‘I have just heard that the postman is going, and so must write for my

life. The College is about fourteen miles from Bridge Town, and about

in the same latitude on the east side of the island. It is a long

handsome stone building, which has been very ill-repaired since the

hurricane. It consists of a Hall and Chapel, each about fifty feet

long, with a handsome porch between them, and two wings in which the

rooms are. I will give you a sketch in my next. The Principal’s house,

which is a separate building at the west end, is a very good specimen

of a Queen Anne house, only without chimneys. The carving of the

staircase and doors is very costly, in cedar. It is so well built that

the hurricane hardly hurt it at all. I generally drink tea there; but

breakfast and dine in my rooms. I get out of bed as soon as it is

light, if they bring me my coffee so soon; else I wait for it. You

can’t think how odd one feels at getting up without a cup of it. I did

not feel this at first, and perhaps it is only habit now. I breakfast

at half-past eight, dine at three: give Lectures from twelve to two;

and the rest of the day give my body as much exercise, and my mind as

little, as I can. There are about fourteen students here: very little

for so expensive an establishment. If I was the Bishop, I should not

make it a place for the exclusive education of gentlemen, but should

let the respectable coloured people, who had time and inclination to

study divinity, come here and prepare for Orders, without insisting on

Latin and Greek. These colonies are not ripe for supporting a learned

clergy; the wealthy are too irreligious to pay towards the maintenance

of anything like a sufficient number to look after the population. The

Bishop should take people of the caste in life that the Wesleyan

ministers come from, and taking care to keep a tight hand over them,

should ordain all who have sufficient zeal and knowledge to undertake

the burden. I will not even insist on their giving up their trades;

for if a parish priest can keep a school, I am sure he may make shoes

without giving up more of his time: and if St. Paul could maintain

himself by tent-making while he discharged the duties of an Apostle, I

don’t see why other people should not be able to maintain themselves

as well, while they do the duties of a parish priest. The notion that

a priest must be a gentleman is a stupid exclusive Protestant fancy,

and ought to be exploded. If they would educate a lower caste here,

they would fill the College directly.’

It was not long after the date of this letter that a restoration, not

‘an addition,’ as Mr. Thomas Mozley says,[187] was made, from

Hurrell’s designs and under his superintendence, of Codrington

College. The hurricane which had wrought the original havoc spent

itself in August, 1831. The great porch between Chapel and Hall, an

open passage locally known as the Belfry, was rebuilt, retaining the

triple arch below, but not the cupola or small dome which formerly

lifted itself over the palm-trees and the bridged waters. The whole

remains as our amateur architect left it. Busy as he was, he thirsted

for fuller news from home.

To FREDERIC ROGERS, Esq.,[188] Sept. 25, 1834.

‘… By the time you get this, it will be near a year since I have heard

a word about you…. Of N[ewman] I heard as late as December 15, 1833: I

have just referred to the rascal’s letter. But as to K[eble] and

C[hristie] and you and the M[ozleys], I am in utter ignorance on which

side the Styx you are all residing…. I have entirely left off animal

food, which has cooled me without weakening me; and I have left off

writing radicalism, which did myself harm, and no one else any good:

for I see neither N[ewman] nor [Rose] will take any of it. Also, above

all, I have left off thinking, which, on matured reflection, I am

convinced is the great evil of human life…. If the sun was not so

intensely hot as to make sitting in the open air intolerable (_N.B._,

there is no shade here), I should take to drawing; but, somehow, there

is not much to tempt one in that department. The lights and shades are

here a third proportional to the lights and shades of an English

summer day, and those on a moonlight night. Everything is one mass of

brightness, except for the first and last half-hours of the day. The

skies, too, are entirely deficient in that glow which one’s English

imagination associates with heat; pale transparency, which one can

hardly look at for its brilliance, stares at one on every side, and

every part of the sky reflects so much light on every part of the

landscape, that you may apply to day what Virgil says of night:

‘“――――_cœlum condidit [igne]

Jupiter, et rebus [lux] abstulit [alma] colorem_.”

‘The two things which I should like to make drawings of are the

bread-fruit tree, and the particular kind of palm which, in the

poetical language of the country, they call the cabbage-tree; both of

which are certainly very beautiful, the former most especially so; and

both so unlike anything English, that I don’t yet understand how to

touch the foliage…. I have two very pleasant rooms in the pleasantest

spot in the whole island, and battel just as at Oxford, which serves

to keep up a pleasant illusion. The College is about four hundred feet

above the sea, which is about two-thirds of a mile off, and the aspect

of my sitting-room is straight towards England; so that when I am

sentimental and dumpish,

πόντον ἐπ’ ἀτρύγετον δερκέσκομαι ἀχνύμενος κήρ.

‘This windward coast is for ever exposed to the full roll of the

Atlantic, and its monotonous perturbation wearies one’s imagination,

as well as the mud and sand, neither of which does it suffer to repose

for a moment. I often wish for what I used to think no very

interesting object, the motionless calms of Torbay or Dartmouth.’

‘Rogers heard from Froude yesterday,’ runs a postscript of Newman to

Keble on Nov. 10. ‘He says nothing about his health, but is evidently

homesick and lonely.’ And two days after, Newman tenderly explains to

Hurrell himself: ‘I am not surprised you should be so unjust to me,

for I should be so to you under the same circumstances. You see we

expected you here with the Bishop of Barbados till the middle of May,

and therefore did not send letters. When we found him here without

you, we instantly began to write; by accidents which we could not help

(_e.g._, the box was a fortnight on the road to Dartington), it was

August before it was off. However, you had news of Oxford up to the

minute of its going…. Keble’s father has taken to his bed, and is so

ill that Keble does not leave him.’

Meanwhile, Hurrell had pursued his grievance, attacking Mr. Keble with

wistful humour, during October. ‘I wish I knew Horace’s receipt for

giving the sound of a swan to mute fishes,[189] and I most certainly

should administer you a dose. I know you must have a great deal on

your hands, so I should be contented with extracting only two pages in

as big a hand as an idle undergraduate’s theme: but I really do wish

to hear something of you…. Concerning your worship’s self, I have been

able to collect that you were in existence on or about the 12th of

June last…. [Davison’s?] death was a great surprise to me, and I may

almost say a shock, as I had always looked to him to do something

great for us…. Do you know, I partly fear that you … are going to back

out of the conspiracy and leave me and [Newman] to our fate? I mean to

ally myself to him in a close league, and put as much mischief into

his head as I can. He has sent me a great many of his pamphlets, etc.,

which I admire greatly for their ἦθος and execution; and I have

written back to him, pointing out wherein I think him too

conservative.’

The deceased colleague may well have been John Davison, who had died

on the sixth day of May, 1834; but Hurrell would not have seen the

announcement before July. Davison is commonly reckoned as one of the

old school, the Oriel Noetics, or Liberals; but there is a contrary

impression of him to be drawn from some charming pages in Mozley’s

_Reminiscences_.[190] Newman twice names him with Rose as a steadfast

encourager of the earliest _Tracts_.[191] There is no doubt that he

sympathised with the Tractarians more than his indecisive habit would

suffer him to testify by deed, and he was much beloved by them.

Hurrell’s expectation of ‘something great’ from him would almost

inevitably centre about the Scripture Commentary which he was known to

be writing and rewriting, but his fastidious self-criticism got the

better of that and him, after a most Oxonian fashion, as he directed

his widow to burn all his manuscripts. Besides, he was fifty-seven,

and naturally preferred an evening siesta on Troy Wall to any chances

of war. Newman, looking back, wrote feelingly of him in April, 1842:

‘It is surely mysterious, considering what the world is, how it needs

improvement, and, moreover, that this life is the appropriate time for

action, or, what is emphatically called in Scripture, work, that they

who seem gifted for the definite purpose of influencing and edifying

their brethren, should be allowed to do so much less than might be

expected…. Left to ourselves, we are apt to grudge that the powers of

such a mind as [Mr. Davison’s] have not had full range in his age and

country, and that a promise of such high benefits should, owing to

circumstances beyond man’s control, have been but partially

accomplished.’[192]

Hurrell’s playful use of the word ‘conspiracy’ to indicate the

Movement, will be noted. It was habitual with him from the first. It

irritated many excellent persons at the time; it irritated Dean Burgon

fifty years later. In the chapter devoted to Mr. Rose, in _Twelve Good

Men_, Dean Burgon administers to Hurrell an oblique rebuke. ‘Froude, a

man of splendid abilities and real genius, but sadly wanting in

judgment and of fatal indiscretion, rendered the good cause the

greatest disservice in his power by speaking of the Hadleigh

Conference in a letter to a friend as “the conspiracy”: which letter

was soon afterward published.’ Yet the word was really employed, and

it may have been even invented, a fortnight before the meeting at

Hadleigh, by none other than Mr. William Palmer! ‘Now I hope you will

be able to join in this little plan and conspiracy,’ he wrote to Mr.

Perceval on July 10, 1833. A more recent, and an equally historic use

of the word (not ironic in the least, this time), is Archbishop

Tait’s, in condemning the publications of the Society of the Holy

Cross:[193] ‘to counteract what I feel obliged to call a CONSPIRACY

within our own body against the doctrine, the discipline and the

practice of our Reformed Church.’

In this later Newman correspondence, as Miss Mozley the Editor of it

remarks, ‘R. H. Froude appears more as critic than originator or

author. His more intimate friends required his criticism, and rested

on his judgment. In his own person, this faculty acted mainly as a

check. He often speaks of trial and failure in his own attempts to

bring out what was working in his mind; as, for instance: “I have

tried to write a criticism on the Apollo [Belvedere], but cannot bring

out my meaning, which is abstruse and metaphysico-poetical. I always

get bombastic, and am forced to scratch out.” His critical faculty was

too masterful to be practised upon himself, but when exercised for the

benefit of friends to whom he looked up, he could give free license to

a pungent pen, and yet leave the modern reader to understand how

anxious those friends might well be to secure his comments, as long as

they were attainable. Keble, in his own simple way, sends his papers

to his old pupil to be overlooked by him; and Mr. Newman was more at

ease with Froude’s _imprimatur_. Thus, he sends him draughts of

papers; for example, “No. 2, Keble’s, No. 1, mine”; with the order:

“criticise the whole very accurately in matter and style, and send it

back by return of post.” Of course the state of Froude’s health made

criticism more possible than authorship, but, also, different

intellectual powers and functions are called into play.’[194]

It is certainly noticeable enough, in all the intercourse of these

years, between Keble, Newman and Froude, how the ordinary business of

the University is completely ignored. It is like necromancy to

remember that men were really still hastily reading the _Ethics_ by

the fire, and emptying bottles, and, with their pipes, racing off to

Shotover, through the white salve-like mud, for a constitutional. ‘The

_Tracts_,’ says Mr. Mark Pattison sadly, ‘desolated Oxford life, and

suspended, for an indefinite period, all science and humane letters,

and the first strivings for intellectual freedom which had moved in

the bosom of Oriel.’ Such æsthetic havoc was never caused in a city,

unless under Savonarola, when all the wonted social graces went to the

dust-bin, and works of art made acceptable fagots, and Christ was

hailed, without legal precedent, King of Florence.

On November 18, 1834, Newman resumes, in reference to complaints from

Hurrell, ‘suffering under intolerable delays incident to distant

correspondence in those days’:

‘I am so angry with you, I cannot say! Have we not sent you a full

box? That up to Sept. 29 you had not received it, is as hard for us to

bear as for you. Why will you not have a little faith?… I suppose all

this is for your good. You want a taming in various ways. It is to

wean you from your over-interest in politics … so you see you are

being taught to unlearn the world, the ecclesiastical as well as the

worldly world. A strange thought came across me about you some six

weeks ago, when I saw a letter from Tucker[195] of C. C. C., giving an

account of his prospects in India. He is not at all an imaginative or

enthusiastic man; but really, a religious spirit has sprung up among

military men at our stations, and having no angel to direct them to

Joppa, they have turned Evangelicals. The various sects there have a

leaning towards the Church, and the men of colour are forming centres

of operation. My thought was, if your health would not let you come

home, you ought to be a Bishop in India….’

What Newman did not confess to his friend was that he had dreamed of

their fates as one: he, too, would be a Bishop in India. To his sister

Jemima he had written from Tunbridge Wells on October 2: ‘I have been

much struck with a most sensible account of the state of India just

received here from Mr. Tucker, in almost every word of which (it is

full of practical and doctrinal matters), I agree. Though he is a

Calvinist, I do believe our differences would, in India, almost be a

matter of a few words. He gives a most exciting account of his field

of labour, without intending it. At this moment, could I choose, and

have all circumstances and providences at my disposal, I would go as

an independent Bishop to his part of India, and found a Church there.

This, you will say, is an ambitious flight. I am sure some one ought

to be sent as Bishop; but the State, the State! we are crippled. I can

fancy the day coming when India might be a refuge, if our game was up

here.’ Froude agreed. He says elsewhere: ‘The present Church system is

an incubus upon the country. It spreads its arms in all directions,

claiming the whole surface of the earth for its own, and refusing a

place to any subsidiary system to spring upon. Would that the waters

would throw up some Acheloides, where some new Bishop might erect a

See beyond the blighting influence of our upas trees.[196] Yet I

suppose that before he could step in, an Act of Parliament would put

its paw upon the κρησφύγετον, and include it within the limits of some

adjacent diocese. I admire [Mozley’s?] hit about our being united to

the State as Israel was to Egypt.’

To return to the letter sent to Barbados on November 18. Around this

half-quaint suggestion of young mitred revolutionaries in unhampered

Sees, Newman’s love and genius break forth together.

‘It quite amused[197] me for awhile, and made me think how many posts

there are in His Kingdom, how many offices, who says to one “Do this,

and he doeth it,” etc. It is quite impossible that some way or other

you are not destined to be the instrument of God’s purposes. Though I

saw the earth cleave and you fall in, or Heaven open, and a chariot

appear, I should say just the same. God has ten thousand posts of

service. You might be of use in the central elemental fire; you might

be of use in the depths of the sea.’

To the editor of the _Letters and Correspondence to 1845_ we owe,

again, this enriching footnote:

‘In Vol. ii. of the _Parochial Sermons_ (Ascension Day, p. 214) there

is a passage which throws light on this ardent confident strain,

prompted as it is evidently by the failure of hope in his friend’s

recovery for service in this present scene. “Moreover, this departure

of Christ and coming of the Holy Ghost leads our minds with great

comfort to the thought of many lower dispensations of Providence

towards us…. This is a thought which is particularly soothing as

regards the loss of friends, or of especially gifted men who seem, in

their day, the earthly support of the Church…. Doubtless, ‘it is

expedient’ they should be taken away; otherwise some great mercy will

not come to us. They are taken away, perchance, to other duties in

God’s service equally ministrative to the salvation of the elect as

earthly service. Christ went to intercede with the Father: we do not

know, we may not boldly speculate, yet it may be that Saints departed

intercede, unknown to us, for the victory of the Truth upon earth …

they are taken away for some purpose surely; their gifts are not lost

to us; their soaring minds, the fire of their contemplations, the

sanctity of their desires, the vigour of their faith, the sweetness

and gentleness of their affections, were not given without an

object.”’

Lastly, the long letter closes with a little budget of news welcome to

the exile, and with its crowded mention of names unforgotten, familiar

fifty years after as they were then.

‘The Tracts now form a thick volume. We have put a title-page and

preface to them, and called them _Tracts for 1833-4_. I think you will

like them, as a whole. You go too fast yourself. Williams has been so

unwell, we were going to send him out to you; but he has lately

mended. I have just engaged with Rivington to publish another volume

of _Sermons_. The first volume was nearly sold off in the course of

nine months: one thousand copies. I have not dared all along to

indulge the hope that I should be favoured with having you here again;

but now really the prospect seems clearing. I do not like to say so,

lest I break a spell! Rogers’ eyes are little or not at all better.

Gladstone is turning out a fine fellow. Harrison has made him confess

that the doctrine of the Apostolical Succession is irresistible.’

A long letter to Newman, on Nov. 23, opens: ‘Do you know, I am hungry

and thirsty to hear about you, and whether your health stands, in the

midst of your occupations? My father tells me your _Sermons_ are

talked of in all directions…. I have entirely left off meat; my dinner

is toast, and a basin of very weak chicken broth. Breakfast is my

chief meal, and consists of a vast joram[198] of milk and arrow-root.

It is an odd thing, [as] milk never used to agree with me, but I find

that by putting a good lot of cinnamon into it, I can digest any

quantity. I find I must not take exercise so as to put me out of

breath, as that increases my cough, yet the more I take the stronger I

get; so that I am in a dilemma, which I shall cut by borrowing one of

the Bishop’s horses instead of walking. I am perforce as idle as

possible, my chief occupation being to keep thoughts out of my head.

In this respect I find my friend Sanctus Thomas[199] of infinite use.

Dawdling over translations, and picking facts out of allusions just

keep one going for the time, without supplying any materials to brood

over. If you see Keble, congratulate him on the Yank edition of _The

Christian Year_,[200] which has gone on Oakeley’s[201] plan of putting

the fine passages in italics. It is amusing to see the selection which

he[202] has made…. As to sentiment, I am heartily tired of this place

and climate. I am sure it has been too hot for me, particularly during

August, September, and October, the hurricane months. I fancy, too, if

there was something more to interest one, I should have been benefited

by it. Niggerland is a poor substitute for the _limen Apostolorum_!

However, I do verily believe that if I had stayed in England I should

have had a confirmed disease on my lungs by this time…. I have not

written a verse since I have been out here, and could not, for the

life of me…. If I had the necessary books here, I should like much to

get together materials for the Lives of Bishops Andrewes, Cosin, and

Overall. They might be made into a nice first volume for a series of

Lives of Apostolical Divines of the Church of England: a genus which

seems to me to have come into existence about the beginning of James

I., and to have become extinct with the Nonjurors…. I wish I could

say, as John of Salisbury of Saint Thomas: “_Domino Cantuarensi, quoad

literaturam et mores, plurimum profuit exilium illud._” But somehow I

think I have become even more uncharitable and churlish than I was!’

Hurrell addressed both Christie and Newman on Saint Stephen’s Day. The

letter to the former caused immense laughter at Oriel. ‘Even Froude is

beginning to joke about matrimony!’ writes James Mozley to his sister.

Never was a joke in less danger of becoming practical.

[Illustration, hand-written letter:

_St Stephen’s day_――

_My dear Christie_――

_When I come home I mean to rat-&-be married: i.e, if I can

hook in any one to be such a fool. The great difference

between A wife & a friend is that a wife cannot cut one, & a

friend can. It is a bad thing περισσὰ φρονεῖν so I shall

certainly rat. I see that little goose H. W. has gone the

way of all flesh. Old Ryder’s apostacy I knew of before.

Isaac cannot hold out long if he is not fall’n already. So

why should you & I be wiser than our neighbours?_

_Some months ago before I had repented of my radicalism &c,

I was devising a scheme for you which was knocked on the

head by my finding from the Brit Mag. that you were ordained

by the Bp. of Oxford. For my part, I’d rather have had my

Orders from a Scotch Bishop, & I thought of suggesting the

same to you. The stream is purer; & besides it w’d have left

one free from some embarrassing engagements. By the by, all

I know about any of you is through the Brit. Mag. Here it

was I learnt about Ryder & Henry, & N’s sermons, & your

ordination & whatever else I have happened to pick up about

any one――I am very thirsty for more authentic

information――Not that I w’d have you write to me after the

receipt of this letter tho, for by that time I should most

likely be on my way back. I shall start as early as I can in

April: & I really begin now to think that I shall come back

cured: At least people tell me that since the weather has

become cooler I have altered for the better in appearance

rapidly, & certainly I have in strength. I have now left off

animal food for many months_]

‘When I come home, I mean to rat-and-be-married: _i.e._, if I can hook

in anyone to be such a fool. The great difference between a wife and a

friend is that a wife cannot cut one, and a friend can. It is a bad

thing περισσὰ φρονεῖν, so I shall certainly rat.[203] I see that …

[Henry Wilberforce][204] has … Old [Ryder’s] apostacy I knew of

before. [Isaac][205] cannot hold out long, if he is not fallen

already. So why should you and I be wiser than our neighbours?[206]

Some months ago, before I had repented of my radicalism, I was

devising a scheme for you, which was knocked on the head by my finding

from _The British Magazine_ that you were ordained by the Bishop of

Oxford.[207] For my part, I would rather have had my orders from a

Scotch Bishop, and I thought of suggesting the same to you. The stream

is purer, and, besides, it would have left one free from some

embarrassing engagements.[208] By the by, all I know about any of you

is through _The British Magazine_…. I am very thirsty for more

authentic information. Not that I would have you write to me after the

receipt of this letter, though; for by that time I shall most likely

be on my way back. I shall start as early as I can in April, and I

really begin now to think that I shall come back cured. At least

people tell me that since the weather has become cooler I have altered

for the better in appearance rapidly, and certainly I have in

strength…. For the last three weeks, I have had a horse, which I have

been cool enough to smug from the Bishop’s stables in his

absence;[209] and this, I think, has been of use to me.’

The letter to Newman, as usual, goes deeper, and touches sadly on more

intimate matters.

‘… There was a passage in a letter I have just received from my father

that made me feel so infinitely dismal, that I must write to you about

it. He says you have written to him to learn something about me, and

to ask what to do with my money. It really made me feel as if I was

dead, and you were sweeping up my remains; and, by the by, if I was

dead, why should I be cut off from the privilege of helping on the

Good Cause? I don’t know what money I left: little enough I suspect;

but, whatever it was, I am superstitious enough to think that any good

it could do “_in honorem Dei et sacrosanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ_,” would

have done something too “_in salutem animæ meæ_.”

‘… My father’s letter was a dismal one altogether. He tells me

Isaac[210] is far from well, and Sir George and Lady Prevost obliged

to leave England. Also that my poor sister [Phillis] has just sailed

for Madeira to escape the winter, for fear of an affection just like

mine…. Also that Mr. Keble[211] is supposed to be on his death-bed.

About you personally I hear nothing. As for myself, it really seems as

if I was going to have a respite. I have still some symptoms which

make me fear it may turn out moonshine, _e.g._, great irritability of

pulse, and shortness of wind in walking up hill. But everyone says,

and I cannot help observing, that my looks are greatly altered for the

better…. Sometimes I seem to myself very ridiculous to give way to

such doleful thoughts, considering how very little there is apparently

the matter with me; and if it was not for the effect consumption had

taken on my … family, I should be ashamed of myself. But the

pertinacity of my trifling ailment has sometimes seemed to me like a

warning that fate had put its hand on me for the next [world].

‘When I get your letter, I expect a rowing for my Roman Catholic

sentiments. Really, I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and

more,[212] and have almost made up my mind that the Rationalist spirit

they set afloat is the ψευδοπροφήτης of the Revelations. I have a

theory about the Beast and Woman too, which conflicts with yours; but

which I will not inflict on you now. I have written nothing for a long

time, and only read in a desultory, lounging way; but really, it is

not out of idleness, for I find that the less I do the better I am,

and so on principle resist doing a good deal that I am tempted to. One

of the Bishop’s horses has contributed much to my recovery, as well as

amusement. To my great satisfaction, I have found that just beyond the

range of my longer walks there is a range of real fine scenery that I

had not a dream of.

Οὕρεά τε σκιόεντα θάλασσά τε ἠχήεσσα

‘I start sometimes between three and four, and come back between six

and seven, in which interval the thermometer averages between 78° and

76°, and there is generally a roaring wind from the sea…. I wish I

knew how you were, and what you are about.’

To the Rev. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, Jan., 1835.

‘I am ashamed of myself for having grumbled at you; your letter[213]

almost made me cry! My dumps are my only excuse, and you may guess I

have had a good dose of them. Now I am in much better spirits about

myself, and flooded with letters to boot, so I ought to be in a good

humour; yet I don’t know whether the prospect of being home again

soon, and the knowledge of what is going on there, has not made me

less contented…. I am sorry to hear such poor accounts of you and

Isaac. Keble says you are overworked. So does Christie; yet I would

not have you leave any of it except the Deanship. On one or two points

I am inclined to grumble at you. You seem to be finessing too deep.

Why publish poor Bishop Cosin’s Tract on Transubstantiation?[214]

Surely no member of the Church of England is in any danger of

overrating the miracle of the Eucharist?… I am more and more indignant

at the Protestant doctrine on the subject of the Eucharist, and think

that the principle on which it is founded is as proud, irreverent, and

foolish as that of any heresy, even Socinianism. I must write you out

a sentence of Pascal on this. (My edition is differently arranged from

most, so I cannot refer you to it.[215]) Speaking of Isa. xlv. 15, he

says: “_Il a demeuré caché sous la voile de la nature qui nous le

couvre, jusqu’à l’Incarnation; et quand il a fallu qu’il ait paru, il

s’est encore plus caché, en se couvrant de l’humanité…. Enfin, quand

il a voulu accomplir la promesse qu’il fit à ses apôtres de demeurer

avec les hommes jusqu’à son dernier avènement, il a choisi demeurer

dans le plus étrange et le plus obscur secret de tous: savoir, sous

les espèces de l’Eucharistie._” And then he goes on to say that deists

penetrate the veil of Nature, heretics that of the Incarnation; “_mais

pour nous, nous devons nous estimer heureux de ce que Dieu nous

éclaire jusqu’à le reconnaître sous les espèces du pain et du vin_.” I

believe you will agree with me that this is orthodox…. Also, why do

you praise Ridley?[216] Do you know sufficient good about him to

counterbalance the fact that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter

Martyr, and Bucer? (_N.B._――How beautifully the _Edinburgh

Review_[217] has shown up Luther, Melancthon, and Co.! What good

genius has possessed them to do our dirty work?) I have also to

grumble at you for letting Pusey call the Reformers “the Founders of

our Church,” in that excellent and much-to-be-studied paper on

Fasting.[218] _Pour moi_, I never mean, if I can help it, to use any

phrases even, which can connect me with such a set. I shall never call

the Holy Eucharist “the Lord’s Supper,” nor God’s priests “Ministers

of the Word,” nor the Altar “the Lord’s Table,” etc., etc.; innocent

as such phrases are in themselves, they have been dirtied: a fact of

which you seem oblivious on many occasions. Nor shall I even abuse the

Roman Catholics _as a Church_ for anything except excommunicating us.

So much for fault-finding…. I am amused to see among your _Sermons_

the Naples one and the Dartington one. I can see the train of thought

which suggested the latter.[219] Since then I have never been well,

and then came my poor sister’s business, who, by the bye, is now at

Madeira…. I have two schemes about the _Tracts_…. 1st, I should like a

series of the Apostolical Divines of the Church of England…. 2nd, I

think one might take the Jansenist saints, Francis de Sales,[220] the

nuns of Port Royal, Pascal, etc., who seem to me to be of a more

sentimental imaginative cast than any of our own, and to give more

room for writing _ad captandum_…. Must it not be owned that the Church

of England Saints, however good in essentials, are, with a few rare

exceptions, deficient in the austere beauty of the Catholic ἦθος?

K[eble] will be severe on me for this, but I cannot deny that Laud’s

architecture seems to me typical.’

This is the letter so charmingly annotated for us by Lord Blachford’s

anecdote. ‘There’s a Basil for you!’ said Newman, with humorous

deprecation, when he read the grudging advice to lay by, in his great

weariness, ever so little of his accustomed work. The comparison rose

readily to his lips, for he had been busy writing the chapters of his

_Church of the Fathers_, month by month, and he was fresh from the

beautiful portraiture of SS. Basil and Gregory Nazianzum.[221] He had

called Hurrell his Basil under no mere momentary sense of a certain

ineradicable blithe hardness in his friend. Newman, as sensitive and

seeing as S. Gregory himself, must have been conscious at the time how

mysteriously fragments of modern biography were getting lodged into

his Early Christian exegetics: for in truth he and Hurrell were as

like Gregory and Basil as their impersonators in a miracle play. The

analogy is not irrelevant, and it is the more attractive the more it

is followed out, especially as there is in it nothing akin to the

painful difference which long severed the loving-hearted great Saints

from each other. ‘Basil’ at Dartington pitied no one much, himself

least of all; the personal consideration affected him at all times as

little as it had affected his mighty archetype, a man of yea and nay,

of cloudless vision and unstinted enterprise.

Newman had written: ‘One of the more striking points of Basil’s

character was his utter disregard of mere human feeling where the

interests of religion were concerned…. This self-sacrifice, which he

observed in his own case for the good of the Church, he scrupled not

to extend to the instance of those to whom he was related, and for

whom he had to act. His brother and his intimate friend, the two

Gregories of Nyssa and Nazianzum, felt the keenness and severity of

his zeal as well as the comfort of his affection.’ And again: ‘Gregory

disliked the routine intercourse of society, he disliked

ecclesiastical business, he disliked publicity, he disliked strife …;

he loved the independence of solitude, the tranquillity of private

life, leisure for meditation, reflection, self-government; study and

literature. He admired, yet he playfully satirised Basil’s lofty

thoughts and heroic efforts. Yet upon Basil’s death, Basil’s spirit,

as it were, came into him…. Was it Gregory or was it Basil that blew

the trumpet in Constantinople, and waged a successful war in the very

seat of the enemy, in despite of all his fluctuations of mind,

misgivings, fastidiousness, disgust with self, and love of quiet? Such

was the power of the great Basil, triumphing in his death, though

failing throughout his life. Within four or five years of his

departure to his reward, all the objects were either realised, or in

the way to be realised, which he had vainly attempted and sadly waited

for. His eyes had failed in longing: they waited for the Morning, and

death closed them ere it came.’ All this amounts to a strange and

touching forecast.

Newman writes again most tenderly on Jan. 18, from London.

‘… I could say much, were it of use, of my own solitariness, now you

are away. Not that I would undervalue that great blessing, which is

what I do not deserve, of so many friends about me: dear Rogers,

Williams, ὁ πάνυ Keble, and the friend in whose house I am staying

(whom I wish with all my heart you knew as _Apostolicorum princeps_,

Bowden); yet, after all, as is obvious, no one can enter into one’s

mind except a person who has lived with one. I seem to write things to

no purpose, as wanting your imprimatur. Perhaps it is well to

cultivate the habit of writing as if for unseen companions; but I have

felt it much, so that I am getting quite dry and hard. My dear Froude,

come back to us as soon as you safely can; and then next winter,

please God, you shall go to Rome, and tempt Isaac, who is very

willing, to go with you. But wherever you are (so be it!) you cannot

be divided from us.’

Hurrell held an irregular correspondence with some old friends to whom

he was warmly attached, and remembered them in his winter leisure.

To the Rev. ROBERT ISAAC WILBERFORCE,

Feb. 25, 1835.

‘I would give twopence if circumstances should ever so turn up that

you could make an occasional residence in Oxford compatible with your

clerical duties,[222] and that we could concoct a second edition of

old times again. It makes me laugh when I think of your old clipped

horse, and how I was choused[223] by John G.; and sundry other matters

which come into one’s head when more serious matters ought to be

there. I wonder if you are the same fellow now that you used to be? I

am afraid my old self is determined to stick by me till the last. But

to talk sense: I really do indulge the hope that sometime we may be

thrown together again. Undoubtedly you owe a debt to your destinies,

which as a mere parish priest you can never repay. Your old project

about the Mendicant Orders was the sort of thing: though perhaps

something connected with later times would tell more just at present.

As to myself, θεῶν ἐν γούνασι κεῖται whether I am ever to be of any

use, though I now begin to entertain serious hopes that I shall

recover. Perhaps you know that I have been out here, in exile _inter

nigridas_, for this year and a quarter. The first winter I got very

little good; and in the summer the heat kept me in a feverish state,

which low diet could not counteract; so I began to think it was up

with me; ὅταιν ὕδωρ πνύγῃ, etc., and I own I felt very doleful: but

since the cool weather set in I have made a decided start, which has

put me in a better humour; and the cooler it is the better I am; so

that I dare say if I had gone to Madeira, or to Rome a second time, I

might have been well. I shall not be sorry for an excuse for spending

another winter in the south of Europe.

‘While out here I have stuck to my old prejudices as tight as I could;

yet I fairly own that I think the niggers less incapable of being

raised in the scale of being than I used. I don’t mean that, generally

speaking, they are at all fit for the situation in which the law has

placed them; but that here and there you see specimens which prove

them, unequivocally enough, to be of the race of Adam, is not to be

denied. Many of them are clever, and some affectionate and even

honest, and if a more judicious system had been pursued, I should not

have despaired of seeing them become generally so. As it is, the

prospect is even in this island a very gloomy one, and in the others,

the state of things seems next to hopeless. In Antigua, where they are

quite let loose, they have been playing a very clever trick in many

places: which is very characteristic of the negro intellect, sharp

enough as to the moment, and absolutely without thought as to the

next. In making sugar it is very important that the canes should be

squeezed as soon as possible after they are cut: a few hours hurts

them, and twenty-four spoils them; so our friends Quakoo and Co. cut

away very diligently, and then strike for wages. Here in Barbados they

cannot play the same trick, as the magistrates would flog them; and

indeed flogging is scarcely less common, and more severe now, than

under the old system. In this island, the most melancholy result of

the change yet discernible is the condition of the emancipated

children under six. The mothers, who have gone on hitherto in their

lax amours with a certainty that any consequences that might result

would be rather in their favour than otherwise, have been bringing a

host of wretched urchins into the world and consigning them over to

the estate nurses, _sans soin_; and now the produce of the last six

years is returned upon their hands, unless they will consent to

apprentice them; this they will not do, out of spite to their masters,

but take the trouble on themselves they will not: so the squalid

little wretches starve and die off shockingly; and those that live are

locked up in their mother’s house while she is at work, doing nothing

but quarrel, growing up in absolute uselessness, and with no chance of

improving…. As to the religious prospects of these colonies, I think

them very bad indeed. If the Church was thrown on the voluntary

system, and left to make its way as the Wesleyans do among the poorer

classes, it would make sure as it went, though perhaps the progress

might at first seem slow; but now all is mere show and rottenness….

Another difficulty arises from the views of the Clergy: those who have

any deference for Church authority are too generally mere Z’s….

Religious instruction out here means marrying the niggers, baptizing

them, and teaching them to read.

‘“The age[224] is out of joint. O cursèd spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!”

‘_Vivas, valeas, et Apostolicus fias._ I shall be back in May.’

Sir James Stephen was very wroth with Froude for his attitude towards

the slaves of the West Indian Colonies, deducing that attitude from

some allusions of Froude’s own to ‘anti-slavery cant.’ The Editors of

the _Remains_ attest that Hurrell did not suffer (as later Mr. J. A.

Froude was said to do, from other alleged causes) from negrophobia.

But certainly his speech about ‘the niggers’ does not always sound

reassuring. Perhaps in this, as in other matters, he leans upon the

reader’s general knowledge of him, and requires that to supply the

marginal comment.

It is a common jibe against reformers, though not always a true one,

that their range of ideas is disproportioned or partial. Members of

the Anti-Vivisection Society are supposed to be indifferent to

wife-beating. Perhaps, if known, Hurrell’s _tendre_ for his only Roman

Catholic, Monsignor Wiseman, and for ‘Roman Catholic sentiments,’ as

he calls them, would seem enough to account for his limitations of

sympathy on an island where he spent an unwilling year-and-a-half. It

is interesting that to a Wilberforce, of all persons, he confides his

final impressions, still pessimistic enough, of ‘our brothers carved

in ebony.’ The Bill for the total abolition of slavery in the British

dominions had received the Royal assent on August 28, 1833, and had

come at last into full operation as Froude wrote. He was not wont, in

other matters, to judge of the justice of a measure by its practical

workings, or by the local material it had to work upon.

Hurrell approaches Keble in his most lucid and mischievous

argumentative mood on the same day.

‘I have a miscellaneous jumble of things that I want to talk to you

about, if I can but arrange them in any sort of order…. And first, I

shall attack you for the expression “The Church teaches” so-and-so,

which I observe is in the Tract[225] equivalent to “The Prayer-Book

etc. teach[es] us” so-and-so. Now suppose a conscientious layman to

inquire on what grounds the Prayer-Book etc., are called the teaching

of the Church: how shall we answer him? Shall we tell him that they

are embodied in an Act of Parliament? So is the Spoliation Bill. Shall

we tell him that they were formerly enacted by Convocation in the

reign of Charles II.? But what especial claim had this Convocation to

monopolise the name and authority of the Church? Shall we tell him

that all the clergy assented to them ever since their enactment? But

to what interpretation of them have all, or even the major part of the

clergy assented? For if it is the assent of the clergy that makes the

Prayer-Book etc. the teaching of the Church, the Church teaches only

that interpretation of them to which all, or at least the majority of

the clergy have assented; and in order to ascertain this, it will be

necessary to inquire, not for what may seem to the inquirer to be

their real meaning, but for the meaning which the majority of the

clergy have, in fact, attached to them! It will be necessary to poll

the Hoadleians, Puritans, and Laudians, and to be determined by [the]

most votes. Again, supposing him to have ascertained these, another

question occurs. Why is the opinion of the English clergy, since the

enactment of the Prayer-Book, entitled to be called the teaching of

the Church, more than that of the clergy of the sixteen previous

centuries; or, again, than the clergy of France, Italy, Spain, Russia,

etc., etc.? I can see no other claim which the Prayer-Book has on a

layman’s deference, as the teaching of the Church, which the Breviary

and Missal have not in a far greater degree…. I know you will snub me

for this…. Surely no teaching nowadays is authoritative in the sense

in which the Apostles’ was, except the Bible? nor any in the sense in

which Timothy’s was, except that of Primitive Tradition? To find a

sense in which the teaching of the modern clergy is authoritative, I

confess baffles me.[226] …

‘Next, as to _The Christian Year_. In the Fifth of November――[as to]

‘“There present in the heart

Not in the hands,”――

how can we possibly know that it is true to say “not in the hands”?[227]

Also, on the Communion … you seem cramped by Protestantism. I

desiderate something in the same key with

‘“Shall work a wonder there

Earth’s charmers never knew,”

and

‘“When the life-giving stream,” etc.[228]

So much for quarrelling. I have attacked N[ewman] for some of the

Tract Protestantism…. However, the wiseacres are all agog about our

being Papists. P. called us the Papal Protestant Church, in which he

proved a double ignorance: as we are Catholics without the Popery, and

Church-of-England men without the Protestantism…. It seems to me that

even if the laity were as munificent as our Catholic ancestors, they

could do nothing for the Church, as things are, except in their

lifetime. Any Churches they might build, any endowment they might

make, would be as likely as not to become in another generation

propagandas of liberalism. Certainly we cannot trust the Bishops for

patrons…. I don’t feel with you on the question of tithes. They cannot

be a legal debt and a religious offering at the same time. When the

payment began to be enforced by civil authority the desecration took

place…. The Wesleyan system is voluntary … they are the strongest, and

most independent of their congregations, of any existing society in

the United States, and, I believe, in England….’

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, March 4, 1835.

‘… My dearest [Newman], I suppose by this time you will have learned

to think as little of my inconsistent reports as I do when making

them! I see [that] on one and the same day I must have sent my father

a cheerful account, and you a dismal one. I am forced to say

something, but have no data to judge by, and so talk at random.

Certain indeed I am that my pulse is still progressively calming, and

that now it is scarcely more irritable than it ought to be; but in

nothing else can I be sure that I change at all…. _Favus distillans

labia tua_, as someone said to John of Salisbury.[229] What can have

put it into your head that your style is dull? The letter you sent me

in the box was among the most amusing I ever received. I have now made

up my mind to come back [in] the packet after the next, so as to be in

England the middle of May, and am not wholly without hope that the

voyage may do something for me. The notion of going to Rome with Isaac

is very gratifying. I must learn French for it, though; for I have no

notion of trusting “Providence,” as I did last time. The sun has

already got almost to his full strength, though the earth is of course

[only] beginning to collect its stock of caloric, and the experience

of last year assures me that the less I have of it the better…. I am

most sincerely sorry to hear of Mr. K[eble’s] death.[230] I suppose if

there ever was anyone to whom death was like going to bed, it would be

Mr. K[eble]. I have written lots of stuff since I have been out here,

some of which I must inflict on you on my return; but none of it will

do to publish. When I look over anything long after I write it, I see

such jumps and discontinuities as make me despair of ever being

intelligible. How I wish to see you all again!’

Shortly after this letter was sent to post, Hurrell left Barbados for

good. No personal records of him exist there, and all memories of him

have faded away. His face was set at last towards another island where

his few remaining days could be crammed full of intelligent toil, and

played at their full value. From Bristol, on May 17, he was able to

announce: ‘_Fratres desideratissimi_! here I am, _benedictum sit nomen

Dei_, and as well as could be expected. I will not boast, and indeed,

have nothing[231] to boast of, as my pulse is still far from

satisfactory….

‘When we asked our pilot “Who was Speaker?” he did not know; but after

much cross-examining he recollected that he had heard it cried about

the street that the old one was turned out; who “the other gentleman”

was, he could not tell. Our next informant was the Custom House

officer, who boarded over night, when we anchored, to see that nothing

was taken out of the ship. All he knew was that “there had been a

jabbering” about a change of Ministers.[232] The day is as dull and

gloomy as possible; but after the torrid zone, any English May day is

“a sight for sair e’en.” … I hope to get a sight of you soon. And now

goodbye both! also I[saac] and R[ogers], and all that are within

reach.’

This is Newman’s narrative note, drawn, thirty years after, from his

own retentive memory:

‘R. H. F. made his appearance in Oxford on Tuesday, May 18. On the

morrow occurred the Convocation in the Theatre, when the proposed

innovation of a Declaration of Conformity to the Church of England,

instead of Subscription to the Articles, was rejected by 459 to 57. It

was the last vote he gave…. He left Oxford, never to return, on June

4. During this time Bowden was in Oxford; and for the first and last

time saw R. H. F.’

Miss Anne Mozley, too, remembered in old age her only sight of Hurrell

Froude.

‘It happened to [me], passing the coach office, in company with Mrs.

Newman, to see Froude as he alighted from the coach which brought him

to Oxford, and was being greeted by his friends. He was terribly thin,

his countenance dark and wasted, but with a brilliancy of expression

and grace of outline which justified all that his friends had said of

him. He was in the Theatre next day, entering into all the enthusiasm

of the scene, and shouting _Non placet_ with all his friends about

him. While he lived at all, he must live his life.’

[Illustration: ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD (BEFORE RESTORATION)]

Frederic Rogers was of the company at Convocation who protested

against a local Repeal of the Test and Corporation Act. He had no very

hopeful feelings about the much-welcomed immigrant, and wrote to his

sister from Oriel on May 2:

‘Wilson, Ryder, Wilberforce, Harding, spent several days here, with a

quantity of other contemporaries, and Hurrell Froude arrived just in

time from Barbados to cut into the middle of it. It quite surprises me

how little people change! All these gentry, married and single, were

so exactly what they always had been, that I could hardly believe I

was not a freshman again. The only painful thing was that I fear

Barbados has not done much for Froude. I was quite shocked to see him,

but I suppose I had been too sanguine; his wretched thinness struck me

more than it had ever done. They say, however, that no one ever gains

flesh in the West Indies, but that it tells when they come back: I

most earnestly trust it may be so. He talks of spending the winter at

Rome again, going straight there, and coming straight back. He

certainly cannot spend it in England. I cannot describe the kind of

sickness I felt in looking at him when just the first meeting was

over. I suppose it is a hopeful sign that his spirits are just as high

as they always were; at least, were so when he first came here: for I

am afraid we must look for a change in that, as Newman tells me he has

heard to-day that his sister who was so ill is given over. I have not

seen him since his hearing the news. However, I am getting

mopish.’[233]

William Froude was still in Oxford also, having moved into Hurrell’s

vacant rooms. Says the Rev. Thomas Mozley, in his most entertaining

book:[234]

‘William Froude gave his heart in with his brother’s work at Oriel,

though his turn even then was for science…. He was the chemist, as

well as the mechanist of the College. His rooms on the floor over

Newman’s were easily distinguishable … by the stains of sulphuric acid

(I think) extending from the window-sills to the ground. The Provost

must sometimes have had to explain this appearance to his inquiring

guests, as they could not but observe it from his drawing-room

window.’

With Hurrell and William, during these May days, was Anthony Froude, a

boy of seventeen, coming up to Oriel with his private Tutor (with whom

he was reading in the neighbourhood) in order to see his eldest

brother.

‘When I went into residence at Oxford my brother was no longer alive.

He had been abroad almost entirely for three or four years before his

death; and although the atmosphere at home was full of the new

opinions, and I heard startling things from time to time on

Transubstantiation and suchlike, he had little to do with my direct

education. I had read at my own discretion in my father’s

library.’[235]

Anthony matriculated during the early December of this very year, two

months before Hurrell died. Perhaps not many College rooms have known

three such notable successive occupiers of one family, each of strong

idiosyncrasy, and alike in nothing whatever but in personal charm.

The happy three weeks ended, Hurrell set out for Devon, with Mr. Keble

for companion part of the way. People who had known him ‘looked

horribly black at me, at first,’ until they became ‘accustomed to my

grim visage,’ he tells Newman, five days later. Doubtless it was a

harrowing thing in the pastoral neighbourhood, this continual

spectacle of young faces at the Parsonage visibly withdrawing from the

summer air. And another indomitable dying Froude was there, poor

Phillis Spedding, the tradition of whose pathetic beauty yet lingers

about the Cumberland hillsides whither she came as a bride.

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Dartington, June 11, 1835.

‘_Dulcissime_, I got home Friday evening before dark very comfortably.

My poor sister is perfectly cheerful, and free from pain, but daily

declines in strength. Indeed, she is now very visibly weakened since I

first saw her. It is impossible she should live many days. She is

quite aware of her state, and seems to be as composed, and almost [as]

happy, as if she was going to sleep…. There is something very

indescribable in the effect which old sights and smells produce in me

here just now, after having missed them so long. Also, old Dartington

House, with its feudal appendages, calls up so many Tory associations

as almost to soften one’s heart with lamenting the course of events

which is to re-erect the Church by demolishing so much that is

beautiful! “rich men living peaceably in their habitations.” On my way

from Oxford, Keble talked a good deal about Church matters, and

particularly about the ancient Liturgies, and my analysis of

Palmer,[236] which had put the facts to him in rather a new point of

view.’

And he reverts, in his animated vein, to the propaganda never out of

his thoughts, saying encouragingly to Newman:

‘I have heard from my sisters and the Champernownes of the efficacy of

your opuscula in leading captive silly women. One very curious

instance I heard the other day of an exceedingly clever girl who for

the last two or three years has been occasionally laid up with a very

painful illness, and suffered severely. Nobody that she lives with can

have acted as channels for infecting her,[237] as they are all either

commonplace sensible people, or Evangelical, or lax. But she has got

it into her head that there is a new party springing up in the Church,

which she calls “the new men,” and has been pumping my sisters about

you, and whether your notions are spreading, etc…. They say she has

been working the Dartmouth Evangelicals with your _Sermons_, and made

one of the parsons knock under! I have also heard of a learned lady (a

very good and sensible person, by-the-bye), poking away most

industriously at your _Arians_, and saying that her views had been

much cleared by it.’

Phillis Spedding did not long survive her return to England. She died

at Dartington three days after the date of Hurrell’s letter, on June

14, 1835, in her twenty-sixth year. Her one little child, Edward

Spedding, then aged eighteen months, grew up only to attain his

majority, and to be buried in January, 1855, at Bassenthwaite, not

with his mother. Thomas Story Spedding, living on at the manor which

he had so romantically inherited, married again.

Meanwhile, in Littlemore, Mrs. Newman was about to lay the

corner-stone of her son’s Early English chapel, with the plans of

which the architectural zeal of Mr. Thomas Mozley, the Vicar’s future

brother-in-law, had much to do. The rumour that Hurrell Froude had

designed it got some currency; and there is a mirth-provoking growl on

the subject in the pages of that watchful worthy, the Rev. Peter

Maurice of Yarnton, Chaplain of New College.[238] Upon the return of

Newman and Froude from Rome in 1833, he says, ‘we soon found that the

malaria of the Pontine marshes, the nondescript fogs of the fatherland

of all heresy, began to develop their miasmata in a new diagnosis….

That edifice [Littlemore Church] was constructed from outlines and

plans sketched out for the architect by an amateur friend of

[Newman’s] own: the Rev. R. H. Froude. It was in a particular style of

Church architecture which they were plotting to introduce. It was, in

fact, the very first Church in modern times[239] that was ever

consecrated with a stone altar, a stone cross, and credentia.’

Hurrell, however, at this very time, 1835, was busying himself with

artistic needs nearer home. After his death, Archdeacon Froude wrote

to Newman in one of his letters, which affectionately begged for a

visit: ‘I hear you have a splendid Altar-table at Littlemore. That

which dear Hurrell designed, and had executed for my chancel, is now

in its proper place.’ This was in December, 1836. Hurrell’s Altar,

practically modelled on the High Altar of Cologne Cathedral, has

always been preserved as his gift at Dartington, and constantly used;

it has undergone no alteration except that it had to be raised for

convenience, after Archdeacon Froude’s death, as he was short, and

both his successors have been very tall men. It was brought from the

old Church to the new. Hurrell also changed the place of the

chancel-screen in the Church now destroyed, moving it eastward, from

the entrance to the choir, to enclose the rail at the Altar-foot, so

that none but communicants passed beyond it: an irregular proceeding

for an ecclesiologist. But it seems clear that he meant by the action

to emphasise the sacredness of the Altar itself.

He was ever on the move, physically and mentally, in and about his

father’s parish. Neighbours and social equals found it a bracing

pleasure to see and hear him again, after absence; he had the greatest

possible influence with them; those of his own age, fifty years later,

and scattered all over England, were still quoting him. He dearly

loved children, whom he met upon equal terms. Wherever there were

children, Hurrell was always testing their metal, while romping with

them. Would they run away from a comrade in danger? Would they throw

blame on others? Would they break promises? He knew of what stuff

every lamb of them was made, and it has been quite impossible for any

of these, either, to forget him. This sweet solicitude, comeliest in

one _auquel une grâce particulière a révélé le prix et la beauté de la

virginité sacerdotale_,[240] played in and out among his graver cares.

That, and the old preoccupation with architecture, stood for his best

diversions, during his final year. It would appear that he also

visited London. The admirable critic of the Movement just quoted lays

some stress, in passing, on Hurrell’s interview with Dr. Wiseman; he

even surmises that it was caused by spiritual anxieties of one sort or

another.[241] But he forgets that Hurrell’s intention then was to

return to Rome, and to historical work in the Vatican Library, and

that, long before, Dr. Wiseman had promised his aid and interest in

obtaining for him facilities for research.

The Gothic plotter (no more Gothic, Mr. T. Mozley thinks, than he

should be), was employing his July of 1835 in outdoor devices. He

tried to allure Newman as far as Torbay. ‘I am sure the lark will do

you good, and the money (£2, 15s.) will not be grossly misspent.’ To

which his friend replies on July 20: ‘… I should like of all things to

come and see you, but can say nothing to the proposal at present,

being very busy here, and being, in point of finances, in a very

unsatisfactory state. I am at present at Dionysius and the Abbé, whom

Oh! that I could despatch this vacation!’

This is the Abbé Jager, the Rev. Benjamin Harrison’s Parisian friend,

a lively, learned, and apparently provoking controversialist, author

of _Le Protestantisme aux Prises avec la Doctrine Catholique_. Newman

received his reply promptly from Paignton, though he put off the

visit. ‘_Frater desiderate_,’ says Hurrell, ‘speak not of finances,

since all the people here are ready to subscribe for you; as for the

Abbé, you can work him here as well as anywhere. It is exquisitely

pleasant here: a hot sun with a fresh air is a luxury to which I have

long been a stranger. If you were to stay here a fortnight, you might

get on with your controversy, and be inspired for the novel! I give

out in all directions that you mean to write it, and divulge the

plot.’

Miss Mozley thus comments on this inciting of a new literary activity

in Newman. ‘There is nothing in the papers before [me] to show that

any ground whatever, in fact, existed for the novel Froude here talks

of. In the Postscript to _Callista_, the author speaks of being

stopped at the fifth chapter “from sheer inability to devise

personages or incidents.” Was the attempt to express the feelings and

mutual relations of Christians and heathens in early Christian times

already an idea in the author’s mind?’ The intrinsic evidence is

certainly strong against the likelihood of Newman’s earlier story,

_Loss and Gain_, or anything remotely resembling it in subject or

framework, being contemplated in 1835. Attentive readers of that very

Oxonian book will recall, incidentally, that Devonshire becomes the

home of the Redings, and may even, without being too fantastic, detect

some faint irregular adumbration of Hurrell Froude, Froude deduced as

Newman would fain have him, in the phantom figure, so illusive and

attractive, of Willis.[242] Perhaps ‘the novel,’ the plot of which

Froude was so pleased to divulge, was but an original inspiration of

his own. He had long before formed a critical, if rather despiteful

interest in fiction, as the unwelcome supplanter of poetry in a

decadent age; and perhaps he had invited Newman to write a story as

Newman had invited him to dream of the Indian Bishopric: all _ad

majorem Dei gloriam_. At any rate, five weeks before, Froude had

mentioned what is apparently the same ‘novel’ as his own affair, in a

letter to Newman printed in the _Remains_ but not in the Newman

_Correspondence_. ‘My ideas about the novel,’ he says, ‘are but

cloudy, as I have no books of reference to get details out of. Would

that the stars may let me return to Oxford before long, to work at

things,[243] and rub up my intellects!’ It would be pleasant, were

there any sure grounds for it, to associate the profound spiritual

passion, as Mr. R. H. Hutton calls it, of _Callista_, with the

emulating and holy friendship of John Henry Newman and Hurrell Froude.

Newman had been bringing forward in print something very dear to both:

the monastic ideal. With his usual scrupulousness, he had begun to

fear that he was laying too great a burden upon his well-wishers in

leaving them to accept and defend a thesis so inexpedient, because so

hostile to the spirit of the time; and Hurrell strikes out against the

expressed misgiving before ending the letter of July 31 just quoted.

His father, as ever, was his standard of wise moderation.

‘… As to your Monasticism articles in _The British Magazine_,[244] my

father read the offensive part in the June one, and could see nothing

in it that any reasonable person could object to; and some persons I

know have been struck by them. I cannot see the harm of losing

influence with people when you can only retain it by sinking the

points on which you differ with them. Surely that would be _Propter

vitam vivendi_, etc.? What is the good of influence except to

influence people?’ To Mr. Keble, at the same time, Froude expresses a

generous envy of Newman’s ‘taking’ utterance (what Newman himself

calls his ‘mere rhetorical or histrionic power’), and admits again the

difficulty of winning any such command over souls in England, with his

own very elliptical genius. ‘I find myself so ignorant of the way to

get at people, that I never know what to assume and what to prove!’

Froude’s straightforward case was Jeremy Taylor’s of old, of whom

Chillingworth regretfully said: ‘Hee wants much of the ethickall part

of a Discourser, and slights too much, many times, the Arguments of

those hee discourses with.’

Newman tells his dear sister Jemima, on August 9: ‘I think I shall go

down to Froude for ten days. I am very unwilling to do it; but it is

so uncertain whether he will be able to come to Oxford at all, that I

think I ought to secure seeing him before he goes abroad.’ And again,

to the absent comrade, a fortnight after: ‘I am sick of expecting a

letter; for the last week I have every day made sure of one, and been

disappointed. I cannot help fearing you are not well…. I must (so be

it!) come down to you before Vacation ends, to get some light struck

out by collision.’ For Newman had been trying to work out alone

‘whether Tradition is ever considered by the Fathers, in matters of

faith, more than interpretative of Scripture.’ To Mr. Rogers, at the

same time, he speaks of the contemplated move. ‘I have little to show,

this Vacation, in point of work done. The time seems to have slipped

away in a dream. Perhaps it would be as well to go down to Froude,

were it only to adjust my notions to his. Dear fellow! long as I have

anticipated what I suppose must come, I feel quite raw and unprepared.

I suppose one ought to get as much as one can from him, _dum licet_.’

Newman himself was again over-busied and ailing. No reader can fail to

notice the deepening tenderness of the correspondence between the two

during these last months, where yet sportiveness and candour, and a

certain mutual deference, keep their old due order. Words go quickly

and lightly, without emphasis or strain, as if driven willingly on the

rising wind which is the eternal silence.

‘My dearest Newman,’ opens the awaited missive of Sept. 3, ‘I am

afraid you will have been grumbling in your heart at me…. But really,

I am not to blame, as I have not put pen to paper for a fortnight,

except yesterday, when I began a letter to you upside down. I cannot

explain what has been the matter with me; but I am sure that the

apothecary into whose hands I fell made a fool of himself…. As to our

controversies, you are now taking fresh ground, without owning, as you

ought, that on our first basis I dished you! Of course, if the Fathers

maintain that “nothing not deducible from Scripture ought to be

insisted on as terms of communion,” I have nothing more to say. But

again, if you allow Tradition an interpretative authority, I cannot

see what is gained. For surely the doctrines of the Priesthood and the

Eucharist may be proved from Scripture interpreted by Tradition; and

if so, what is to hinder our insisting on them as terms of communion?

I don’t mean, of course, that this will bear out the Romanists (which

is perhaps your only point?), but it certainly would bear out our

party in excommunicating Protestants…. You lug in the Apostles’ Creed,

and talk about expansions. What is the end of expansions? Will not the

Romanists say that their whole system is an expansion of the Holy

Catholic Church and the Communion of Saints?’

Finally, on the 10th, arrives Newman’s definite word: ‘I propose

coming to you next week,’ coupled with anxious inquiries about his

health. Hurrell replies at once:

‘We shall be ready for you whenever you come. Dr. [Yonge] and a young

doctor called Hinkson, who has paid much attention to the stethoscope,

examined my chest all over; and they both told my father they never

examined a chest in which there was more complete freedom from bad

symptoms. Yet they say the disorder in my throat is dangerous unless

stopped. Dr. Yonge is decided that I am not to go abroad this winter.’

Newman reached Dartington on the 15th, and was most happy there, among

scenes and faces ‘loved long since,’ for nearly a month. Every one who

has ever come across it remembers the phrase in which he briefly sums

up the end of the visit: ‘I left, and took my last farewell of R. H.

F. on Sunday, October 11, in the evening, sleeping at Exeter. When I

took leave of him his face lighted up, and almost shone in the

darkness, as if to say that in this world we were parting for ever.’

The angel, the ‘beautiful young man girded,’ who knew well ‘the way to

the country of the Medes,’ had turned homewards, his mission over, and

was to walk with Tobit no more.

Travel was an unconscionably slow business then, especially in the

south-west. On the following Thursday Newman wrote from Southampton to

Mr. Rogers at Oriel:

‘I have just got here from Lyndhurst, and find the Oxford coach full.

Nothing therefore is left for me but to go up to London, and try to

get to Oxford in that way. Be so good as to make my excuses to College

for my non-appearance: it is the first time, I believe, I ever was

away any day of an Audit, (except when abroad) since I have been

Fellow. I trust I shall be with you to-morrow.

‘Dear Froude is pretty well, but is languishing for want of his Oxford

contubernians. I trust I have been of use, in this way, in stimulating

his spirits. So strongly do I feel this, from what I see and hear of

him, that I mean almost to make myself responsible for some intimate

going down to him at Christmas. He is allowed to read now, which is a

great comfort. I am to send him a lot of books. It is wonderful,

almost mysterious, that he should remain so long just afloat, and as

far as it is mysterious, it is hopeful. Really, it would seem as if he

were kept alive by the uplifted hands of Moses: which is an

encouragement to persevere [in prayer].’

The delayed traveller wrote to Hurrell the day after his arrival at

Oxford:

‘St. Luke’s Day, 1835.

‘I have been obliged to come round by London, and having business

there, I did not regret it. Rivington will publish a third volume [of

_Sermons_]; and please will you manage to get for me your father’s

leave to dedicate it, in a few words, to him? Keble was married on the

10th, and told no one. The College has but heard from him that he

resigns his Fellowship on that day, without a year of grace.[245] I

engage to undertake and pledge myself to provide a visitor for you

next Christmas: Rogers, or [Tom] Mozley, or Williams. But if no one

comes, I shall come myself, which would be too great a pleasure: for I

cannot put into words, or rather I do not realise to myself, how much

the _genius loci_ of Dartington Parsonage draws. I could be very

foolish did I allow myself! All my own reminiscences of the place are

sad, and I am almost debarred from them; and I seem to have no right,

_alienigena_, to intrude elsewhere.’

Newman adds his parenthesis long, long after. ‘This feeling is

expressed in the verses I wrote on my first visit to Dartington, in

1831:

‘There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart.

I have never seen Dartington since I saw Hurrell there.’[246] He

shared to the full, as we have seen, Hurrell’s own passion for the

place, a place even yet, despite the profane railway along the very

bank of the Dart, of romance and peace; but he held his dedicated

heart aloof from it in 1835 as in 1831, as a passage in a letter to

his elder sister shows: ‘This country [Devon], is certainly

overpoweringly beautiful and enchanting, except to those who are

resolved not to be enchanted.’

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, _Die Omnium Sanctorum_, 1835.

‘_Carissime_: After all this delay I write without being able to

report progress;――but don’t be hard on me. For a long time the weather

has been so very bad as to confine me entirely to the house, which has

dullified me, partly by its inherent dulness, and partly by making me

rather worse, to such a degree that, till the last two days, which

have rather revived me, I have been up to little more than thinking in

my arm-chair, or listening to a novel. Yesterday I got a drive, and

to-day a ride, which I hope have done me good; and if I can go on so

for a week, I shall be as well as when you went, I have no doubt; and

in a diligent humour I am willing to hope…. Don’t be conceited if I

tell you how much you are missed here in many quarters. Now you are

gone, I clearly see that a step has been gained. Even I come in for my

share of the benefit, in finding myself partially extricated from an

unenviable position hitherto occupied by me: that of a prophet in his

own country….

‘Before I finish this, I must enter another protest against your

cursing and swearing[247] [at the end of the first _Via Media_] as you

do. What good can it do?――and I call it uncharitable to an excess. How

mistaken we may ourselves be on many points that are only gradually

opening on us! Surely you should reserve “blasphemous,” “impious,”

etc., for denial of the articles of the Faith.’

This latter passage is well known from its incorporation in the

_Apologia_. Again, Hurrell resumes on the 15th:

‘You will be in a rage with me when I tell you I have not answered

[Boone].[248] If I was sure of being able to think and write whenever

I chose, I should not have hesitated for a moment to promise the

[article] in a week or two. But this is far from my case; and I was in

a particularly do-nothing way, the day I got your letter. I don’t know

whether you know the sensation of a pulse above 100°? If you do, I

think you will admit it not to be favourable to mental exertion. So

you see I can’t count on myself, or make promises, and wish much I was

not committed at all. As to the review of Blanco White, it is an

amusement to me, for which I am grateful to you; but being tied up

about time, correcting the proofs, etc., are my bothers. I may,

indeed, be up to business-like work soon, and I hope I shall; but I am

no prophet. So I have almost a mind to tell Boone that I will let it

stand over till the next.’

Newman’s instant reply was reassuring:

‘… I shall write to Boone to-night to tell him that you think you

could not get the article done in time for January. I will take it

through the press, if you will trust me. Do not fuss yourself, or

think yourself pledged….

‘Keble was thrown from his horse, and broke a small bone in his

shoulder, but is better. He will not be editor of the _Tracts_….

‘M. Bunsen has pronounced upon our views, gathered from the _Arians_

(!), with singular vehemence. He says that if we succeed, we shall be

introducing Popery without authority, Protestantism without liberty,

Catholicism without universality, and Evangelism without spirituality.

In the greater part of which censure you doubtless agree!’

The all-but-dying invalid finished the long, able, dispassionate

review, entitled ‘Mr. Blanco White: Heresy and Orthodoxy,’ for the

printers. It appeared in time, in _The British Critic_ for January,

1836. It ends: ‘We must now, however, leave our argument imperfect,

hoping very shortly to recur to it.’ This is the colophon from Hurrell

Froude. It is diligent and collected, and keeps the colours boldly

flying after a fashion wholly characteristic. The manuscripts went in

sections to Newman.

‘In the last five days I have written forty of the enclosed

sixty-three pages. If the humour lasts, I may do the rest in a jiffy.

I have spent a week with Dr. Yonge…. [He] was not satisfied with the

effect of steel, and changed it for I know not what, three days ago;

since when I am decidedly stronger. But the Bishop of Llandaff[249]

has warned us against confounding succession with causation. If Rogers

will bring my Breviary, I shall be obliged. I shall be delighted if

Mozley comes with him. They will meet Wilson, though but for a day.’

The Breviary is the celebrated identical book, first studied under

Blanco White’s direction, the history of which is briefly given in the

_Apologia_, and which is, to Dr. Abbott, so important an agent in

determining Newman’s after-career. It may be assumed that Mr. Rogers

forgot to take it, that Christmastide, to Dartington, as it was on the

shelves of Hurrell’s rooms at Oriel when he died, and when Archdeacon

Froude asked Newman to choose a keepsake there. It is still at the

Oratory in Edgbaston.

A long letter to Newman from the Rev. R. F. Wilson, on Dec. 19,

contained, incidentally, no very cheery news of their friend,

succumbing to consumption of the throat.

‘It was a great pleasure to me to meet poor Froude, though he looks

sadly, and without any abatement of those symptoms which must make his

friends most anxious about him, appears weaker [by] a great deal than

when he was in Oxford. To me, he was a more interesting person than

ever, because I find that his peculiar way of thinking, and manner of

expressing himself, which I thought might only belong to him in health

and strength, continue just the same. I saw also Rogers there, for a

day.’

Froude himself ‘continues just the same,’ on paper. He was busily

hoisting sail in the offing, and quite calm about it. ‘I don’t know

that it does one any harm,’ he had written eighteen months before, ‘to

have the impression brought seriously before one that one is not to

see out the changes which seem to be at hand.’

He keeps on rallying Newman in his old animated strain, on Dec. 21,

winning the quick official contradiction: ‘As to our being out of

joint here! No, no; we are doing well.’

‘By Rogers’ account, things don’t go exactly as they ought at Oxford.

Golius[250] has rebelled, he says; and Ben Harrison[251] has jibbed;

and the Theological meetings go flat; and old Mozley[252] won’t work.

Harpsfield is the writer on the Breviary services whose name I could

not remember. Rogers says that Sancta Clara is rich. Wilson,[253] for

your comfort, is much less tender in the finger’s end than he was last

spring, though I hear Keble does complain of his being rather soft. I

very much wish to hear of your putting into execution your plan of a

campaign in London, and enlarging the basis of operations.

‘… When you write, tell me if you think there was any of the “nasty

irony”[254] you used to complain of? I tried to avoid it…. I am

entirely confined to the house, which we succeed in keeping very warm,

though out-of-doors it is a sharp windy frost.’

Frederic Rogers wrote to Newman from Dartington, where, according to

Newman’s arrangement, he was spending Christmas with Hurrell:

‘I am excessively amused at the alternations of treatment Miss Froude

is subject to from Hurrell and Mr. B[ogue].[255] In fact, I can hardly

help being in a constant half-laughter when anything is going on

between Froude and his sister.’

‘Mary Froude,’ adds Newman’s annotating hand in or about 1860, ‘was

one of the sweetest girls I ever saw. She was at this time engaged to

Mr. B[ogue]. He used to come with a great consciousness of his

situation, much gravity, and great reverence for her. Hurrell, on the

other hand, treated his sister, in a good-humoured way, as a little

child, calling her “Poll,” and sending her about on messages, etc., to

Mr. B[ogue’s] seeming scandal and distress. Mary Froude all the while

was the very picture of naturalness and simplicity, receiving with

equal readiness and equability the homage of the one, and the playful

rudeness of the other.’ Mr. Bogue won his bride only to lose her. Her

strength had been greatly impaired by her devoted attendance on her

favourite brother; nor did she long outlive him. She was the youngest

of Archdeacon Froude’s three daughters. The inscription over the vault

in the old beautiful churchyard next Dartington Hall, on the slope of

the hill, thus includes her name:

‘Also Mary Isabella Froude, wife of the Rev. Richard Bogue, [who] died

August 7, 1836, in her 22nd year.’

Shortly after the loss of his young wife, Mr. Bogue bought the

patronage of Denbury from the Duke of Bedford, and enlarged the old

Rectory House. He was Curate there for a good while to Archdeacon

Froude.

‘The most important year in the history of the Oxford Movement was the

year 1836,’[256] the Hampden year. The great fight at Arques was

coming on, with ‘brave Crillon’ far away. Newman duly wished a Happy

New Year to Hurrell at Dartington. Sadly welcome are such conventions,

when nothing less may be said, and nothing more can be said. He sends

divers comments, with a postscript: ‘T. Mozley cannot come to you. His

brother is going to marry my younger sister.’[257] There was the usual

prompt answer, touching on the testimonial to Wellington, then

Chancellor of the University, as ‘abominable’ and _doctrinaire_; and

on the 16th Mr. Rogers wrote from Bridehead, as he knew well that

Newman would be anxious for personal news, as soon as might be:

‘I have left Froude, who professes to remain much as he has been,

rather weaker than when you were with him, from never being in the

open air, but not worse than he has been from the beginning of his

confinement. I am afraid, too, he is not quite in such good spirits as

he used to be. You ought to send Harrison down to him, to take lessons

on the subject of the Reformers; for certainly he has a way of

speaking which carries conviction in a very extraordinary way, over

and above the arguments he uses. Did Froude tell you that some good

lady who has read you wonders how it is that you and Arnold should

have any difference between you, your sentiments and general tone so

perfectly agreeing? (!)’

As the young host at Dartington had always loved the younger guest, it

is natural to find the praises of the latter in Froude’s notes to

Newman. Thus on Jan. 12: ‘Rogers leaves us on Thursday, having been

the greatest of acquisitions, in the eyes of everyone.’ ‘The greatest

of acquisitions’ of course meant an acquisition to the Cause: Mr.

Rogers’ own worth being properly valued, and that valuation added as

so much credit to local impressions of the Movement. Hurrell had no

merely social triumphs in mind. He had paid Newman, as guest and

passive proselytiser, the same compliment.

Again: ‘R[ogers] left us on [Thursday]. We had many arguments and

proses,[258] in the former of which he was generally victorious, but

in the latter I think I may boast of having succeeded. I do believe he

hates the meagreness of Protestantism as much as either of us.’

One who had never spared himself scrutiny and blame could, without

affectation, arraign his dying languor as ‘selfishness’ and

‘idleness.’ Poor Hurrell’s capacity for work and perseverance had

always been on the heroic scale. ‘These are not times,’ he had written

in 1831, ‘in which people who think their own principles right have

any business to be shilly-shally … [but] times when it seems almost a

sin to be jolly.’ Newman knew how to cheer on that astounding energy,

though with an aching heart.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Jan. 7, 1836.

‘I am quite ashamed to think how long it is since I got your last

letter; but illness makes one selfish, at least mine does, and dislike

of writing, or in fact of doing anything, except trying to keep myself

as comfortable as possible, has become a ruling passion. Since autumn

set in I have done actually nothing except that review of B. White,

which N[ewman] committed me about in such a way that I could not back

out, and so was forced to go forward whether I would or not. However,

I hope to turn over a new leaf as the weather mends, and indeed I

begin to feel its reviving influence already. It is now more than two

months since I have been out of doors, except in a close carriage, and

for the last three weeks I have not been out at all, but have lived in

an artificial summer at about the temperature of sixty-five degrees….

I am also prohibited altogether from eating meat, poultry, etc., or

any animal food except fish, which, considering that milk does not

agree with me, makes my case rather a hard one. On the whole, however,

I am very comfortable, if it was not for an occasional twinge of

conscience at my total idleness, for which I fear I really have no

excuse, as I did not find myself a bit worse when obliged for a week

to work as hard as I could for _The British Critic_. N[ewman] is now

trying to hook me in for something else in the same line, and though I

doubt not I shall be provoked with myself for having agreed to it,

when the time for delivering the MS. draws near, yet I really think

that the stimulus is a good thing for me. I am really very much

obliged to you for your compliments about Becket,[259] for they really

are the only ones I get in any quarter.’

There was no longer the least hope for a patient who had inherited

consumption; who had never taken care of himself; whom no change of

climate had ever benefited; whose long austerities had done, no doubt,

their share of the work. As it was, he had entered his thirty-third

year, outliving several of his family. But the treatment to which he

was subjected seems radically wrong to those who glory in hygienic

science revolutionised since his day. The hot climate, the low diet,

the extra clothing while in England, the atrocious dumb-bell exercise,

instead of a gentle and uniform strengthening of every muscle in the

body, and last of all, the deprivation of fresh air, his one possible

alleviation, were so many superfluous death-wounds in the fight. Mr.

Keble, like Mr. Rogers and Newman, deplored the shut windows at

Dartington, remembering their friend’s lifelong predilection for the

open. ‘I am sorry to find they think it necessary to confine him so,’

he sighs to Newman. And then he adds, with a whipped-up miscellaneous

optimism: ‘His being able to write is an excellent sign. What have you

set him on now?… Thank you for sending me Wilson’s letter: it shows

him in a most amiable light. You have all of you made much more than I

meant out of that little word of mine of his being “softish.” I only

meant that he was not as disposed to hang all Whigs, Puritans, etc.,

as some might be; but this we charitably attribute to the bad company

he has kept in London.’

From Oriel Hurrell had, every few days, a full journal of the party’s

doings, interspersed with all manner of private and autobiographical

references. Newman, dining with a celebrated Evangelical (Mr.,

afterwards Sir James Stephen), sketches in the latter’s instructive

conversation. ‘It is so hard to [repeat] without seeming to bepraise

myself; but since I am conscious I have got all my best things from

Keble and you, I feel, ever, something of an awkward guilt when I am

lauded for my discoveries. He did not like my _Arians_, which, if I

understood him, jumped about from one subject to another, and was

hastily written, though thought out carefully…. He seemed to treat

with utter scorn the notion that we were favouring Popery: this age of

Mammon and this shrewd-minded nation were in no danger of it….

Further, the most subtle enemy which Christianity has ever had was

Benthamism. Now he thought our views had in them that which could

grapple with it…. He wanted from me a new philosophy…. Indeed, go

where I will, “the fields are ready for harvest,” and none to reap

them. If I might choose my place in the Church, I would, as far as I

can see, be Master of the Temple. I am sure, from what little I have

seen of the young lawyers, I could do something with them. You and

Keble are the philosophers, and I the rhetorician’ … the fascinating

miscellany of a letter goes on. And another quickly follows, when the

writer (who had been named to Lord Melbourne as well as Keble) fears

that Keble will refuse the Divinity Professorship at Oxford if it be

proffered him, and flies to Froude as to one who can help to prevent

that calamity. ‘I dread lest he should decline it. I write to you,

that if you agree with me, you may write to him at once. For myself, I

should go by your judgement, if such a thing occurred to me….

_Carissime_, I think I may say with a clear conscience I have no

desire for it, and, had I my choice, would decide that the offer

should not be made to me. I am too indolent, and like my own way too

well, to wish it. I should be entangled in routine business, which I

abhor. I should be obliged to economise,[260] and play the humbug, in

a way I should detest, and I have no love for the nuisance of house

and furniture, adding up bills, settling accounts, hiring servants,

and getting up the price of butcher’s meat. I have the unpopularity,

the fame, of being a party man, [with] the care of Tracts and the

engagements of agitation. I am more useful as I am; but Keble is a

light too spiritual and subtle to be seen unless put upon a

candlestick.’ There is a most affectionate ending to his letter sent

to the post on Candlemas Day. ‘Θάρσει, φίλον ἦτορ You could not but

get weaker this weather, so confined.’

Meanwhile Hurrell had written ‘the last letter he wrote to me, perhaps

the last letter he wrote at all.’ It is dated Jan. 27, 1836; the flow

of it, the wonted pace, is gallant as usual, though it held both

serious criticism and sad news. ‘You may perhaps have seen in the

papers,’ he says to Newman, that my grandmother died, the 14th of this

month. She retained her faculties to the last, and seems to have

undergone the minimum of suffering which death requires. She was

within a month or two of eighty-nine.’ This was his father’s mother,

Phillis Hurrell.

‘It is very encouraging about the Oxford Tracts, but I wish I could

prevail on you, when the second edition comes out, to cancel or

materially alter several. The other day accidentally put in my way the

Tract on “The Apostolical Succession in the English Church”; and it

really does seem so very unfair, that I wonder you could, even in the

extremity of οἰκονομία and φενακισμὸς have consented to be a party to

it.[261] The Patriarchate of Constantinople, as everyone knows, was

not one “from the first,” but neighbouring Churches voluntarily

submitted to it, in the first instance, and then by virtue of their

oaths remained its ecclesiastical subjects; and the same argument by

which you justify England and Ireland would justify all those Churches

in setting up any day for themselves. The obvious meaning of the canon

[of Ephesus] is that Patriarchs might not _begin_ to exercise

authority in Churches _hitherto_ independent, without their consent.

‘Christie tells me you have had a letter from poor Blanco White,

pleased rather than otherwise with [my] review,[262] and mistaking it

for yours, and sending you a copy of the book. Poor fellow: I should

much like to know in what tone he wrote; it must have been a painful

thing answering him…. I don’t gain flesh, in spite of all the milk.

Indeed, I suspect that in the last six weeks I have lost a good deal,

but the symptoms remain the same.’ It is in this letter that Froude

arranges for the continued dedication of the accumulated dues from his

own Fellowship to the propagation of the Cause dear to his heart. ‘So

spend away, my boy,’ he calls cheerfully to Newman, ‘and make a great

fuss, as if your money flowed in from a variety of sources!’ It was

his valediction.

Archdeacon Froude, early in February, leaves a blank on the last page

of his communication to Newman, ‘for your regular correspondent to

fill.’ Then comes the ominous postscript: ‘Hurrell wishes me to say

that he has nothing particular to say just now, but that you shall

hear from him in three or four days. He has received your two letters.

And now (as he will not ask to see what I may write), I will tell you

in a few words that my fears for him have increased considerably

within the last week. There can be now no doubt that he has been

losing ground, that he is much thinner than when Mr. Rogers left us,

and as evidently weaker…. He is generally cheerful, sleeps well, and

takes a sufficient quantity of food.’

Newman’s thirty-fifth birthday came on February 21, and upon that day,

absorbed as he now became in fighting Hampdenism, he penned a loving

letter of ‘long, long thoughts’ to his favourite sister Jemima,

betrothed to John Mozley. ‘Thank my Mother and Harriet for their

congratulations upon this day. They will be deserved, if God gives me

grace to fulfil the purposes for which He has led me on hitherto in a

wonderful way. I think I am conscious to myself that, whatever are my

faults, I wish to live and die to His glory; to surrender wholly to

Him as His instrument, to whatever work, and at whatever personal

sacrifice, (though I cannot duly realise my own words when I say so).

He is teaching me, it would seem, to depend on Him only; for, as

perhaps Rogers told you, I am soon to lose dear Froude: which, looking

forward to the next twenty-five years of my life, and its probable

occupations, is the greatest loss I could have. I shall be truly

widowed; yet I hope to bear it lightly.’

At intervals of five days, Archdeacon Froude gave Newman his

melancholy bulletin. Nowhere is he more admirable than in facing the

impending loss of the son who had come to be his pride and glory, and

his bosom friend. Says the Rev. Thomas Mozley: ‘There was a sort of

stoicism about Archdeacon Froude’s character which sometimes surprised

those who had only seen him for a day or two, conversing, or

sketching, or sight-seeing. He once rather shocked his clergy by

delivering a Charge while a very dear daughter was lying dead in his

house: but there was a romantic conception of duty in the act which

affords some key to Richard Hurrell’s character.’

Feb. 18, 1836.

‘My dear Hurrell desires me to account to you for his long silence,

but … I am sure you must have attributed it to the real cause, and be

prepared for a confirmation of the fears I then expressed…. All hope

of his recovery is gone; but we have the comfort of seeing him quite

free from pain, and in sure trust that the change will be a happy one

whenever it shall please God to take him. His thoughts continually

turn to Oxford, to yourself, and Mr. Keble; but my heart is too full

to add more than his instructions to thank you for all you have

written to him, and to say how much he was interested in Mr. Rogers’

most amusing account of the late proceedings in the University.’

Feb. 23, 1836.

‘Your friend is still alive. The morning after I wrote my last, he

awoke with a fluttering about the heart and a pulsation at the wrist I

could not count. Our apothecary thought he could not live out the day;

but our doctor holds out no hope of any change having taken place that

should raise our expectations beyond that of a short respite. As he

continues free from pain, or any very uncomfortable sensation except

that of extreme weakness … I am thankful that he is permitted to

remain with us, even for a few days. On no account, my dear Mr.

Newman, would I have you come down: no good could come of it. You

shall hear again from me in a few days; sooner, if anything occurs

that should call for an earlier communication. Hurrell desires me to

thank you, and also to say that he is “sorry that he has given you any

trouble about those stupid accounts,” to use his own words, and that

he “cannot scrape up ideas and strength enough” to write to you

himself. Should he, (contrary to all reasonable grounds for hope), get

a little about again, do tell Mr. Williams [that] his paying us a

short visit will give us great pleasure indeed.’

Feb. 28, 1836.

‘My dear son died this day. Since my last he has been gradually but

quietly sinking. After a rather more than usually restless night, he

spoke of himself as being quite comfortable this morning, and appeared

to hear the Service of the day, and a sermon, read to him with so much

attention that I did not think the sad event so near as it has been.

About two o’clock, as I was recommending him to take some egg and

wine, I observed a difficulty in his breathing. He attempted to speak;

and then after a few slight struggles, his sufferings were at an end.’

He was laid to rest on March 3, beside his mother, brother, and

sister, close to the Church porch. The burial service was read by the

Rev. Anthony Buller, a Devonian and an Oriel man, an old friend who

dearly loved him. Apparently neither Newman nor Keble travelled down

for the day to Dartington Parsonage, though the former, at least, had

arranged to do so from London. But the Archdeacon’s tidings were sent

to Oxford, and it was only on the morning of March 1 that Newman

learned of his loss. It quite overcame him. ‘He opened the letter in

my room,’ writes Thomas Mozley to his sister, ‘and could only put it

into my hand, with no remark. He afterwards, Henry Wilberforce told

me, lamented with tears (not a common thing for him), that he could

not [have seen] Froude just to tell him how much he felt that he had

owed to him in the clearing and strengthening of his views.’ Keble,

too, at the Hursley Altar, the Sunday after Hurrell’s home-going,

which must have been his own first Sunday there as Vicar, broke down

completely, and for some minutes could not go on. At Oriel (to

overhear again the Rev. T. Mozley addressing his brother John):

‘Froude’s death seems not a gloom, but a calm sadness over the

College. Newman showed me his father’s letter written the same day,

perfectly quiet and manly, making various arrangements, and telling

Newman and his [other] friends to make selections from Froude’s scanty

collection of books, to keep for his sake. I suppose Froude never got

a book or anything else, in his life, merely for the sake of having

it. His absolute indifference to possession was something marvellous.

Did I ever tell you that for two years, at least, he has given his

Fellowship to Newman, to go towards the _Tracts_? Yet he was by no

means careless about money matters; for he with great pains put the

accounts of Junior Treasurer (which I find troublesome enough even

now), on an entirely new and simpler plan, to the great convenience of

his successor…. I dare say there is no one who has said more severe

and cutting things to me, yet the constant impression Froude has

always left on my mind is that of kindness and _sweetness_.’ This

testimony, indeed, was general.

On March 2, Newman wrote to his old friend J. W. Bowden, from Oxford:

‘Yesterday morning brought me the news of Froude’s death; and if I

could collect my thoughts at this moment, I would say something to you

about him; but I scarcely can. He has been so very dear to me, that it

is an effort to me to reflect on my own thoughts about him. I can

never have a greater loss, looking on for the whole of my life, for he

was to me, and he was likely to be ever, in the same degree of

continual familiarity which I enjoyed with yourself in our

undergraduate days…. It would have been a great satisfaction to me had

you known him. You once saw him, indeed; but it was when his health

was gone, and when you could have no idea of him. It is very

mysterious that anyone so remarkably and variously gifted, and with

talents so fitted for these times, should be removed. I never, on the

whole, fell in with so gifted a person. In variety and perfection of

gifts I think he far exceeded even Keble. For myself, I cannot

describe what I owe to him as regards the intellectual principles of

religion and morals. It is useless to go on to speak of him: it has

pleased God to take him, in mercy to him, but by a very heavy

visitation to all who were intimate with him. Yet everything was so

bright and beautiful[263] about him, that to think of him must always

be a comfort. The sad feeling I have is that one cannot retain in

one’s memory all one wishes to keep there; and that as year passes

after year, the image of him will be fainter and fainter.’

The long-memoried man who uttered that was only too conscious that he

had no portrait of his departed friend.

On the 6th, turning aside from other things, Newman says, in his

thrilling undertone, to Keble:

‘… We have indeed had an irreparable loss; but I have for years

expected it. I would fain be his heir. When I was with him in October,

I so wished to drink out his thoughts, but found they would not flow

except in orderly course, as all God’s gifts. It was an idea of

Bowden’s, the other day, that as time goes on, and more and more

Saints are gathered in, fewer are needed on earth: the City of God has

surer and deeper foundations, day by day.’

Some thought of kindred wing crossed at the same time the mind of

Charlotte Keble at Hursley. ‘I shall be very glad,’ she says,

feelingly, to her sister-in-law Elizabeth on March 9, ‘for poor Mr.

Newman to have the comfort of John’s being in Oxford. He seems very

much to need it; and nobody, I suppose, can so entirely sympathise

with him, both in his distress for the loss, and also in the views and

opinions which knit them all three together. I can’t help thinking (at

least, one doesn’t know), but that Mr. Froude may in some way or other

be of more service now than if he had been kept here longer.’[264]

Perhaps no apology need be made for dwelling on the impression left by

Hurrell Froude on the minds of his comrades, above all, on the mind of

his best-loved comrade, after he had passed away. This afterglow, this

‘trailing cloud of glory,’ is biographic comment indeed. He had lived

so detached a life that it is pleasant to associate him, at the last,

with the _schwärmerei_ of much tender common human sorrow, with sorrow

sure of his own immortal continued interest in all that he had worked

for in England: for it helps to show him less as an elf and a ‘kinless

loon,’ than as the Saint-errant which, through his thirty-two years,

he was.

The heavy blow of his mother’s unexpected death fell on Newman in May.

The association of this loss with the sharp foregoing one, and the

remembrance of Froude, whom he had known and lived with so happily

since they first became colleagues at Oriel, are palpable enough in

the brave sigh of that greatly religious soul, breathed in a letter to

Harriett Newman, dated June 21, 1836:

‘You have nothing to be uneasy at, so far as I am concerned. Thank

God, my spirits have not sunk, nor will they, I trust. I have been

full of work, and that keeps me generally free from dejection. If it

ever comes, it is never of long continuance, and is even not

unwelcome. I am speaking of dejection from solitude. I never feel so

near Heaven as then. Years ago, from 1822 to 1826, I used to be very

much by myself, and in anxieties of various kinds which were very

harassing. I then, on the whole, had no friend near me, no one to whom

I opened my mind fully, or who could sympathise with me. I am but

returning, at worst, to that state … and after all, this life is very

short, and it is a better thing to be pursuing what seems God’s Will

than to be looking after one’s own comfort. I am learning more than

hitherto to live in the presence of the dead: this is a gain which

strange faces cannot take away.’

Less than a year later, a similar strain comes like a music of triumph

over sorrow in such a letter to Frederic Rogers, on the death of his

sister, as none but Newman could write:

‘This is only a fresh instance of what I suppose one must make up

one’s mind to think, and what is consoling to think, that those who

are early taken away are the fittest to be taken, and that it is a

privilege so to be taken, and that they are in their proper place when

taken. Surely God would not separate from us such, except it were best

both for them and for us; and that those who are taken away are such

as are most acceptable to Him seems proved by what we see: for

scarcely do you hear of some especial instance of religious

excellence, but you have also cause of apprehension how long such a

one is to continue here…. We pray daily: “Thy Kingdom come”: if we

understand our words, we mean it as a privilege to leave the world,

and we must not wonder that God grants the privilege to some of those

who pray for it, … pray for our eventual re-gathering, but our

dispersion in the interval. The more we live in the world that is not

seen, the more shall we feel that the removal of friends into that

unseen world is a bringing them near to us, not a separation. Our

Saviour’s going brought Him nearer, though invisibly, in the Spirit.’

It is all reticent and impersonal, but it rises, before his great

battle begins, from Newman’s stricken lonely heart. ‘Thou doomed to

die,’ as he had said, long before, in his poem, ‘David and Jonathan’:

‘Thou doomed to die: he on us to impress

The portent of a blood-stained holiness.’

Last of all, come from his half-unwilling hand the lines well-known to

students of sacred verse.

‘Dearest! he longs to speak, as I to know:

And yet we both refrain.’

What beauty is in that word ‘refrain,’ a filament of English feeling

kept between the quick and the dead! It occurs in a little

afterthought of a stanza, which was the only poetic offering of

Newman’s pen to Hurrell Froude gone.[265] Never was there so

imponderable an obituary; nor ever any more exquisitely in keeping.

For ‘the rest’ was indeed ‘silence.’ A proposal for a monument in S.

Mary’s at Oxford, affectionately brought forward by Robert

Wilberforce, as due to ‘our incomparable friend,’ ‘that invaluable

friend,’ somehow fell through. A special paper for _The British

Magazine_ fell through too, neither Newman nor Keble being able, in

his first grief, to write it to his own satisfaction. The only actual

notice of Froude’s decease occurred in a bare alphabetical list

printed in the April number, 1836. ‘Tributes of Respect’ were usual in

the Magazine, but he had none. The _Annual Biographer and Obituary_,

published by the Longmans in 1837, does not include him. Nor had he

any epitaph, not even when Archdeacon Froude died twenty-three years

later, until Dartington Church was taken down, being thought too

remote from the village population, in 1878, and the stones used in a

re-erection close to the highway below; then the vault was railed in,

where it was left in the lonely grassy space, with only the ancient

Hall, the grey ivied tower, and the sun-dial for solemn neighbours,

and the name and dates of each of the Froude family were cut on the

plain slab. They are unaccompanied even by a text, or a Christian

symbol. And thus, in the abstention which was his lifelong garment,

Hurrell sleeps. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth, March 25,

1903, a great garland of leaves and simple Devon blossoms lay there,

with a dedicatory good word from his favourite Book of Daniel: ‘O man

greatly beloved! peace be unto thee: fear not; be strong, yea, be

strong…. But go thou thy way till the end be; for thou shalt rest, and

stand in thy lot at the end of the days.’ It cannot be for ever that

‘Froude of the Movement’ shall lack a less perishable memorial.

[Illustration: DARTINGTON OLD CHURCH, NOW DESTROYED

(_The railing by the south porch enclosed the tomb of the Froudes_)]

[Illustration: THE PRESENT ASPECT OF HURRELL FROUDE’S BURIAL-PLACE

(IN THE FOREGROUND), DARTINGTON OLD CHURCHYARD]

In 1836, the ‘vanishing of such a spirit without sign’ was not to be

endured. It was the most natural thing in the world that all he had

written should be gathered together, that such a lover of books (as

Leigh Hunt says somewhere, in one of his happy literary retrospects),

should himself become a book. Hurrell became a singular book, as it

happened, made up, paradoxically, of matter never prepared by himself

for publication; and he and it were put forth as a party manifesto. It

may not be uninteresting to review the origin and character of _The

Remains of the late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of

Oriel College, Oxford_, printed by the Rivingtons in 1838 and 1839,

and consisting of four volumes octavo. The Editors, whose names do not

appear upon the title-page, were the Rev. John Keble and the Rev. John

Henry Newman. The latter is generally supposed to have done most of

the work; there are published letters of Keble’s to Sir John

Coleridge, and of Newman’s to Mr. Frederic Rogers, which go to show

that the idea of bringing out the _Remains_, and the initiatory

labour, including the first Preface, were Newman’s. But according to

Coleridge’s _Memoir_, Mr. Keble, as collaborator, wrote by far the

greater part of both Prefaces. For the very beautiful second one he

was certainly responsible.[266]

Of Part I. of these _Remains_, Vol. i. is devoted to a Private

Journal; Memoranda personal and philosophical; Letters to Friends; one

Latin and five English poems; seven pages of remembered miscellaneous

sayings; and a diary as Appendix. The companion volume is devoted to

Sermons complete and fragmentary; three Essays on subjects connected

with arts and sciences, and three on subjects purely ecclesiastical.