but I got from your letter something more like happiness than I have known since my mother died. Since that time it seems as if I had been ἄθεος ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ; but I hope I may yet get right at last. It is a great comfort to find so many expressions in the Psalms like “O tarry thou the Lord’s leisure,” as they serve to keep up the hope that, weary and unsatisfactory as are my attempts to be religious, they may in time “comfort my heart.” And now I can talk to you about myself, I feel a sort of security against bewildering my mind with vague thoughts, which I did not know where to check, because I could not get anyone to sympathise with them at all.

‘I have borrowed Mr. Bonnell’s Life,[52] and have got about two-thirds through it. I did not at first like the plan you recommended to me about reveries, as I had been directing all my actions with a view to fitting myself for realising my reveries. But it is a wretched unsatisfactory pursuit, for besides that it does not seem to have any real religion in it, I have often felt as if I had lost myself, and that I was acting blindly, without a drift. It is much better to give up all notion of guiding myself, and “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added.” I beg your pardon for putting before you the roundabout fantastic methods to which I have been resorting to arrive at

a plain simple truth that ought to have come at once; but perhaps they may serve to show the state of my mind better than any direct description I could give. It is very frightful to see people like Mr. Bonnell so alarmed about themselves, and expressing so strongly the wretchedness of their moral condition. It seems as if, to a fellow like me, it must always be presumptuous not to despair. The evening before last I was much struck with a thought in the beginning of Hooker’s Preface to the Ecclesiastical Polity, about not permitting thoughts to pass away as in a dream. It seems as if people might make so much more out of their lives by keeping records of them….

‘I will write you down some horridly-expressed verses which call themselves to the tune of “Allan Water” and “Rousseau’s Dream”; the first sketched in autumn, 1825, but undergoing changes for a long time, poor as is the result; the second written at W[illiams’s]. I have not shown them to anyone, and they may give you a sort of guess at the things my mind has been running upon.’

‘On the Banks of Allan Water’ was his favourite air.

[‘The Fashion of this World Passeth Away.’]

‘Ere the buds their stores deliver,

Have ye watched the springtime gay?

Have ye seen the sere leaves shiver

In an autumn day?

Have ye loved some flower appearing,

Tulip, or pale lily tall,

Day by day its head uprearing,

But to mourn its fall?

Have ye on the bosom rested

Of some friend that seemed a god?

Have ye seen her relics vested

In their long abode?

With the years that ye have numbered,

With the flowers that gaily blow,

With the friends whose sleep is slumbered,

Ye shall perish too.’

[Heaven-in-Earth.]

‘Oh, can it be that this bright world

Was made for such dull joys[53] as ours?

Dwells there not aught in secret furled

‘Mid Nature’s holy bowers?[54]

Is it for naught that things gone by

Still hover o’er our wondering mind,

And dreamy feelings, dimly high,

A dwelling-place within us find?

No: there are things of higher mould,

Whose charmèd ways we heedless tread;

And men even here a converse hold

With those whom they shall meet when dead.

Lord of the World, Almighty King,

Thy shadow resteth over all:

Or where the Saints Thy terrors sing,

Or where the waves obey Thy call.’

To this productive year belong also some haunting unfinished lines which might bear for a title The Summons. Of course none of these three poems of Hurrell’s appeared, later, in Lyra Apostolica; nor elsewhere than in the Remains.

‘To-night my dreary course is run,

And at the setting of the sun,

Far beneath the western wave

I seek my quiet grave,

Amid the silent halls of Fate,

Where lie in long and shadowy state

The embryos of the things that be

Waiting the hour of destiny.

I hear thy magic voice;

I hear it, and rejoice….

To-morrow: ere the hunter’s horn

Has waked the echoes of the morn….’

Froude at this time was associating a good deal with Blanco White, the Anglicised Spaniard and ex-priest who came to Oriel, aged fifty-one, when Tyler left it, and deeply interested Oriel men with his knowledge of the scholastic philosophy.

For some three years he was in great repute among them: his mental gifts were invalidated to them, later, by his aimlessness and instability. To his practical acquaintance with the Roman Breviary, often demonstrated in his own rooms, after dinner, to Froude, Newman, Pusey, and Wilberforce, Hurrell owed much, especially in conjunction with the able lectures on liturgical subjects being delivered by Dr. Lloyd.

Hurrell’s most intimate letter of all those addressed to Keble, beating and surging with the pathos which is inseparable from a young man’s interior life, ends sadly and bravely on Jan. 8, 1827:

‘I am glad of your advice about penance, for my spirit was so broken down that I had no vigour to go on even with the trifling self-denials I had imposed on myself; besides, I feel that though it has in it the colour of humility, it is in reality the food of pride. Self-imposed, it seems to me quite different from when imposed by the Church; and even fasting itself, to weak minds, is not free from evil, when, however secretly it is done, one cannot avoid the consciousness of being singular…. I have not much more to say, and when anything comes over me, will put it down on a large sheet, and send it off when it is full. I am so very unequal to my feelings, that sometimes I suspect all to be hypocrisy; but the tide has by this time so often returned after its ebbing, that finding myself again on the dry land does not make me so much doubt the reality of all His waves and storms which have gone over me.’

To his dear Robert Isaac Wilberforce, an approaching guest, Hurrell indites on the same day a more mundane theme:

‘I must prepare you to find me a great humbug about cock-shooting; for, though I will not recede from my assertions concerning the pre-eminent qualifications of our woods in that line, yet, as our sporting establishment does not go beyond the bare appointments for what Bob calls hedge-popping, the vicinity of the cocks will serve no other purpose than to make you feel more acutely the disadvantages of a connection with such unknowing people.’

His Tutorship was not an unmixed enjoyment to him, after taking his M.A. Of it he writes thus seriously, humbly, and characteristically:

To the Rev. John Keble, Oct. 23, 1827.

‘Perhaps it may amuse you to hear something of my proceedings in my new line of life. I have six Lectures in all: three each day…. I have now got through two days and seen the general aspect of affairs, and as yet no liberties have been taken with me, to my knowledge: however, this is the thing against which I endeavour to arm myself, and from which I expect a fruitful harvest of moral discipline. I look upon it as one of the best opportunities which can be given me to put my elements into order and harmony. It is a quick and efficacious refreshment to me to think of the south-westerly waves roaring round the Prawle after our stern, or the little crisp breakers that we cut through, when you cruised with us off Dartmouth Harbour. Somehow or other, without having exposed myself that I know of, in any flagrant way, there remains upon my mind a more vivid impression of my incompetence than I expected to await my entrance into the office. I feel called on to act a part for which neither my habits nor my studies have fitted me. I am, and always have been, childishly alive to the pain of being despised, and I cannot but feel that I have not the sort of knowledge to give me any command over the men’s attention, or even power of benefiting the attentive; and, if it was not that I know how good it is for myself, I believe I should give it up at once!… Two more tedious days are over; I am not a bit more in love with my occupation, so that this letter, instead of suggesting to you some ludicrous ideas and reminiscences, will terminate in a concatenation of dolefulness, and ask for a consolatory answer.

‘Lloyd gave us his introductory Lecture to-day, i.e., settled the books we were to do, and the times of coming, and was very good-natured, as usual, in his reception of all of us. I am afraid my time and spirits will be so much drawn upon in another quarter, that I shall not have much left of either for him. Otherwise an historical account of the Liturgy, tracing all the prayers, through the Roman Missals and Breviaries, up to their original source, for one Lecture, and the Epistle to the Romans and First of Corinthians for the other, would be a very

eligible subject to spend a good deal of time on…. I go to the Tyrolese singers, who perform some national music in the Town-Hall at eight o’clock. I hope they will help to lull me into a momentary forgetfulness; and that I may dream myself among lakes and mountains, far, far away from the vulgar crowd.’

Hurrell’s forecast that his time and spirits would be drawn upon to the detriment of his studies, was due to the anxiety he began to feel about his brother Robert. The latter had followed Hurrell to Oriel in 1822, and graduated B.A. on the 8th of June, 1826. Ardent and active in everything, he had taken a chill during that Long Vacation, after a particularly long pull at sea, and the chill was to terminate only in consumption.

To the Rev. John Keble, New Year’s Day, 1828.

‘… I wish I could write verses! and then I should make an attempt to perpetuate in my mind the notions that came into it the other day at seeing the dead body of a poor woman who for the last two years has been in a state of intense bodily suffering, from which she was released a few days since. I do not recollect having seen her before her illness; but while she was alive I had never seen her free from the expression of dull pain; and her face was distorted by a sore wound, which never healed, on the side of her mouth. But the morning after her death there was such a quiet careworn beauty on her countenance, that it seemed to me as if good spirits had been ornamenting her body at last, to show that a friend of theirs had inhabited it. I am willing to hope that the recollection of it may be a help to me in fits of scepticism, when everything seems so tame and commonplace.’

These serious thoughts haunted Hurrell at home where his brother’s health was failing day by day. ‘Bob’ had the chief share of the physical beauty and vitality of the family. One who knew him well has preserved an anecdote of his lovable mischief.

‘The richness and melody of Copleston’s[55] voice surpassed

any instrument…. It was no small part of the daily amusement of the undergraduates to repeat what Copleston had said, and just as he said it, and to vary it from their own boyish imaginations…. The second of the four Froudes, who died young, made this a special study. Coming out of Tyler’s room after a Lecture, he tapped gently at the door, and said in the exact Copleston tone: “Mr. Tyler, will you please step out a moment?” Tyler rushed out, exclaiming: “My dear Mr. Provost!” but only saw the tail of the class descending the staircase. “You silly boys, you’ve been playing me a trick!” was all that he could say.’[56]

The wheel of fortune brought the Provostship of Oriel not to ‘an angel,’ John Keble, but to Edward Hawkins, on the promotion of Copleston to the See of Llandaff, early in this year. A letter of Froude’s to him has been preserved. There is an entry in the former’s Diary, under date of Nov. 22, 1826, thus printed: ‘Promised —— I would not vote against him if ever he stood for the ——. Foolish: but I must abide by it.’ Hawkins and James Endell Tyler were the two among the Fellows who had for years set their hearts upon the Provostship. Tyler lost his chance when he left Oriel during the autumn for the living of S. Giles-in-the-Fields, London, where Endell Street, W.C., yet preserves his name. Either to him, or to Hawkins, Hurrell had hastily pledged his word. But when he wrote the following letter he was quite aware of Mr. Keble’s definite withdrawal from the candidacy which was not yet announced. As a matter of fact, Mr. Keble had never consented to come forward, and his disciple’s course became, thereby, easy as well as plain.

To the Rev. Edward Hawkins,[57] Jan. 23, 1828.

‘My dear Hawkins,—Though I don’t set so high a value on the emanations of my pen as to volunteer a superfluous communication, yet, from what Churton said to me in his note, I fancy I ought to supply an ἔλλειμμα in my last

letter by making a more formal declaration of my unconditional and uncompromising determination to rank myself among your retainers. I am really very sorry that my stupid delay in answering your letter should have caused you any bother (to use a studiously elegant expression, than which I cannot hit on a better): and this is the more provoking, as I actually had written you an answer the first day; but as I said something at the end of it about my brother, which afterwards I thought too gloomy, and which, I believe, was suggested by seeing him look particularly unwell from some accident, I thought it rather too hard to call on you for sympathy in my capricious fancies. I suppose I may take the liberty to enclose this in a cover to the Bishop, otherwise I should hesitate to draw on your purse as well as your time for such a scribble as this. However, I have left you enough clear paper at the end to work out a question in algebra, or make the skeleton of a sermon! And as this is probably worth more than any words I have to put into it, I shall conclude by begging you to consider me ever affectionately,

‘R. H. Froude.’

For poor ‘Bob’ Froude, full of frolic and power, the Lusisti satis had been spoken. He died on April 28, 1828, between the dates of the two following letters, which Hurrell wrote with a heavy heart.

To the Rev. Robert Isaac Wilberforce, April 2, 1828.

‘… I have not much spirits to write to you, but will not allow my promise to go for nothing. When I first came home I found my brother very much emaciated and enfeebled, but not quite so far gone as I had been prepared for. But since I have been here his disorder has been making very rapid progress indeed…. From what I had heard at Oxford, I almost doubted I might not find all over before my arrival: and the relief which I felt when, on getting off the coach at Totnes, I heard from my father that, not a quarter of an hour before, he[58] had driven in to meet me, was so great as almost to unsettle my resolution. So that now the near prospect of a

conclusion is rather hard to face. Even so late as yesterday evening I began a letter to you, in which I expressed a hope that when Monday came my brother and I might not part for ever, but that he would be alive on my return for the Long Vacation. But the medical person who has attended him told me, just now, that unless he was relieved from his present oppression, forty-eight hours would end him. In this state I really do not think that the [Oriel] election has claims on me so great as those which retain me here; and, unless his illness take some unexpected turn, I shall write to [the Provost] in a day or two, to apologise for absenting myself. I cannot, indeed, flatter myself that any turn will long retard the encroachment of the disorder; but, unless appearances decidedly indicated that, by staying out the Vacation, I should see all, I think it would be foolish to shrink from my business; for, when the time of parting came, it would be worse a fortnight hence than now…. I have known enough of myself to foresee the return of all my fretfulness and absurdity, when I leave this enchanted atmosphere. I hope you will excuse my not writing a longer letter; for most things now seem insipid to me, except such as I have no right to inflict upon you. So good-bye, my dear [Robert], for the present, and do not expect to see me till the beginning of Term. I should very much wish to take my part in the election, and do not even now wholly abandon the idea. For I know that active occupation is the best resource, and I shall not shrink from it merely to indulge my feelings.’

To the Rev. John Keble, May, 1828.

‘… The feelings under which I wrote to you last, were, as you say, like the effect of a stunning blow, and I was quite surprised, myself, how quickly they evaporated. I cannot indeed call them either groundless or irrational, and I am, in some respects, not contented at being so soon released from them. Yet many things have occurred to me, which, even to my reason, have made things seem better than they did at first. The more I think of B[ob], the more I am struck with his singleness of heart, and the low estimation in which he held himself. I have found, too, some things which he had written,

which I regret much that he had not shown me, which give me almost assurance that he was farther advanced in serious feeling, and had taken greater pains to fight against himself than anyone supposed. Among others, there is one which seems to me quite beautiful, On the Legitimate Use of Pleasure; which he has headed with: “My opinion, June, 1827. I wonder what it will be next year.” It is well arranged as a composition, quite elegant in the language, and shows that he must have thought over the Ethics in a common-sense way, and compared it with Bishop Butler. I had often heard him say what a fool he used to be in thinking that the Ethics was only something to be got up, and something quite irrelevant to actual conduct…. But I feel now as if I had been conversing with a person, who, if he had not much undervalued himself, would never have deferred to me….’

To the Rev. John Henry Newman, Aug. 12, 1828.

‘I have just torn up a letter which I began for you the other day, and fear that you will have cause to wonder how I could reserve this for a better destiny. For the fact is, that I seem to myself to become duller as I grow older, and to have acquired a fustiness independent of place and occupation, an inherent fustiness which idleness cannot blow away nor variety obliterate…. I fear from what I hear of C[hurton][59] that the chance of his recovery is at present very slender. His brother wrote to me the other day to ask what place in Devonshire we reckoned the best suited[60] to complaints of that description, as his enfeebled state put his going abroad out of the question. But I know from experience how little Devonshire air can do … I myself am still, as I indeed have been for a long time, perfectly well. But I find the freshness which at first resulted from a relaxation from College discipline now gradually

wearing out; and as the images of impudent undergraduates fade away from the field of my fancy, and the consciousness of what I am released from becomes less vivid, a new host of evil genii take possession of the deserted spot. Till within this last week or so, I felt quite differently from what I ever used to, and reckoned myself to have become quite a cheerful fellow; but now I begin to see with my old eyes, and to feed upon the dreams of faëryland.

‘“And as I mark the line of light that plays

O’er the smooth wave towards the burning west,

I long to tread that golden path of rays,

And think ’twould lead to some bright Isle of Rest.”

… I have a brother now at home who is coming to Oriel next term, and will make a very good hand at mathematics unless he is very idle.’

The brother at home referred to was William Froude, afterwards LL.D. (Glasgow) and F.R.S., then newly come from Westminster School. He was entered at Oriel on Oct. 23, 1828, with Hurrell for Tutor.

To the Rev. John Keble, Aug. 26, 1828.

‘… I have long been meditating a letter to you, and have put it off from day to day, in hopes that when the fine weather should come at last, it might rekindle in me some spark of poetical feeling. But I was thinking over with myself last night how I could scrape up a verse or two in honour of this long-wished-for revolution, and was, after some fruitless pains, obliged to abandon the undertaking. It is a melancholy fact, yet full often does it force itself upon me, and in too unquestionable a shape, that I get stupider as I get older; and that I either never was what I used to think myself, or that Nature has recalled her misused favours! In vain is it that night after night I have tried to peep through the clouds at Lyra and Cassiopeia, as they chase one another round the pole, and that I have got up at three to see Mercury rise, when he was at his longest distance from the sun; and that I have sailed to Guernsey on a fine day and come back on a finer, when the waves washed in on the deck as each passed in succession; and that (when for a short time off the island in a

calm) I found the latitude within a minute by taking the sun’s meridian altitude, and that I have seen him rise out of the water, cut in two by the horizon as sharp as a knife. “This brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,—what seemeth it to me but a pestilent congregation of vapours?” I can partly account for it from the fact that we are so uncommonly comfortable and cosy here, and quite agree with you, that “home by mazy streams” is not the most bracing school in which the recipient of habits can be disciplined.