‘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.

‘Then, henceforth, hail! ye impudent undergraduates: γεύεσθε, μὴ

φείδεσθε.’

‘I heard from N[ewman] the other day, with the testimonials,’ he adds,

a little later. ‘… He is a fellow that I like the more, the more I

think of him; only I would give a few odd pence if he were not a

heretic!’ This in reference to Newman’s early Evangelicalism, not yet

sloughed away. As between Froude and Newman, so between Newman and

Pusey, affection appears to have preceded perfect intellectual

confidence. There is a parallel thought, in more sedate dress, in

Newman’s private journal of May 17, 1823: ‘That Pusey is Thine, O

Lord, how can I doubt? … yet I fear he is prejudiced against Thy

children…. Lead us both on in the way of Thy commandments!’[61]

Hurrell quickly came to a correct reading of Newman, and he presently

made sure that his beloved Keble should share it too. He said once,

when conversation ran on the traits of undoubted excellence in

criminal characters: ‘Were I asked what good deed I had ever done, I

should say that I had brought Keble and Newman to understand each

other.’ That mutual love, indeed, despite a long parting, never

wavered. There is an odd little footnote to be gathered from Mr.

Anthony Froude’s ‘Oxford Counter-Reformation.’[62] He is speaking of

events subsequent to 1845.

‘My eldest brother had left to us younger ones, as a characteristic

instruction, that if we ever saw Newman and Keble disagree, we might

think for ourselves. The event which my brother had thought as

impossible as that a double star should fly asunder in space, had

actually occurred. We had been floated out into mid-ocean upon the

Anglo-Catholic raft, buoyed up by airy bubbles of ecclesiastical

sentiment. The bubbles had burst, the raft was splintered, and we――I

mean my other brother and myself――were left, like Ulysses, struggling

in the waves.’

Says Mr. Thomas Mozley,[63] referring to this time, and to tastes

shared in common among Oriel men: ‘I think we all of us found it

easier to admire and even to criticise, than to design. Keble, Froude,

and Ogilvie undertook a memorial of William Churton, to be placed in

S. Mary’s. It was to be simple, modest, and unobtrusive, like the

subject. Whether the result carried out this idea, I leave others to

say,’ If we are to judge from a letter of Hurrell’s addressed to

Keble, the first design emanated from Newman, though drawn by himself.

‘I don’t make much progress in my design for C[hurton’s] monument,’ he

writes on May 23, 1829. ‘O[gilvie] decides on its being Gothic; and if

this is the case, it will never do to let it take its chance in the

hands of a statuary.[64] Yet the responsibility of doing it one’s self

makes me so fastidious that I cannot settle on anything,’ He had

thought of falling back upon ‘the sort of niches which are used to

hold statues of saints, or [stoups for] holy water: somehow it does

not seem quite congruous to make one of these merely to frame an

inscription.’ However, he draws a narrow pointed arch over a tall

pedestal supporting a plain cross, on the suggestion of Newman, adding

that he likes it especially, though it may be a bit eccentric.[65] ‘It

is to stand in the wall over one of the doorways, between the blank

window on the south side, and the window in which the gallery

terminates. This is meant to be represented standing under an arch cut

out in the wall.’ There were not many Englishmen attempting Early

English decoration in 1829. The memorial to William Ralph Churton,

Fellow of Oriel, aged twenty-seven, _phthisi eheu præreptus_, is to be

found in S. Mary’s Church, though not in the position allotted it in

this letter; and the big ugly white sarcophagus with fussy details in

high relief on a grey ground is certainly no design of Hurrell

Froude’s.

Froude’s intimate correspondence with Newman began in 1828, their

friendship having been forming since 1826. To all to whom the latter

spoke or wrote with affection, as Miss Mozley reminds us, he was ever

open and confiding. ‘But there is distinction in his confidences. Thus

to his mother he writes what it would not occur to him to say to

anyone else: experiences, sensations, and odd encounters; dreams,

fancies, and passing speculations: while to Hurrell Froude, on another

field altogether, there is the same absolute trust, and unlocking of

the heart.’[66]

Sometimes, in the early letters, the correspondent at Dartington feels

impelled to continue his autobiography, in default of anything better

to deal with. ‘When I come to consider my resources,’ he says in his

smiling mock-grandiose way, ‘I feel that they will not prove

commensurate with my malignity, and that I shall not be able even to

bore you with success.’

To the Rev. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, Aug. 12, 1829.

‘Since I left Oxford, little has happened to me, and still less have I

done. I have indeed written two sermons, and they lasted near twenty

minutes, so that I may hope to get on. But the time that they took me

is quite absurd, and that which they gave me an excuse for wasting,

under the plea of thought, grotesque indeed. Also, the paper that I

wasted on things that turned out to have no reference to the subject

would form a distinct object of contemplation; and after all, when I

came to preach them, they seemed so rambling and incomplete that I

could not fancy, while I was reading them, how anyone could possibly

follow me. Besides this, I have done nothing except getting my

equatorial put up and adjusted in our garden, and trying provoking

experiments on the insensibility of my hearing organs. I find the

summit of perception to which I can attain is to observe that a note

harmonises better with its octave, twelfth, and fifth, than with their

next-door neighbours. I also can acknowledge a discord in a deuce[67]

and a seventh; but as for knowing one from the other, unless they come

very close on each other, it passes my comprehension how man can do

it…. I am quite ashamed of the length of time this has been on the

stocks, and of the shabby performance which it turns out. Alas, it is

a sad reflection that I am condemned to retrograde in all respects: to

find no resting-place for my self-complacency either in my

intellectual, moral, or corporeal prowess, and notwithstanding to be

as conceited as ever!’

This was a note of needless dissatisfaction only too sincere, repeated

in Keble’s ear. ‘As for me, I despair of ever becoming a scholar or

mathematician either, beyond just enough to amuse myself when I am a

solitary country Curate….’

1829 is a silent year with Hurrell, on the whole. He had lost his

beloved brother, and he was preparing for his own Ordination. In the

late summer he paid his first visit to his cousins at Keswick.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Sept. 17, 1829.

‘The evening I received your criticisms I wrote you three sides of a

letter, and did not send it, only because I thought time would produce

things better worth writing: and now I am so changed in position and

circumstances I think I may as well begin again. So all I will retain

of my former letter is a criticism on _The Christian Year_, suggested

by a very tempestuous night, in which all our party were crossing the

Channel in a pilot-boat. You must not say “the wild wind rustles in

the _piping_ shrouds”:[68] shrouds never “pipe” when trees or rustling

can be presented to the fancy, but only on occasions when it is more

sublime than comfortable to be a listener. This, in my letter, I

endeavoured to enforce by a description of the scene I witnessed, and

the night I spent on deck: but I doubt not you will willingly take all

this for granted…. I left Devonshire more than a fortnight since for

Cumberland. [Dornford?][69] made me stay some time in Dublin, which

was my first stage, and is, in point of time, much the nearest way:

and also sent me into the north of Ireland after Captain Mudge, who is

surveying the coast. In my hunt for him, I saw the Giants’ Causeway,

every stone of which is beset by some fellow who claims a fee for

describing it. It is certainly well worth seeing; but you can conceive

nothing so perfectly unlike any of the pretended representations of

it. I made two bad drawings there, which will serve to keep it in my

own mind, but will do little to illuminate mankind at large. I am

forgetting all this while to tell you that, while at Dublin, I found I

was within twenty-five miles of

‘“The Lake whose gloomy shore

Skylark never warbles o’er”:

and immediately hired a horse, to start the next morning at five to

see it. I was most unlucky in my day, as it had been fine for the

preceding week, and only set in for rain when I got among the Wicklow

mountains. I had a very wild romantic uncomfortable ride through a

wholly uninhabited country, till I got within the baleful influence of

lionisers,[70] and was pestered out of my wits by humbugging guides

who dinned into my ears miserable expansions of Tom Moore’s note about

St. Kevin, till I was quite out of patience. The day was so misty that

it was only once or twice that I could make out the scene distinctly,

and so constantly raining, that all my paper was soaked in trying to

draw what I could make out. By dint of perseverance, I crawled into

poor St. Kevin’s[71] cell, which is hardly large enough to coil one’s

self up in, and when I was there hardly a square foot of it was dry:

so the day answered the purpose, at any rate, of showing me that there

is a dark side to a hermit’s existence. He had chosen himself a most

picturesque rocky point, which projects a little into the Lake, with

one or two hollies and mountain ashes growing up in its crevices; and

cut out a cell for himself in its perpendicular face. It would take

too much space to describe the grand gloom of the Lake, the seven

ruined Churches on its borders (one of which is still a burial-ground

for the Roman Catholics), and that extraordinary Tower, a relic of

paganism, which stands in one of the churchyards.

‘I am now on the bank of the Lake by which my mother was brought up,

and of which I used to hear over and over again. It has been much

altered by Macadamisers, and the house she lived in has been sold.

Houses seem to have sprung up about Keswick Lake as if it was a

Torquay or Sidmouth; and new dandy names have been given to all the

creeks and islands, and nothing but gaiety seems to be going on or

thought of. But I suppose old Skiddaw looks pretty much the same as he

used to do, and will see things go to pot with their predecessors…. I

hope in a day or two to find out the Parish Register, and see her

birth and marriage: which is something like poring over the name of a

place one likes in a map….’

The home of Margaret Spedding’s childhood, Armathwaite Hall, is within

six miles of Cockermouth, the birthplace of Wordsworth. It stands at

the foot of Bassenthwaite Lake, and looks out towards some of the

loveliest and best-known mountains of the district, including Skiddaw,

Helvellyn, and the Borrowdale Hills. It had been sold to Sir Frederick

Vane, Bart., of Hutton Hall, Penrith, in 1796. Hurrell was a guest at

Mirehouse, where his cousin John Spedding was always from time to time

entertaining some of the noted literary men of the period.

To Newman, on Sept. 27, 1829, he writes more of St. Kevin’s dismal and

delightful habitation, and ends with the praises of his mother’s

county. ‘I got to Cumberland about ten days since, and I can safely

assert that it exceeds anything that imagination can conjure up. I

don’t mean that the extensive views of lake and mountain are so

especially splendid, for, when the scene is on so large a scale, the

trees and rocks become deplorably insignificant, woods seem little

better than furze brakes; but, in rambling along the brooks and

waterfalls, one comes to such excessively romantic corners, that they

have quite put me out of love with Devonshire. The only thing which I

desiderate is a Church steeple here and there in the valleys; for the

worst of it is, that very few of the Parish Churches here are in

exterior little better than a decent barn. What a horrid-looking

scribble this is! and I know it is full of false spellings of all

sorts, which will in many places make it unintelligible.’

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Feb. 5, 1830.

‘My Lectures this Term are less fatiguing than they have ever been

yet, and there are fewer men that one cannot take an interest in. I

have a set of very nice men in Pindar, which I am glad to be forced to

get up: it certainly is one of the most splendid organs of Tory

feeling that I have come in contact with! Don’t you think he had the

republican artificial style in his head when he talked about

κόρακες ὣς ἄκραντα γαρύετον Διὸς πρὸς ὄρνιχα θεῖον?’

All was grist which came to this preoccupied critic’s mill. He had an

unaffected fondness for the classics. His theory about the poet whom

he loved and understood best, and whom he is always quoting, is that

he was a shy pastoral lyrist driven by officious friends into the epic

field. Says Newman in a passing note of interest: ‘It was [Froude’s]

notion that Horace and others used to (what is now called) patronise

Virgil, as a man who really had a great deal in him; but who, the pity

was, would not conform himself to the habits of society, and so lost

opportunities of influence. So they set him upon the _Æneid_, to make

something of him.’[72]

On Easter Monday, 1830, the Rev. R. H. Froude preached in the pulpit

of S. Mary-the-Virgin, before the University, his sermon on Knowledge.

His quiet sober sermons, of which no fewer than twenty appear complete

in the _Remains_, are to a reader searching, pitiless, unforgetable.

The undergraduate, however, must have ‘disvenerated’ them.

This to Newman, on Aug. 1, 1830, in a letter filled with political

comment admiring the spirit of King Charles X. and Polignac in their

disasters, and growling over Whig successes in England, is too amusing

to be omitted. ‘… I set out in the rain to Exeter. I was not very

well; and had made up my mind, as a matter of conscience, to have a

tooth out when I got there; because, though it had not yet ached, I

thought it probable it might before I had another opportunity. I got

to Exeter, went to the dentist, had the forceps applied: the top of

the tooth broke; they were applied again: a splinter came out of the

side; and so on, till it was down fair with the jaw, and part of the

nerve had come away in the fragments. Nothing remained to be done

except to punch, etc.; and here I thought: “_Satis jam pridem sanguine

fuso_”: I had satisfied my debt to my future self; and the present

self might be excused from further suffering, till the toothache

actually came.’

Froude’s lecturing at Oxford was now quite done; Newman’s and Robert

Wilberforce’s likewise; they resigned their Tutorships as gracefully

as they might, being joyful over the turn things had taken. The long

opposition maintained against their desire to arrange the terminal

table in accordance with their own best judgment, ended in total

defeat for ‘the erect fighting figures’ of the three friends. The

Provost himself, Hampden, Denison, and the junior Copleston rushed

into the breach with Lectures many and purposeful; but Oriel felt the

change, whether for good or ill, to be a real crisis. According to one

distinguished commentator, her regeneration dates from that day;

according to another, she never recovered the loss, and could but

suffer her scholarly pre-eminence to pass, gradually but surely, to

Balliol, which has ever since held it. Two at least of the

dispossessed Tutors had conceived already a wider field of action for

their energies. They had leisure now to think and to write; and

leisure bred consequences. ‘Humanly speaking,’ Newman assures us, in

his fragment of autobiography, written throughout in the third person,

‘the Movement never would have been, had they not been deprived of the

Tutorship, or had Keble, not Hawkins, been Provost.’

Newman made a proposal that Robert Wilberforce or Froude should join

him in the care of S. Mary’s parish, or rather, in building up at

Littlemore what the Vicar ultimately intended even then should become

a separate parish: but neither saw his way to accept the work. From

letters of this time we gather knowledge of their ever-increasing

attention to the Fathers; to the ethical aspects of many great

political questions; and to the country walks and rides, apart or

together, which did so much to strengthen that pure passion for

Nature, ‘subdued and cherished long,’ which in Newman, as in Froude,

lent sweetness and balance to character. Froude’s heartfelt love of

Devon is conspicuous, whether he be in it or away from it. During the

Long Vacation of 1831, he succeeded in carrying Newman off from his

books and the stuffy summer air of low-lying Oxford, to the delights

of Dartington. As a glowing corroboration of what Hurrell himself was

always writing, it is worth while to quote his friend’s description of

the district, sent to his interested mother at Iffley.

‘Dartington, July 7, 1831.

‘I despatched a hasty letter yesterday from Torquay which must have

disappointed you from its emptiness; but I wished you to know my

progress. As we lost sight of the Needles, twilight came on, and we

saw nothing of the coast. The night was beautiful, and on my

expressing an aversion to the cabin, Froude and I agreed to sleep on

deck…. When I awoke, a little before four, we were passing the

Devonshire coast, about fifteen miles off it. By six we were entering

Torbay…. Limestone and sandstone rocks of Torbay are very brilliant in

their colours and sharp in their forms; strange to say, I believe I

never saw real rocks before, in my life! This consciousness keeps me

very silent, for I feel I am admiring what everyone knows, and it is

foolish to observe upon. You see a house said to have belonged to Sir

Walter Ralegh;[73] what possessed him to prefer the court at Greenwich

to a spot like this?… I know I am writing in a very dull way, but can

only say that the extreme deliciousness of the air, and the fragrance

of everything makes me languid, indisposed to speak or write, and

pensive. My journey did not fatigue me, to speak of, and I have no

headache, deafness, or whizzing in my ears; but, really, I think I

should dissolve into essence of roses, or be attenuated into an echo,

if I lived here!… What strikes me most is the strange richness of

everything. The rocks blush into every variety of colour, the trees

and fields are emeralds, and the cottages are rubies. A beetle I

picked up at Torquay was as green-and-gold as the stone it lay upon,

and a squirrel which ran up a tree here just now was not the pale

reddish-brown to which I am accustomed, but a bright brown-red. Nay,

my very hands and fingers look rosy, like Homer’s Aurora, and I have

been gazing on them with astonishment. All this wonder I know is

simple; and therefore, of course, do not you repeat it. The exuberance

of the grass and the foliage is oppressive, as if one had not room to

breathe, though this is a fancy. The depth of the valleys and the

steepness of the slopes increase the illusion, and the Duke of

Wellington would be in a fidget to get some commanding point to see

the country from. The scents are extremely fine, so very delicate yet

so powerful; and the colours of the flowers as if they were all shot

with white. The sweet peas especially have the complexion of a

beautiful face: they trail up the wall, mixed with myrtles, as

creepers. As to the sunset, the Dartmoor heights look purple, and the

sky close upon them a clear orange. When I turn back and think of

Southampton Water and the Isle of Wight, they seem, by contrast, to be

drawn in Indian ink, or pencil. Now I cannot make out that this is

fancy, for why should I fancy? I am not especially in a poetic mood. I

have heard of the brilliancy of Cintra and still more of the East, and

I suppose that this region would pale beside them; yet I am content to

marvel at what I see, and think of Virgil’s description of the purple

meads of Elysium. Let me enjoy what I feel, even though I may

unconsciously exaggerate.’

Newman’s senses were extraordinarily delicate: he writes as if at

thirty he was half unaware of some of his most special faculties.

A week later, a postscript follows, addressed to Harriett Newman,

telling of ‘a sermon to write for to-morrow, which I do believe to be

as bad a one as I have ever written, for I was not in the humour; but

I do not tell people so. It may do good, in spite of me!’ and this

confidence: ‘The other day the following lines came into my head. They

are not worth much; but I transcribe them:

‘There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart,

One who could love them, but who durst not love:

A vow had bound him ne’er to give his heart

To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove.

’Twas a hard humbling task, onward to move

His easy-captured eye from each fair spot,

With unattached and lonely step to rove

O’er happy meads which soon its print forgot.

Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot.’[74]

There was a lifelong strife in Newman’s mind between created and

Uncreated Beauty, or rather, a lifelong choice. He seems to have felt

that he could not be as much of a poet as his own heart prompted, and

be also as much of a hard-working saint as Divine Grace called him to

be. For him, as in the beginning, a loved landscape was ‘pagan’: a

temptation towards false gods. How little his attitude was understood,

during his life, is well illustrated by the published complaint of Mr.

Aubrey de Vere that his friend Dr. Newman of the Catholic University

would never make time to go driving with him through the exquisite

scenery about Dublin, though invited again and again. In all this, as

in much else, he was entirely Augustinian. _Ejiciebas eas et intrabas

pro eis._ It does not seem clear that Hurrell Froude, who outran

Newman in many austerities, shared fully in the exercise of this

signal one. His loneliness of spirit, far more developed than his

friend’s, was also far less conscious, and his boyish relish of the

beauties of moor and sea based itself, rather, on a philosophy which

was Keble’s, and Henry Vaughan’s long before him:

‘Thou who hast given me eyes to see

And love this sight so fair,

Give me a heart to find out Thee,

And read Thee everywhere!’[75]

Certainly, Newman was never so tormented by his affection for music,

or for anything else in the same class, as he was by the glamour of

out-of-doors at Taormina, and the homelier charms of ‘Devon in her

most gentle dimplement.’ Spiritual matters apart, one does not

perceive what else could have inwrought him more effectually with the

very fibres of Hurrell’s being, than his felt infatuation for the

Dartington he visited but twice in his busy life. They shared the same

passion, again, for Rome. The spirit of place can always create a

final test between any two cultivated minds. To differ in kind or even

in degree of response to it, is indeed to differ.

The principle which lay at the bottom of Newman’s renunciation was

one, however, which was equally familiar to his friend. It may not

always have involved, for him, the need of so determined a

depreciation of the loveliness of rural England, as too keen a

reminder of

‘Isaac’s pure blessings, and a verdant home,’

things forsworn by both young men in that ‘highly religious and

romantic idea of celibacy’ which they had adopted for good and all,

between them, without Keble’s help. As Newman says of S. Basil and S.

Gregory, retiring together from the world: ‘somehow, the idea of

marrying-and-taking-Orders, or taking-Orders-and-marrying; building or

improving their parsonages, and showing forth the charities, the

humanities, and the gentilities of a family man, did not suggest

itself to their minds.’ Nothing is plainer than that the arch-celibate

was Froude, and not Newman: perhaps it would be quite exact to say

that the idea, in Froude, as in Pascal, was wholly endemic, and in

Newman only so in part. We are told in the _Apologia_ how the idea was

strengthened and supernaturalised by contact with Froude. Hurrell

sometimes deplored with unmixed simplicity the social disqualifications

of a total abstainer. ‘I wrote S[am] a letter the other day,’ he tells

Robert Wilberforce, when the future Bishop had plighted his troth. ‘I

suspect it was of the dullest! for I have no knack at writing to

people in his interesting situation.’ In all this lack of sympathy

with ordinary conduct and motive, there was no touch whatever of

conscious oddity, but only of childishness. Newman, by far the

tenderer heart of the two, never shared it.

Newman has left us an account of the origin of the sermon he mentions,

which was preached in the old Church on July 16, 1831: that on the

Pool of Bethesda, ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow,’ in the first

volume of _Parochial Sermons_. ‘Twice in my life,’ he writes about

1862, ‘have I, when worn with work, gone to a friend’s house to

recruit…. When I was down at Dartington for the first time, in July,

1831, I saw a number of young girls collected together, blooming, and

in high spirits; “and all went merry as a marriage-bell.” And I sadly

thought what changes were in store, what hard trial and discipline was

inevitable. I cannot trace their history; but Phillis and Mary Froude

married, and died quickly. Hurrell died. One, if not two, of the young

Champernownes died.[76] My sermon was dictated by the sight and the

foreboding. At that very visit [from Oxford] Hurrell caught, and had

his influenza upon him, which led him by slow steps to the grave. He

caught it sleeping, as I did, on deck, going down the Channel from

Southampton to Torbay. Influenza was about, the forerunner of the

cholera. It went through the Parsonage at Dartington. Every morning

the sharp merry party, who somewhat quizzed me, had hopes it would

seize upon me. But I escaped; and sang my warning from the pulpit…. I

am a bird of ill omen.’[77]

Correspondence of course broke out anew, the moment the two were

parted. Hurrell’s Greek reading progressed on his own summary lines.

‘_Timæus_ gets worse and worse. I can see no point in which it is

interesting, except as a fact to prove what stuff people have sucked

down…. I have cut _Timæus_,’ he announces a bit later, ‘and have

nearly finished _Gorgias_, which is as elegant and clever and easy as

possible.’ His weather comments (such being unavoidable in England)

are concise and instructive. By way of letting Newman know that there

had been a fortnight of fine weather since the latter’s own rainy

experiences at Dartington, he throws out an abrupt postscript of July

29: ‘What a lie old Swith.[78] has told!’

The Rev. Thomas Mozley seems to have received conditional offers or

promises from Hurrell of sharing with him a country cure. The former

proposed first the vacant Moreton Pinkney, thirty miles north of

Oxford, then the parish of S. Ebbe’s, within its ancient limits. But

both projects failed of realisation. Hurrell’s strength had to be

hoarded, and Archdeacon Froude was averse to any measure which would

create new duties, and cause a stricter separation between them.

Keble, on behalf of his friend, would have favoured Northamptonshire

rather than the city. He saw Newman on August 10 of this Long Vacation

of 1831. ‘He wishes you to have a country parish,’ Newman writes; ‘he

did not give his reasons.’ Newman himself coveted Hurrell’s parochial

co-operation. These plans for an active employment of superfluous

energies, formed, one after another, by appreciators of them, were

destined to be vain. Meanwhile, relish for historical study was

indicating to him how he could be of use, in a day full of most

unscholarly conceptions of the past, long before the documentary

firmament had been unrolled by Government for the man in the street.

_Dandum est Deo eum aliquid facere posse._ He knew the path he meant

to take, and communicates his dream to Newman, prefacing it with a bit

of encouraging domestic news: ‘W[illy] continues very steady, getting

up at half-past five, and working without wasting time till two or

three.’ His next surviving brother William was then twenty years old,

and reading for Honours.

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Aug. 16, 1831.

‘Since you wish to have a definite categorical answer to M[ozley’s]

question, I will say, No; and having said this, will proceed to my

reasons and qualifications. First, whatever you may think, I have a

serious wish, and (if I could presume to say so) intention of working

at the ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages. Now, my father

assures me that such a parish as [S. Ebbe’s] would be a complete

occupation of itself, so that I am unwilling at once, and without

giving myself the trial, to give up the chance of doing what I cannot

but think as clerical, as improving, and much better suited to my

capacity, such as it is, than the care of a parish. A small parish,

and a less bothering one, might be a recreation, almost; but such an

absorbing one as this I should be sorry to take, till I found that I

could not work at anything else. Secondly, my qualification of the

‘No’ is this: if you either feel very certain I shall do nothing else,

or have a strong opinion as to the improvement I should get from the

occupation you propose, believe me willing to be convinced that my

present view is incorrect.

‘I have read a good deal of Plato, have stuck in _Parmenides_ as in

_Timæus_, but think all which keeps clear of metaphysics is as

beautiful and improving as anything I ever read. As to Socrates, I can

scarcely believe that he was not inspired, and feel quite confident

that Plato is responsible for every tint of [puzzleheadedness] which

shows itself in his arguments. One is apt, of course, to be carried

away with a thing at the moment; but my present impression is, that

_Gorgias_, _Apologia Socratis_, _Crito_, and _Phædo_, rank next to the

Bible in point of the greatness of mind they show, and in grace of

style and dramatic beauty surpass anything I have ever read. I think I

am improved in composition, and attribute it to imitation of Plato. I

am going to serve D[enbury?] for the next month, and shall have to

write a number of sermons.

‘How atrociously the poor King of Holland[79] has been used; but

nothing yet is so painful as the defection of the heads of the Church.

I hear that the Bishop of Ferns[80] is dying: _spes ultima_.’

During the early autumn, Froude returns to the curacy question, and

reiterates the conviction which his own idiosyncrasy was strengthening

in him every day, and which surely was as warranted as it was sincere.

‘I have read the Lives of Wycliffe and Peacocke[81] in Strype; but

must read much more about them and their times, before I shall

understand them. At present I admire Peacocke and dislike Wycliffe. A

great deterioration seems to have taken place in the spirit of the

Church after Edward III.’s death. I hope I shall have perseverance to

work up the history of the period. If I do this, I shall not think

myself bound to take a curacy.’

It is a thousand pities that we can never have on our shelves the

Froude of historical verity, to counterbalance the Froude of

historical romance. Hurrell, so far as he got, was certainly all for

‘the ideas underlying history, and their organic connection,’ and was

but poorly adapted for ‘the insertion of his own ideas into history …

the professing to find in history what he had in reality put

there.’[82] Is it not clear that such a fault may spring not from

perverseness, but from the too pictorial eye? This the elder brother

lacked, as likewise the other disadvantage of a magical prose style.

That perturbing possession, the luckiest asset of the essayist, seems

to delight in playing tricks on historians, for in the past, at least,

the dullest have been the safest.

As one who understood the dangers of style, Hurrell chides Newman for

the hair-splitting preliminary method to which he was treating _The

Arians_. ‘If you go on fiddling with your Introduction, you will most

certainly get into a scrape at last!’ And then: ‘I have for the last

five days been reading Marsh’s _Michaelis_, which I took up by

accident, and have been much interested by it. I see that old

Wilberforce[83] owes to it much of the profundity which I have before

now been floored and overawed by. It has put many things into my head

that I never thought of before.’

The first unmistakable symptoms of Hurrell’s chronic illness had

developed by the January of 1832. ‘I don’t think he takes care of

himself,’ Keble says anxiously, in a letter to Newman, shortly after

his election to the Professorship of Poetry. And Hurrell himself had

confessed to Newman, as it were, ‘how ill all’s here about my heart:

but ’tis no matter.’ Hence the reply from Oxford, on the 13th.

‘Your letter was most welcome, sad as it was; I call it certainly,

from beginning to end, a sad letter, and yet somehow sad letters, in

their place, and in God’s order, are as acceptable as merry ones. What

I write for now is to know why you will not trust your brother to come

up by himself? Let him go into your rooms; and do stop in Devonshire a

good while, in which time you not only may get well, but may convince

all about you that you _are_ well――an object not to be neglected….

Your advice about my work is not only sage, but good, yet not quite

applicable, though I shall bear it in mind. Recollect, my good Sir,

that every thought I think is thought, and every word I write is

writing, and that thought tells and that words take room, and that

though I make the Introduction the whole book, yet a book it is; and

though this will not steer clear of the egg blunder, to have an

Introduction leading to nothing, yet it is not losing time. Already I

have made forty-one pages out of eighteen.’ The correspondence between

the two, then as ever, gives diverting glimpses of the mordant and

ineffably frank critic away from Oxford, and the divine and

man-of-letters in residence who continually sought, ‘in the beaten way

of friendship,’ the advice he did not invariably need. Thus he sends a

rough draft to Dartington of ‘a sermon against Sir James Mackintosh,

Knight,’[84] expecting strictures, ‘should you discern anything

heretical,’ and calling special attention to the argument: ‘therefore

be sharp.’ The young censor was pleased to approve ‘on the whole,’

though with minor reservations. ‘As to your _Annotationes in

Neandri[85] Homiliam_,’ Newman writes cheerfully, ‘to be sure I have

treated them with what is now called true respect; for I have spoken

highly of them, and done everything but use them! I did not have them

till Saturday morning; so having your authority for what I wanted

(_i.e._, the soundness of the main position and the τόποι), I became

indolent.’

Meanwhile, towards the end of January, Hurrell sends an asked-for

bulletin of his physical progress, and follows it up with several

others, in all of which he makes it unconsciously plain that he has

more pressing interests than his own sinking barometry. His mind was

going forward by leaps and bounds towards convictions then

unguessed-at, now quite general, about ‘the Tudor Settlement.’

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Jan. 29, 1832.

‘I promised I would give an account of myself, if I did not appear in

person by the beginning of Term. I am getting rid, though by slow

degrees, of all vestiges of cough, and, what is more to the purpose,

my father is quite easy about me, which he was far from being when I

first came home…. I have been very idle lately, but have taken up

Strype now and then, and have not increased my admiration of the

Reformers. One must not speak lightly of a martyr, so I do not allow

my opinions to pass the verge of scepticism. But I really do feel

sceptical whether Latimer was not something in the Bulteel[86] line;

whether the Catholicism of their formulæ was not a concession to the

feelings of the nation, with whom Puritanism had not yet become

popular, and who could scarcely bear the alterations which were made;

and whether the progress of things in Edward the Sixth’s minority may

not be considered as the jobbing of a faction. I will do myself the

justice to say that those doubts give me pain, and that I hope more

reading will in some degree dispel them. As far as I have gone, too, I

think better than I was prepared to do of Bonner and Gardiner.

Certainly the ἦθος of the Reformation is to me a _terra incognita_,

and I do not think that it has been explored by anyone that I have

heard talk about it.’

With what astonishing prescience this novice surveys his _terra

incognita_!

Again, writing to Newman on Feb. 17, the obsession for historical

truth, as the handmaid to religious reform, breaks through some

melancholy detail. He has been asked for a full bulletin; he confesses

that the doctor states, and that he himself cannot deny, that there

has been an attack on the lungs, attended, however, with but little

pain or fever. He finds it ‘disheartening,’ for he had been taking

long rides, and was in great spirits. Then he runs on to a topic which

occurs to him not for the first nor for the last time. Might it not be

a good thing to turn journalist, to have a Quarterly, and to speak in

it the thing which is? ‘Imagine me in a yellow jacket,’ he says

elsewhere to Newman; imagine him seated, and goose-quilled, and

editorial. It was never to be. Was it not quite as well? Would not Mr.

Froude (if the pun will pass muster) have proved gunpowder in a

Magazine? He talks as he always talks of his own inspirations,

derisively. But plainly, his heart is in it. He would start, this

time, ‘on a very unpretending scale,’ and design his foxy Quarterly

‘to be at first only historical and matter-of-fact, so that writing

for it would be the reverse of a waste of time even if it failed

entirely, which I really hardly think possible, considering the

ridiculous unfounded notions most people have got, and the vast

quantity of unexplored ground. A thing of that sort might sneak into

circulation as a book of antiquarian research, and yet, if

well-managed, might undermine many prejudices. I am willing to think

that I could contribute two articles per annum to such a work, without

losing a moment of time, indeed getting through more than I should

else. Memoirs of Hampden would be a subject [Keble] would take to with

zest, as he hates that worthy with as much zeal and more knowledge

than your humble servant. However, this is a scheme formed at a

distance, which, as Johnson remarks, makes rivers look narrow and

precipices smooth. Can you tell me where to go for the history of

Lutheranism? I must know something of it, before I get a clue to

Cranmer and the rest.’

Lastly, to the same correspondent, on Feb. 26.

‘… I trouble you with a few lines of grateful acknowledgment for the

concern you are so kind as to take in my welfare, though I cannot at

the same time refrain from observing that your advice does more credit

to your heart than your head…. I was at Dr. [Yonge’s[87]], where I

stayed three days, and was thoroughly examined. He assures me that

whatever may have been the matter with me, I am now thoroughly well,

and that I may return to Oxford at once without imprudence. At the

same time, he says I must be extremely cautious, as the thing which

formed in my windpipe proves me to be very liable to attack, and he

looks on it as an extraordinary piece of luck that I got rid of it as

I did. I am to wear more clothing than I have hitherto done, and to

renounce wine for ever; the prohibition extends to beer: _quò

confugiam_?’

Before Hurrell left home, his father had notified Newman of their

conditional intention to visit the Continent. ‘If the doctor advises

it,’ the Archdeacon writes on Feb. 22, ‘I have offered to be Hurrell’s

companion to the Mediterranean, or any other part of the world that

may be supposed most favourable in such a case as his. I own [that] my

faith in the advantages to be gained by going abroad is not very

great, unless they can be procured under the most favourable

circumstances. At any rate, I think your suggestion for his giving up

the office of Treasurer[88] shall be followed.’ He had held this

office of Junior Treasurer since 1828, to the great general

satisfaction, sharing with Newman the mental quickness, the

‘constitutional accuracy’ and the conscientiousness which go towards

the casting-up of a perfect accountant. Hurrell, however, came up in

the spring, whence he blithely reports his improved health.

[Illustration: Common room Oriel July 12 1832

H. Froude J. Mozley J. H. Newman

_From a pencil drawing by Miss Maria Giberne_]

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, May 5, 1832.

‘… Thinking that you may wish to know something of my concerns, and

wishing to know something of yours, … I send you the following. As to

myself, about which valuable thing I am most concerned, you must know

that I have at last found a κρησφύγετον in barley-sugar; only to think

that my stars should let me off so easily! Sucking has had a most

wonderful effect on me, and has removed nearly all that F[airford][89]

had left of tendency to irritation; I might say all, if I could suck

continually, but just now these east winds take advantage of casual

intervals, and remind me that I am not perfectly at liberty. However,

I have left off my handkerchief, and never feel the want of it; also,

I am up at half-past six every morning; and taking an enlarged view of

myself, I think my condition to be approved of.’

Up to July 31, Froude remained in Oxford, being and doing with all his

usual zest, writing his papers on architecture, proving a very

well-head of vitality to his friends, and ‘living his life.’ Could it

have been indeed as early as this that he cut across the preliminaries

described by Lord Blachford,[90] and paralysed an intended appeal to

Bishops and Deans by announcing that he, for one, meant to ‘get on the

box’ in person? This is thought to be the moment of Miss Giberne’s

inspiration. It would seem as if the date should be a year later. In

July of 1832 the Tutorial question was over; and there was no other

_agendum_ in debate between Froude and Newman. However that may be,

there in the handsome lady’s sketch-book is Hurrell, smoothly, almost

infantinely, mischievous, with one obedient Mozley to listen and abet;

there is Newman, at an angle of the ottoman, distinctly not surveying

with fond adoring gaze and yearning heart his friend (as he says he

does, in a poem, part of which, at least, was written that very week),

but back to back with him, sulking furiously, and putting on a silent

stare which sufficiently expresses human disapproval: that little

sudden void stare, entirely characteristic, as of one who is forced to

survey, for the time being, an endless vista of Siberian snows.

It was a boding time; the cholera was raging all about; Newman himself

was tired and dejected from overwork, and none too hopeful concerning

Hurrell’s health or the impending prospect of separation. Long after,

annotating his own correspondence at Edgbaston, he tells us something

special about the lines just referred to, in what may be called, from

a merely literary point of view, one of the most successful, though

one of the least known, of his shorter lyrics. Hurrell’s share in it

is no more, so to speak, than a tiny marginal portrait of him, tender,

in passing, as the work of some old Flemish illuminator. Newman

ascribes the origin of the last lines to this July. ‘With reference to

the memory of that parting, when I shook hands with him, and looked

into his face with great affection, I afterwards wrote the stanza:

‘And when thine eye surveys

With fond adoring gaze

And yearning heart, thy friend,

Love to its grave doth tend.’[91]

But it is remarkable that the completed poem is dated Valetta, January

30, 1833: as if to mark the vanishing of the only shadow which ever

crossed the united path of Newman and Froude; and that shadow was due,

as we shall see, to a fancy of Newman’s, conceived in illness.

Abstract and gnomic as his verses are, two human faces, nameless but

recognisable, look through them with ‘sad eyes spiritual and clear.’

One is Mary Newman’s, in her sisterly youth;[92] the other is Hurrell

Froude’s. Dearly as Newman loved his many friends, then and after (and

as Dean Church reminds us, mutual affection as profound as that of the

early Christians, was the very hall-mark of the Tractarians), there is

but one friend discernible in the long vista of his poetry, most of

which was written in his living presence. Hurrell may never have

suspected as much. The temper of both, shrinking from the least

emotional emphasis, would have precluded any open give-and-take. The

privilege of being English has its own system of taxation. The

Cardinal, in his old age (possibly when _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ was

overrunning the stage), had to assure some inquirer, by post, that he

hardly had been in the habit of addressing Hurrell as ‘Dearest,’ in

the prose exigences of every day.

The truant Fellow, restored to his father’s Parsonage, was able to

send a definite announcement of his future movements, within a

fortnight of his leaving Oxford.

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Sept. 9, 1832.

‘I am afraid poor [Willy] will make no hand of his Second Class. He

has no interest, and can pick up none, for what he is about; and all

his interleaves and margins are scribbled over with lug sails. You

will be glad to hear that I have made up my mind to spend the winter

in the Mediterranean, and my father is going with me, the end of

November, and we shall see Sicily and the south of Italy. We are both

very anxious that you should come with us. I think it would set you

up…. I have read M. Thierry’s stuff.[93] His ignorance is surprising.

He supposes Oxford to have been a Bishopric in Henry the Second’s

time, and he sticks in Saxons _ad libitum_, quoting authorities with

which I am familiar, and where nothing of the sort occurs. My

translations have been at a standstill…. Also, I am getting to be a

sawney,[94] and not to relish the dreary prospects which you and I

have proposed to ourselves. But this is only a feeling: depend on it,

I will not shrink, if I buy my constancy at the expense of a permanent

separation from home. I think this journey will set me up, and then I

shall try my new style of preaching. We must indulge ourselves and

other people with a little excitement on such matters, or else the

indifferentists will run away with everything!’

William Froude, at Michaelmas, took his First Class in Mathematics,

and a Third in Classics, quite as Hurrell expected. As to the microbe

of travel thus featly introduced into the post, it did its work upon

the recipient, though not without much hesitation and debate. One of

Newman’s arguments against a plan with which, it is plain, he fell

violently in love at once, was the state of his own health, involving,

possibly, some additional responsibility for Archdeacon Froude. ‘You

need fear nothing,’ Hurrell gallantly assures him, ‘on the score of

two invalids: I am certainly better now than I have been for more than

a year. I bathed yesterday with great advantage, took a very long

walk, drank five glasses of wine, and am better for it all. My

contemplated expedition is wholly preventative, so don’t be uneasy on

that score…. As to my sawney feelings, I own that home does make me a

sawney, and that the First Eclogue runs in my head absurdly. But there

is more in the prospect of becoming an ecclesiastical agitator than in

_At nos hinc alii_, etc.’

On Monday, December 3, Newman set out on the Southampton coach,

reaching Exeter next day, and Falmouth, whence the Maltese packet of

800 tons, called the _Hermes_, was to sail, early on the Wednesday

morning following. He wrote there his poem,

‘Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?’

the first of eighty-five dating from the Mediterranean voyage, the

eighty-fifth being the ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ which has endeared to

English-speaking pilgrims the Straits of Bonifacio. When the Froudes

arrived at Falmouth, Newman had a nocturnal adventure to relate to

them. He had been very roundly sworn at by a person, apparently a

gentleman, who sat near him on the box. ‘I had opened by telling him

he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maid-servant stuck

atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain!’ The hasty

fellow-traveller afterwards apologised. In the moonlight he had

attributed a highly laic motive to Newman’s interference, so the

latter explains to his mother. On the 8th of December the _Hermes_

sailed. The three friends were to be together for five months, and

their route is minutely and enchantingly mapped out in the first

volume of the Newman _Correspondence_. The journey held unique

experiences, filled with interest, for the two younger men, and they,

on their part, seemed to have interested deeply many whom they met.

Hurrell kept a log as they moved, for his brothers and sisters, for

Mr. Keble, for Mr. Williams, and a few others; and out of it a fairly

connected narrative can be extracted, of a colour and form quite other

than Newman’s, the better correspondent, but graphic enough. Before

starting on his voyage, Hurrell had seen in print, in the first and

second volumes of _The British Magazine_, both his pioneer papers on

Gothic Architecture, and the earlier chapters of his history of S.

Thomas à Becket; these were followed, in volume iv., by The Project of

Henry II. for Uniting Church and State, A.D. 1154.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Dec. 12, 1832.

‘We started from Falmouth about eleven, on the 8th. “_Jamque tibi e

mediis pelagi_ mirabilis _undis_,” about sixty-eight miles to the

south of Oporto, and thirty from the shore: the sea a perfect sheet of

glass, showing the reflection of the stars, particularly Sirius, which

is most splendid. The Pole-star sinking perceptibly: I am sure the

Great Bear’s tail must have had a dip as he went his rounds. It has

been very calm all day, and we have gone seven-and-a-half miles an

hour: when the sun came to the meridian our latitude was 41° 36´. In

the daytime the sea was a pale blue colour; I will not attempt to

describe the sunset. Yesterday was very interesting: when we came on

deck in the morning we could just make out Cape Ortegal to the

south-east of us, at a distance of about forty miles. It was very

pale, and scarcely to be distinguished from the sky, but rose very

high above the horizon, and, as we neared it, seemed to be quite

precipitous; we did not get within thirty miles, so that it has left

on my mind only the ghost of an impression: but it is a grand ghost.

We saw where Corunna lay, and must have been within twenty miles of

some part of the coast between that and Cape Finisterre, which we

doubled in the dark. All of it was of a very singular character, but

insignificant compared with Cape Ortegal. All that day the wind was

fresh from the east, and the sea very wild and grand, of a deep

black-blue, covered with breakers: we went rather more than eight

miles an hour, though the ship tossed amazingly. This was the first

day that we had had a clear sky, and marvellous it was: a strong east

wind in the middle of December, and the climate like May! our latitude

at noon 44° 3´. There is something in the colour of the sea out of

soundings, which is very striking to one who has only seen the shallow

water that surrounds England. There is not a tint of green in it;

to-day it has been a pale blue, like a beautiful lake; yesterday it

was a black-purple. We find that this steamer is to touch at Cadiz and

Algiers, and to spend two days at Gibraltar, in the way to Malta, and

that afterwards it is to spend four days between Zante, Cephalonia,

Ithaca, and Leucadia, touching at Patras (_olim_ Patræ), then to spend

six at Corfu, and afterwards return to Malta the same way; so we shall

certainly extend our trip. The commander and the midshipmen are a very

gentlemanlike set, and we the only passengers: so it is most

luxurious…. And now I am stupid; if there is nothing more to tell

to-morrow, I shall fill up the blank between Falmouth and Cape Ortegal,

which may be regarded as our Dark Age.

‘_Thursday evening._――The day has again been beautiful, and quite

summery, with scarcely a cloud. When the sun rose we were off the

Berlingas (some small sharp rocks, which you will see in a map), and

from thence we kept near shore all the way to the rock of Lisbon. The

greater part of the way we could not have been much more than a mile

off. The sea has been its old green to-day; the coast all along very

peculiar, not very high, but wild, and strongly marked; the rock

precipitous, and deeply indented, and every promontory relieved by a

thin mist of spray from the breakers of the Atlantic. We watched them

curl in upon the shore, each rising in a green transparent line as it

came to its turn to break, and then turning partially into a delicate

mist where it met the more prominent rocks, till at last the whole

line seemed to burst, and another rose behind its aërified relics, and

put me in mind of Ἀφροδίτη…. When we passed Mafra we saw the cupolas

of the palace of Cintra, and, through an opening of the hills, made

out the greater part of it through glasses. The situation is strange

for so magnificent a building. And now we had a clear view of the

ridge on which the Duke took up his position on the northern side of

the lines of Torres Vedras. I will not attempt to describe it, except

that it is grand to a degree, rising in spire-like shaggy tops, and

cut by deep ravines, the sides of which were fringed with what we were

told were cork trees. As we got near we saw many villas about half-way

up, and on the two highest points were two convents. The Roman

Catholics are queer fellows: they are determined to be admired and not

envied; we, unhappily λαχόντες ἀντιοστρόφον τυχὴν, are envied and not

admired. We doubled Capo Roca at three, and then went down to dinner.

The mouth of the Tagus was too distant to make anything out, except

the masts of the English ships, who are there to bully Don Miguel.[95]

On Friday we got up at seven to see Cape St. Vincent, and passed close

under it. The light on it was very fine, and the form of the rocks

bold; but yesterday had spoiled us. The day is fine, cloudless, and

windless――almost too hot…. Just now we saw a fishing-boat, and made

towards it. The people were in a great fright, and pulled with all

their might, while they thought there was a chance to get away; at

last they gave up in despair. When we came up we found they had no

fish: there were four of them, very dark complexions, and, as well as

I could judge, Moorish features: the boat, sails, and all, perfectly

un-English (a word which has ceased to be vituperative in my

vocabulary). The coast which we are now passing is too distant to be

very interesting, but a grey ridge of mountains rises behind, out of a

dead flat, reminding one that we are off a strange land. The lateen

sails, too, of which many are about, and two turtles which we almost

ran over just now, and a shark’s fin just showing above water, all

tell the same story…. On Sunday morning it was foggy and disagreeable,

and we were in the dreaded Bay of Biscay: however, I was still well

enough to do Service on board…. All the ship’s crew attended except

the steersman and the stokers, _i.e._, the fellows that feed the fire

of the engine. The commander had them all upon deck in the morning and

gave them a practical discourse on good behaviour, which amused

[Newman] and me by being so much to the point: he is a nice fellow, I

think. After Service I was fairly done up, and lost my character….

Next day we were in the middle of the Bay: still cloudy and damp, and

a long gentle swell: but we had served our time, and were all alive

and merry…. In the evening we found that the commander was a musician

and a painter; he had a very elegant miniature of his wife that he had

finished up for his amusement at sea; and he sang us several songs,

accompanying himself on the Spanish guitar, in very good taste, as

[Newman] said: we the ἀμύητοι liked it much; and we have not had any

qualms since: and now I have got on to where the rest begins. We live

splendidly on board, have a cabin each, capital dinners, and good

company: the three midshipmen, gentlemanlike obliging fellows as can

be: yesterday they went out of the vessel’s course, to show us the

coast to advantage.

‘_Saturday._――On getting up, found ourselves in Cadiz harbour; the

convent bells put us in mind that we are in a religious country: it

sounded just like Oxford before Morning Chapel. We found ourselves in

quarantine and unable to land. The Consul’s boat came off for the

letters, rowed by eight Spaniards, such odd-looking fellows! they row

without rullocks, having a strap and a τροπωτήρ…. We saw the

unfinished Cathedral very distinctly through a glass: it had not at

all an ecclesiastical look, but was large and picturesque. It will

never be finished now, I suppose, as the day of apostasy seems at hand

in Spain.

‘_Sunday morning._――Here we are at Gibraltar.’

Newman’s letters, enthusiastic over sky and sea, are full of the

horrors of the ship (which he says was not properly cleaned before

being sent down from Woolwich), and of the little stuffy rooms which

are enough to kill a valetudinarian; but valetudinarian Hurrell seems

to have enjoyed it all.

To the Rev. ISAAC WILLIAMS, Dec. 27, 1832.

‘… We were at Gibraltar only forty-eight hours, and of that we were in

quarantine forty. The remaining eight hours, however, we turned to

account, under the auspices of the Colonel of engineers, who was kind

enough to lend us horses, and go over everything with us:

unfortunately we were there so short a time, that we could only see

what was curious, and had no leisure for the picturesque; to enjoy

which, it would have been necessary to ride away five or six miles, on

what they call the neutral ground: the low sandy isthmus which joins

the rock to the continent; but from the fortifications we saw enough

to convince us what a magnificent object it must be. In our scramble

we had the luck to see three or four monkeys, scrambling, with the

greatest ease, up and down what seemed a smooth precipice. I know how

odious descriptions are, yet I must just tell you that, among other

things, we were taken through a gallery cut out in the most

precipitous face of the rock, about 650 feet above the base, and 800

feet below the top, so that when you peep out through the port-holes,

which are cut every here and there for cannon, you seem suspended in

mid-air, and feel giddy, in whatever direction you look. Thanks to

Colonel R[ogers] we saw so much that we had no right to grumble at the

quarantine: but it really is something so exquisitely grotesque, that

one cannot help being provoked. We were moored close alongside of a

coal-wharf, and all the day that we were imprisoned, a parcel of

fellows of the town were at work, wheeling coals into our vessel, and

upsetting them on the deck, so that they were in all but contact with

our crew for a whole day; also, all packages were received, after

undergoing the ceremony of a partial ducking in the water; and letters

had a chisel dug into them, which was supposed to let out the cholera.

And while all this absurd farce was going on, we were imprisoned in

one of the most interesting places in the world, not knowing when we

should be released, or whether at all; however, even in this time, we

had some amusement from the variety of curious figures that came down

to the Quay to look at us. One fellow, a Moorish Jew, was dressed so

picturesquely, and looked so exotic altogether, that I tried to draw

him; but he saw what I was at, and first hallooed out: “You no paint

me,” and, when I went on, he bolted as fast as he could. The Moors are

magnificent-looking fellows, with very high stern features, dark eyes,

and very marked nostrils that give to the full face rather a look of

ferocity; even the lowest of them look like aristocrats. The Spanish

women, too, were worth looking at: three of them came down to visit a

merchant who came with us from Cadiz; the high head-dresses were the

only peculiarity in their dress, but one of them was very

fine-looking, and very unlike an Englishwoman. I should have thought

her ladylike, only she spat with the most perfect indifference, just

as ―――― would in C[ommon] R[oom]. We left Gibraltar at ten on Monday

night, and had very calm beautiful weather for two days…. We got to

Algiers [Thursday morning] about three, and it was then rough, cloudy,

and blowing fresh. This is the most wretched, wicked-looking place I

ever set eyes upon. I can associate its idea with nothing but a wasp’s

nest. It is huddled together, leaving no apparent room for its

streets; its windows are loop-holes, as if to fire through. All beyond

its walls looks perfectly desolate, except a number of white specks,

which are houses where the rich inhabitants retire in time of plague.

The town itself is a mass of white, as perfectly white as a chalk

quarry; and the monotony of the glare[96] is only relieved by the rust

of weather-stains, which are not white-washed by the French so

regularly as by the Moors.

‘The Quay, as every one knows, is a strong battery, expressly for the

shelter of pirates; and, when one thought of the horrors that had been

practised in that detestable place, and felt the personal discomfort

of an approaching storm, and saw, for a foreground, the infamous

tricoloured flag on the ships, the general impression was as much the

reverse of favourable as can easily be fancied. A boat came alongside

with the Vice-consul, for letters. His Excellency was an English Jew,

and there was an half-starved Frenchman for his πάρεδρος. He was rowed

by four fellows, of what race I know not…. Their features were perfect

apathy, and looked like stuffed red leather more than flesh and blood.

If we had touched any one of the crew we should have been in for a

hundred days’ quarantine in every port of Europe, and yet the wretches

had the impudence to insist on our slitting all the letters, to let

out the cholera. We stayed an hour, and then started; and sure enough,

the storm came. The wind was north-west, and blew right across from

the Gulf of Lyons, which I shall always think more formidable than the

Bay of Biscay. The wind lasted till we got under the lee of Sardinia;

and what with the stink of the bilge-water, which was stirred up by

the tossing, and the constant noise, and the difficulty of standing

and sitting and eating and drinking, we were constantly wretched

enough. My father spent the whole time in his berth; [Newman] and I

the greater part of ours. But ills have their end. The sea and the

stink subsided, and we made the rest of our voyage to Malta stilly and

quickly, arriving there on Monday morning after breakfast. [Newman]

does not think his health perceptibly improved yet,[97] but he has

entirely got over sea-sickness, and has written an immense deal for

the _Lyra Apostolica_.[98] He has written so many letters to his

mother and sisters, that I need say no more about him. He will write

to you soon. I know you will think this a very dull letter, as it is

about places and not people; but we have been so little on shore, that

I have not been able to indulge your taste. Kindest remembrances to

O.[99] I will write to him soon.――Yours affectionately, R. H. F.’

From Malta also, on Christmas night, a letter was despatched to

Dartington, addressed, apparently, to John Spedding Froude, which

carries on the record of the travellers. All the Froudes, like all the

Hares, could draw.

‘… There is so much that is picturesque and singular about this place,

that I do not despair of occupation for all the fifteen days in

drawing, if the weather is only tolerable. The boats, and the dresses,

and the colours and forms of the buildings are all as good practice as

anything I can fancy, and I shall not be sorry to have time on my

hands for studying them at leisure. We shall be allowed to go about

the harbour [in quarantine] as much as we like, and there are several

places where we may land. This will have to start a day or two after

our return, so you will not hear much more of Malta till the next

packet. As yet I have made egregious failures in attempts to colour;

indeed, I have had no opportunity of doing anything from nature, and

recollection supplies one too indistinctly. My father has made many

very interesting coast drawings as we have come along, but he has done

nothing in a finished way.

‘_Corfu, Jan. 1._――We got here the day before yesterday, after a most

interesting voyage. The sea has been as still as a lake, and we have

had a light breeze in our favour; but it must be owned that we have

sailed away from the fine weather. Ever since we got here it has

rained torrents, and is now blowing a violent gale, so that we thank

our stars we are in harbour. On Friday morning we (as you would say)

made Zante on our larboard bow, at a distance of about fifty miles.

The high land of Cephalonia appeared at the same time, so they kept

her away three-quarters of a point, and made for the passage between

the islands. The south point of Cephalonia is a very high mountain; it

was covered with snow, which here and there appeared through the

clouds. Zante is cliffy, and not so very unlike some of the Isle of

Wight.[100] We got to the town just after dark, and went ashore to

make out what we could. We went to a billiard-room, a coffee-house,

the head inn, and two or three shops. Everything was filthy to a

degree, but there seemed to be some really handsome houses, such as

Sir John Vanbrugh might have built. The shops are all open to the

street, and one would think that the shopkeepers had never taken more

than coppers in their lives; yet in a tobacco shop, on asking the

price of a cherry-stick pipe, which I should have guessed at twelve

shillings in England, they told me it was one hundred dollars, and a

midshipman who was with us, and had lived a great deal in those parts,

said that it was not at all dear at the money. The mouthpiece was

amber inlaid with turquoise, and in that miserable-looking shop there

must have been thirty or forty more pipes as costly: I wonder where

they get customers? We drank a bottle of Zante wine at the head inn,

and very nice it was; on asking the price, the landlord most

unaffectedly said there was nothing to pay, and when we gave him a

shilling he seemed to think it was most munificent.

‘… The town is now in possession of a Suliote chief, who has taken the

castle into his own hands, and has quartered himself and his followers

in all the best houses of the town, which is now newly building, and

promises to be regular, and even elegant. The streets are quite

straight, and cut one another at right angles, and the houses all have

piazzas before them; but everything is now at a standstill, and the

streets themselves, unpaved, are more like the courses of rivulets

than anything else. It was a night of rejoicing, this being the Day of

St. Dionysius, and all the common people were assembled in the bazaar,

a sort of shambles, and the gentlemen in a coffee-room, smoking and

playing cards, in their best dresses: most of them were fine-looking

fellows, very quiet and polite. We had coffee there, and very capital

it was, but thick and almost like chocolate. I should like to know how

they make it. The Greeks there were all dressed in their white linen

petticoats, embroidered coats, and shaggy capotes, except one old

fellow, who had on an English box-coat, and one other fellow, whom,

from his vulgar impudent countenance, I conclude to have been an

English blackguard. They all say the Morea is in a most wretched

state, full of banditti and pirates, so that you cannot go anywhere

without an escort. Next day we found ourselves just off Ithaca, at

breakfast-time, and got breakfast over before we entered the strait

between Ithaca and Cephalonia. This was the first day that I attempted

what is called sketching, and I made a tolerable hand of it; at least,

I found out how to make memoranda that did to work upon afterwards. I

can make no hand of colour, and think I shall hardly attempt it, till

I have time to make some finished studies from nature. You and W[illy]

care so little about classics, that I need not trouble you about

Ulysses’ castle, Sappho’s leap, etc. We got here on Sunday night, and

the rain came soon after us, and has persecuted us incessantly ever

since. We got ashore yesterday and walked about the town, which is

very picturesque, and exactly like the panorama….

‘We were at a ball at Corfu on the anniversary of the installation of

the Ionian Government, at which all the native population were

expected; but the day was so stormy that it made a poor show. I meant

to have got you a real Albanian capote, but they were not to be had at

Corfu, and the cherry-stick tobacco-pipes were too dear.’

To the Rev. ISAAC WILLIAMS, Jan. 10, 1833.

‘We spent Christmas Day at Malta in an incessant row, taking in coals,

while the bells of all the many Churches of Valetta told what was

going on in that land of superstition;――watched one poor fellow in

quarantine all day, saying prayers to himself, and looking towards the

Church nearest on the shore, opposite to the Lazaretto.[101] The time

is now drawing nigh when we shall spend fifteen long days in that

abode of the unblessed. It is now the 10th of January, and we are just

in sight of Malta, on our return from the Ionian Islands. We have not

seen them under the most favourable circumstances, as the weather has

been wintry, _i.e._, either very stormy or very cold. I have been

often longing for the bright hot Spanish sun which conducted us from

the Bay of Biscay to Gibraltar…. Among other things, we spent half an

hour in the coffee-house [at Zante] where the Greek merchants were

assembled for the holiday evening: a little wretched dirty place, but

the company were very polite to us, and we were surprised at the

cleanness of their dresses, and a certain refinement in their

appearance and manner. We were under the guidance of Major L[ongley]

brother of L[ongley] of H[arrow][102] who is Governor of Cythera, and

knows something of the habits and language of the people. The company

all rose to him, and sat down when he said κάθεστε; but they pronounce

so queerly, that one can hardly ever make out a word, although their

newspapers are quite intelligible, and differ but little from old

Greek. I would give much to live among them for a bit, and get into

their notions. As it is, we have seen nothing but the surface, and

heard the notions of the resident English, which cannot be relied on….

In Corfu, the breed is very mongrel, mixed up with Venetian and

Italian blood; so that, altogether, the sight was uninteresting,

except that when one saw a splendid set of apartments, with

magnificent English furniture, and brilliantly illuminated, with a

band of music, etc., it contrasted itself oddly with the thought of

old Thucydides and the Corcyrean sedition. The remains of the old town

are very scanty, and one cannot make out anything satisfactory about

τὸ Ἡραῖον, etc. There is a rock that they call Ulysses’ ship; but I

suspect the name of a Venetian origin. In one place there is the

remains of an Ionic temple, on a very small scale, lately discovered;

but we had no time to go into antiquarian questions. We rode over most

of the island, and saw several of the villages, all of which bear

marks of having been tenanted by a rich population; but everything is

of a Venetian character. I cannot make out whether the people are

religious or not; yet they seem, on the whole, to be an innocent civil

set. Every small knot of families have their priest and their chapel,

but no parishes that we could hear of. Their Churches are very small,

but great numbers of them: two or three to a small village. [Newman]

and my father went into one in an out-of-the-way village, in which

there [were] fine silver lamps, a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last

Supper, well executed, and several pictures of Saints, in the hard

German style of the fifteenth century. I went twice into the Church

which is the depository of the body of St. Spiridion;[103] and people

were praying there both times, one person apparently from the higher

classes. In the chapel where the body lies, lamps are always kept

dimly burning, and the people go in and kiss the shrine. The feet are

stained with tears, and there are many splendid offerings there of

precious stones. They keep all the Saints’ days by going to Church,

and playing cards afterwards; and on the fast days they fast fairly….

On our way back from Corfu, the curtain was drawn back which had

before hung over the scenery, and the long ridges of the Acarnanian

mountains appeared in full splendour; among these many points in the

range of Pindus were visible in the distance; and from Zante we

certainly saw the summit of Parnassus, though partially intercepted

with clouds. To look at, Mount St. Meri, in the north of Morea, is the

most magnificent, but I do not know its classical name.[104] And now I

suppose I must bid farewell to these extraordinary places for the rest

of my life; having only just seen enough of them to know how well

worth seeing they are.’

The fifteen days of detention were not quite so annoying or so

monotonous as the travellers had feared. ‘This Lazaret,’ says Newman

in the course of a long letter to his sister Jemima, ‘was built by the

Knights [of St. John at Malta] for the Turks…. We burn olive wood. I

assure you we make ourselves very comfortable. We feed well from an

hotel across the water. The Froudes draw and paint. I have hired a

violin, and bad as it is, it sounds grand in such spacious halls. I

write verses, and get up some Italian, and walk up and down the rooms

about an hour and a half daily; and we have a boat, and are allowed to

go about the harbour.’ An incident on the quarantine island is

responsible, in Newman’s biography, for the one and only tiff between

himself and Froude.[105] In reality, it was no tiff at all, as Froude

was wholly innocent of offence. (Newman, it may be remarked in

passing, had just written his _David and Jonathan_.) It seems that

during the January nights in the Lazaretto, all three of the English

travellers used to hear unaccountable footsteps, in the rooms and

galleries, their own doors having been locked from the outside. On one

occasion Newman thought he heard the noises in Archdeacon Froude’s

room. ‘The fourth time it occurred, I hallooed out: “Who’s there?” and

sat up in my bed ready to spring out. A deep silence followed, and I

sat waiting a considerable time: and thus I caught my cold.’ A week

later, there is no clean bill of health to send Mrs. Newman. ‘The

weather has been unusually severe here. My cold caught in the Lazaret

ripened the day I came out of it into the most wretched cough I ever

recollect having, as hard as the stone walls, and far more tight than

the windows.’ In short, Newman was housebound, a close prisoner, and

miserable enough, despite his successful completing of his

‘Patriarchal Sonnets.’ Archdeacon Froude forbade his going out to

Church. The next day, Monday, he confides to the all-sympathetic bosom

of his family: ‘I am properly taken at my word. I have been sighing

for rest and quiet. This is the sixth day since I left the Lazaret,

and I have hardly seen or spoken to anyone. The Froudes dine out every

day; and are out all the morning, of course. Last night I put a

blister on my chest; and never having had one on before, you may fancy

my awkwardness in taking it off and dressing the place of it this

morning. I ought to have had four hands. Our servant was with the

Froudes…. Well, I am set upon a solitary life, and therefore ought to

have experience what it is; nor do I repent…. I have sent to the

library, and got _Marriage_[106] to read. Don’t smile――this

juxtaposition is quite accidental! You are continually in my thoughts.

I know what kindness I should have at home.’ He ends dismally, not

without citing the Apostolic precedent of going not alone but two and

two: ‘I wonder how long I shall last without any friend about me!’ One

can imagine the anxiety and indignation of the devoted hearts at

Iffley. Early in April their unfriended John Henry received his sister

Jemima’s answer, distinctly uncomplimentary to Hurrell Froude;

whereupon Newman rushed into explanation: he could not have Froude

blamed; he had begged to be left alone (‘you know I can be very

earnest in entreating to be left alone’): he had refused his repeated

solicitations even to let him sit by him and read to him; he had, in

short, driven him away. Hurrell, indeed, was not cut out by Nature for

a nurse. Be that as it may, would it be far wrong to surmise that it

was influenza which had been playing its now-well-understood tricks on

Newman? But he made up like a lover for his passing semi-accusation.

Froude, as it happened, was singularly well at this time, though the

reprieve from discomfort was to be but brief.

The three companions went from Malta to Messina, where, in wretched

weather, they had divers small misadventures, shared with

Rohan-Chabots. Hurrell kept, that week, a sort of journal of events;

and the pages describing the capture of lodgings at Palermo seem worth

transcription, since they show the revered Vicar of S. Mary-the-Virgin

defeated by female diplomacy, and in the unexpected rôle of a

sprinter.[107]

‘We got to Palmero about eleven or twelve next morning [Feb. 11,

1833]: the sea calm, the sun hot, and everything beautiful to a

degree. Here we knew that there was to be a scramble for rooms; so

when we anchored, [Newman] and I made a rush for the ladder, and were

first in the boat; but unfortunately, when we were in it we found that

we had mistaken the landing-place. Our boat was nearest the Quay; and

we had to clear out round all the others to make for the custom-house

and town, which were a mile off; also, our boat had only one man. So

we saw two other boats give us the go-by, in one of which was the wife

of the Governor of Moldavia and Wallachia:[108] they landed about four

minutes before us, and we thought to make up our way by running. I was

soon left behind by [Newman] and the boatman. When they passed the

Countess, I saw her tap a fellow on the shoulder, who ran off for a

coach, in which she set off as hard as she could for the Albergo di

Londra. We found afterward that she had secured Page’s whole house by

letter; and not contented with this, she had two servants ahead, who,

when [Newman] came up with them, raced him; and being fresh, they

contrived to keep ahead by a foot or two, so as just to bespeak

Jaquerie’s whole house before he could speak to the landlord. On this,

we despaired, and put up with the first place we could find to hide

our noses in: luckily, it had no fleas! and that was more than we had

bargained for.’ Newman, in his own letters, does not single out for

praise the one negative charm of their temporary dwelling. “It is

astonishing,” he says from the depth of English decency, “how our

standard falls in these parts!”

The Archdeacon, with his attendant spirits, was off at four in the

morning for Egesta. They had a carriage to themselves, drawn by three

mules with bells, and a boy and a guide, besides the driver; much

æsthetic rapture and next to nothing to eat, seems to have been their

portion. But the culminating point, the complete satisfaction of the

heart’s desire, was Rome. ‘All the cities I ever saw are but as dust,

even dear Oxford inclusive, compared with its majesty and glory,’

writes Newman to the Rose Hill auditory. This enthusiasm of his was

not without its scruples and torments. He adds an occasional colophon

of genuine self-comfort, being sure that ‘our creed,’ the while, is

‘purer than the Roman’: a matter which, apparently, Hurrell forgot to

dwell upon. He never had to rid himself of the least taint of the

Pharisee, although he had been scandalised enough at Naples. That

alien city of all badness had given his notions of its nominal

religion a rude shock. Frederick William Faber, passing through

Cologne in 1839, got, unwillingly, the very same sort of painful

disedification which Froude got at Naples.[109] The sadness of the

decay of an ideal, even though a misplaced and mistimed one, hangs

over some of the letters sped towards holy Oxford.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, March 16, 1833.

‘_Rome._――… I should like to be back at the election much; _sed fata

vetant_. Being abroad is a most unsatisfactory thing, and the idleness

of it deteriorating. I shall connect very few pleasing associations

with this winter, and I don’t think I shall come home much wiser than

I went. The only μάθησις on which I can put my hand, as having

resulted from my travels is, that the whole Christian system all over

Europe “_tendit visibiliter ad non esse_.”[110] The same process which

is going on in England and France is taking its course everywhere

else; and the clergy in these Catholic countries seem as completely to

have lost their influence, and to submit as tamely to the State, as

ever we can do in England…. Egesta … by good luck we have been able to

see, though we were obliged to abandon the rest of our Sicilian

expedition. It is the most strangely romantic place I ever saw or

conceived.[111] It is no use attempting to describe it, except that

the ruins of the city stand on the top of a very high hill,

precipitous on three sides, and very steep on the other, literally

towering up to heaven, with scarcely a mule-track leading to it, and

all round the appearance of an interminable solitude. After going some

miles through a wild uninhabited country, you approach it by winding

up a zigzag path cut in the face of what looks a perpendicular and

inaccessible rock, and, till you have got some way up, it wears so

little the appearance of a track, that without guides no one would

venture on. At the top the old walls of the town can be distinctly

traced, where one would think that mortal foot had never or rarely

been, and numbers of tooled stones [are] scattered in all directions,

evidently the remains of well-finished buildings. Here and there is a

broken arch which makes one fancy the remains to be Roman, and in the

most conspicuous place a fine theatre, nearly perfect. When you come

to the ascent on the opposite side, you all at once see the Temple, in

what seems a plain at the bottom, with its pediments and all its

columns perfect, and only differing from what it was at first in the

deep rich colouring of the weather-stains. When we saw it there was a

large encampment of shepherds in the front of it, with their wolf-dogs

and wild Salvator-like dresses; and, by-the-by, as we found

afterwards, with no great objection to lead Salvator-like lives; for

when by some accident we were separated from one another, they got

round [Newman] shouting “_Date moneta!_” and, he thinks, would

certainly have taken it by force, except for a man with a gun who is

placed there by Government, as _custode_ of the Temple, and who came

up when the others were getting most troublesome. On getting close to

the Temple, we found that it stands on the brink of a precipitous

ravine 200 or 300 feet deep, which gives a grandeur to the whole scene

even beyond what it gets from the mountains and the solitude. Compared

with Egesta, Pæstum is a poor concern, and so is Naples when compared

with Palermo.