William Froude, at Michaelmas, took his First Class in Mathematics, and a Third in Classics, quite as Hurrell expected. As to the microbe of travel thus featly introduced into the post, it did its work upon the recipient, though not without much hesitation and debate. One of Newman’s arguments against a plan with which, it is plain, he fell violently in love at once, was the state of his own health, involving, possibly, some additional responsibility for Archdeacon Froude. ‘You need fear nothing,’ Hurrell gallantly assures him, ‘on the score of two invalids: I am certainly better now than I have been for more than a year. I bathed yesterday with great advantage, took a very long walk, drank five glasses of wine, and am better for it all. My contemplated expedition is wholly preventative, so don’t be uneasy on that score…. As to my sawney feelings, I own that home does make me a sawney, and that the First Eclogue runs in my head absurdly. But there is more in the prospect of becoming an ecclesiastical agitator than in At nos hinc alii, etc.’

On Monday, December 3, Newman set out on the Southampton coach, reaching Exeter next day, and Falmouth, whence the Maltese packet of 800 tons, called the Hermes, was to sail, early on the Wednesday morning following. He wrote there his poem,

‘Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?’

the first of eighty-five dating from the Mediterranean voyage, the eighty-fifth being the ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ which has endeared to English-speaking pilgrims the Straits of Bonifacio. When the Froudes arrived at Falmouth, Newman had a nocturnal adventure to relate to them. He had been very roundly sworn at by a person, apparently a gentleman, who sat near him on the box. ‘I had opened by telling him he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maid-servant stuck atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain!’ The hasty fellow-traveller afterwards apologised. In the moonlight he had attributed a highly laic motive to Newman’s interference, so the latter explains to his mother. On the 8th of December the Hermes sailed. The three friends were to be together for five months, and their route is minutely and enchantingly mapped out in the first volume of the Newman Correspondence. The journey held unique experiences, filled with interest, for the two younger men, and they, on their part, seemed to have interested deeply many whom they met. Hurrell kept a log as they moved, for his brothers and sisters, for Mr. Keble, for Mr. Williams, and a few others; and out of it a fairly connected narrative can be extracted, of a colour and form quite other than Newman’s, the better correspondent, but graphic enough. Before starting on his voyage, Hurrell had seen in print, in the first and second volumes of The British Magazine, both his pioneer papers on Gothic Architecture, and the earlier chapters of his history of S. Thomas à Becket; these were followed, in volume iv., by The Project of Henry II. for Uniting Church and State, A.D. 1154.

To the Rev. John Keble, Dec. 12, 1832.

‘We started from Falmouth about eleven, on the 8th. “Jamque tibi e mediis pelagi mirabilis undis,” about sixty-eight miles to the south of Oporto, and thirty from the shore: the sea a perfect sheet of glass, showing the reflection of the stars, particularly Sirius, which is most splendid. The Pole-star sinking perceptibly: I am sure the Great Bear’s tail must have had a dip as he went his rounds. It has been very calm all day, and we have gone seven-and-a-half miles an hour: when the sun came to the meridian our latitude was 41° 36´. In the daytime the sea was a pale blue colour; I will not attempt to describe the sunset. Yesterday was very interesting: when we came on deck in the morning we could just make out Cape Ortegal to the south-east of us, at a distance of about forty miles. It was very pale, and scarcely to be distinguished from the sky, but rose very high above the horizon, and, as we neared it, seemed to be quite precipitous; we did not get within thirty miles, so that it has left on my mind only the ghost of an impression: but it is a grand ghost. We saw where Corunna lay, and must have been within twenty miles of some part of the coast between that and Cape Finisterre, which we doubled in the dark. All of it was of a very singular character, but insignificant compared with Cape Ortegal. All that day the wind was fresh from the east, and the sea very wild and grand, of a deep black-blue, covered with breakers: we went rather more than eight miles an hour, though the ship tossed amazingly. This was the first day that we had had a clear sky, and marvellous it was: a strong east wind in the middle of December, and the climate like May! our latitude at noon 44° 3´. There is something in the colour of the sea out of soundings, which is very striking to one who has only seen the shallow water that surrounds England. There is not a tint of green in it; to-day it has been a pale blue, like a beautiful lake; yesterday it was a black-purple. We find that this steamer is to touch at Cadiz and Algiers, and to spend two days at Gibraltar, in the way to Malta, and that afterwards it is to spend four days between Zante, Cephalonia, Ithaca, and Leucadia, touching at Patras (olim Patræ), then to spend six at Corfu, and afterwards return to Malta the same way; so we shall certainly extend our trip. The commander and the midshipmen are a very gentlemanlike set, and we the only passengers: so it is most luxurious…. And now I am stupid; if there is nothing more to tell to-morrow, I shall fill up the blank between Falmouth and Cape Ortegal, which may be regarded as our Dark Age.

‘Thursday evening.—The day has again been beautiful, and quite summery, with scarcely a cloud. When the sun rose we were off the Berlingas (some small sharp rocks, which you will see in a map), and from thence we kept near shore all the way to the rock of Lisbon. The greater part of the way we could not have been much more than a mile off. The sea has been its old green to-day; the coast all along very peculiar, not very high, but wild, and strongly marked; the rock precipitous, and deeply indented, and every promontory relieved by a thin mist of spray from the breakers of the Atlantic. We watched them curl in upon the shore, each rising in a green transparent line as it came to its turn to break, and then turning partially into a delicate mist where it met the more prominent rocks, till at last the whole line seemed to burst, and another rose behind its aërified relics, and put me in mind of Ἀφροδίτη…. When we passed Mafra we saw the cupolas of the palace of Cintra, and, through an opening of the hills, made out the greater part of it through glasses. The situation is strange for so magnificent a building. And now we had a clear view of the ridge on which the Duke took up his position on the northern side of the lines of Torres Vedras. I will not attempt to describe it, except that it is grand to a degree, rising in spire-like shaggy tops, and cut by deep ravines, the sides of which were fringed with what we were told were cork trees. As we got near we saw many villas about half-way up, and on the two highest points were two convents. The Roman Catholics are queer fellows: they are determined to be admired and not envied; we, unhappily λαχόντες ἀντιοστρόφον τυχὴν, are envied and not admired. We doubled Capo Roca at three, and then went down to dinner. The mouth of the Tagus was too distant to make anything out, except the masts of the English ships, who are there to bully Don Miguel.[95] On Friday we got up at seven to see Cape St. Vincent, and passed close under it. The light on it was very fine, and the form of the rocks bold; but yesterday had spoiled us. The day is fine, cloudless, and windless—almost too hot…. Just now we saw a fishing-boat, and made towards it. The people were in a great fright, and pulled with all their might, while they thought there was a chance to get away; at last they gave up in despair. When we came up we found they had no fish: there were four of them, very dark complexions, and, as well as I could judge, Moorish features: the boat, sails, and all, perfectly un-English (a word which has ceased to be vituperative in my vocabulary). The coast which we are now passing is too distant to be very interesting, but a grey ridge of mountains rises behind, out of a dead flat, reminding one that we are off a strange land. The lateen sails, too, of which many are about, and two turtles which we almost ran over just now, and a shark’s fin just showing above water, all tell the same story…. On Sunday morning it was foggy and disagreeable, and we were in the dreaded Bay of Biscay: however, I was still well enough to do Service on board…. All the ship’s crew attended except the steersman and the stokers, i.e., the fellows that feed the fire of the engine. The commander had them all upon deck in the morning and gave them a practical discourse on good behaviour, which amused [Newman] and me by being so much to the point: he is a nice fellow, I think. After Service I was fairly done up, and lost my character…. Next day we were in the middle of the Bay: still cloudy and damp, and a long gentle swell: but we had served our time, and were all alive and merry…. In the evening we found that the commander was a musician and a painter; he had a very elegant miniature of his wife that he had finished up for his amusement at sea; and he sang us several songs, accompanying himself on the Spanish guitar, in very good taste, as [Newman] said: we the ἀμύητοι liked it much; and we have not had any qualms since: and now I have got on to where the rest begins. We live splendidly on board, have a cabin each, capital dinners, and good company: the three midshipmen, gentlemanlike obliging fellows as can be: yesterday they went out of the vessel’s course, to show us the coast to advantage.

‘Saturday.—On getting up, found ourselves in Cadiz harbour; the convent bells put us in mind that we are in a religious country: it sounded just like Oxford before Morning Chapel. We found ourselves in quarantine and unable to land. The Consul’s boat came off for the letters, rowed by eight Spaniards, such odd-looking fellows! they row without rullocks, having a strap and a τροπωτήρ…. We saw the unfinished Cathedral very distinctly through a glass: it had not at all an ecclesiastical look, but was large and picturesque. It will never be finished now, I suppose, as the day of apostasy seems at hand in Spain.

‘Sunday morning.—Here we are at Gibraltar.’

Newman’s letters, enthusiastic over sky and sea, are full of the horrors of the ship (which he says was not properly cleaned before being sent down from Woolwich), and of the little stuffy rooms which are enough to kill a valetudinarian; but valetudinarian Hurrell seems to have enjoyed it all.

To the Rev. Isaac Williams, Dec. 27, 1832.

‘… We were at Gibraltar only forty-eight hours, and of that we were in quarantine forty. The remaining eight hours, however, we turned to account, under the auspices of the Colonel of engineers, who was kind enough to lend us horses, and go over everything with us: unfortunately we were there so short a time, that we could only see what was curious, and had no leisure for the picturesque; to enjoy which, it would have been necessary to ride away five or six miles, on what they call the neutral ground: the low sandy isthmus which joins the rock to the continent; but from the fortifications we saw enough to convince us what a magnificent object it must be. In our scramble we had the luck to see three or four monkeys, scrambling, with the greatest ease, up and down what seemed a smooth precipice. I know how odious descriptions are, yet I must just tell you that, among other things, we were taken through a gallery cut out in the most precipitous face of the rock, about 650 feet above the base, and 800 feet below the top, so that when you peep out through the port-holes, which are cut every here and there for cannon, you seem suspended in mid-air, and feel giddy, in whatever direction you look. Thanks to Colonel R[ogers] we saw so much that we had no right to grumble at the quarantine: but it really is something so exquisitely grotesque, that one cannot help being provoked. We were moored close alongside of a coal-wharf, and all the day that we were imprisoned, a parcel of fellows of the town were at work, wheeling coals into our vessel, and upsetting them on the deck, so that they were in all but contact with our crew for a whole day; also, all packages were received, after undergoing the ceremony of a partial ducking in the water; and letters had a chisel dug into them, which was supposed to let out the cholera. And while all this absurd farce was going on, we were imprisoned in one of the most interesting places in the world, not knowing when we should be released, or whether at all; however, even in this time, we had some amusement from the variety of curious figures that came down to the Quay to look at us. One fellow, a Moorish Jew, was dressed so picturesquely, and looked so exotic altogether, that I tried to draw him; but he saw what I was at, and first hallooed out: “You no paint me,” and, when I went on, he bolted as fast as he could. The Moors are magnificent-looking fellows, with very high stern features, dark eyes, and very marked nostrils that give to the full face rather a look of ferocity; even the lowest of them look like aristocrats. The Spanish women, too, were worth looking at: three of them came down to visit a merchant who came with us from Cadiz; the high head-dresses were the only peculiarity in their dress, but one of them was very fine-looking, and very unlike an Englishwoman. I should have thought her ladylike, only she spat with the most perfect indifference, just as —— would in C[ommon] R[oom]. We left Gibraltar at ten on Monday night, and had very calm beautiful weather for two days…. We got to Algiers [Thursday morning] about three, and it was then rough, cloudy, and blowing fresh. This is the most wretched, wicked-looking place I ever set eyes upon. I can associate its idea with nothing but a wasp’s nest. It is huddled together, leaving no apparent room for its streets; its windows are loop-holes, as if to fire through. All beyond its walls looks perfectly desolate, except a number of white specks, which are houses where the rich inhabitants retire in time of plague. The town itself is a mass of white, as perfectly white as a chalk quarry; and the monotony of the glare[96] is only relieved by the rust of weather-stains, which are not white-washed by the French so regularly as by the Moors.

‘The Quay, as every one knows, is a strong battery, expressly for the shelter of pirates; and, when one thought of the horrors that had been practised in that detestable place, and felt the personal discomfort of an approaching storm, and saw, for a foreground, the infamous tricoloured flag on the ships, the general impression was as much the reverse of favourable as can easily be fancied. A boat came alongside with the Vice-consul, for letters. His Excellency was an English Jew, and there was an half-starved Frenchman for his πάρεδρος. He was rowed by four fellows, of what race I know not…. Their features were perfect apathy, and looked like stuffed red leather more than flesh and blood. If we had touched any one of the crew we should have been in for a hundred days’ quarantine in every port of Europe, and yet the wretches had the impudence to insist on our slitting all the letters, to let out the cholera. We stayed an hour, and then started; and sure enough, the storm came. The wind was north-west, and blew right across from the Gulf of Lyons, which I shall always think more formidable than the Bay of Biscay. The wind lasted till we got under the lee of Sardinia; and what with the stink of the bilge-water, which was stirred up by the tossing, and the constant noise, and the difficulty of standing and sitting and eating and drinking, we were constantly wretched enough. My father spent the whole time in his berth; [Newman] and I the greater part of ours. But ills have their end. The sea and the stink subsided, and we made the rest of our voyage to Malta stilly and quickly, arriving there on Monday morning after breakfast. [Newman] does not think his health perceptibly improved yet,[97] but he has entirely got over sea-sickness, and has written an immense deal for the Lyra Apostolica.[98] He has written so many letters to his mother and sisters, that I need say no more about him. He will write to you soon. I know you will think this a very dull letter, as it is about places and not people; but we have been so little on shore, that I have not been able to indulge your taste. Kindest remembrances to O.[99] I will write to him soon.—Yours affectionately,

R. H. F.’

From Malta also, on Christmas night, a letter was despatched to Dartington, addressed, apparently, to John Spedding Froude, which carries on the record of the travellers. All the Froudes, like all the Hares, could draw.

‘… There is so much that is picturesque and singular about this place, that I do not despair of occupation for all the fifteen days in drawing, if the weather is only tolerable. The boats, and the dresses, and the colours and forms of the buildings are all as good practice as anything I can fancy, and I shall not be sorry to have time on my hands for studying them at leisure. We shall be allowed to go about the harbour [in quarantine] as much as we like, and there are several places where we may land. This will have to start a day or two after our return, so you will not hear much more of Malta till the next packet. As yet I have made egregious failures in attempts to colour; indeed, I have had no opportunity of doing anything from nature, and recollection supplies one too indistinctly. My father has made many very interesting coast drawings as we have come along, but he has done nothing in a finished way.

‘Corfu, Jan. 1.—We got here the day before yesterday, after a most interesting voyage. The sea has been as still as a lake, and we have had a light breeze in our favour; but it must be owned that we have sailed away from the fine weather. Ever since we got here it has rained torrents, and is now blowing a violent gale, so that we thank our stars we are in harbour. On Friday morning we (as you would say) made Zante on our larboard bow, at a distance of about fifty miles. The high land of Cephalonia appeared at the same time, so they kept her away three-quarters of a point, and made for the passage between the islands. The south point of Cephalonia is a very high mountain; it was covered with snow, which here and there appeared through the clouds. Zante is cliffy, and not so very unlike some of the Isle of Wight.[100] We got to the town just after dark, and went ashore to make out what we could. We went to a billiard-room, a coffee-house, the head inn, and two or three shops. Everything was filthy to a degree, but there seemed to be some really handsome houses, such as Sir John Vanbrugh might have built. The shops are all open to the street, and one would think that the shopkeepers had never taken more than coppers in their lives; yet in a tobacco shop, on asking the price of a cherry-stick pipe, which I should have guessed at twelve shillings in England, they told me it was one hundred dollars, and a midshipman who was with us, and had lived a great deal in those parts, said that it was not at all dear at the money. The mouthpiece was amber inlaid with turquoise, and in that miserable-looking shop there must have been thirty or forty more pipes as costly: I wonder where they get customers? We drank a bottle of Zante wine at the head inn, and very nice it was; on asking the price, the landlord most unaffectedly said there was nothing to pay, and when we gave him a shilling he seemed to think it was most munificent.

‘… The town is now in possession of a Suliote chief, who has taken the castle into his own hands, and has quartered himself and his followers in all the best houses of the town, which is now newly building, and promises to be regular, and even elegant. The streets are quite straight, and cut one another at right angles, and the houses all have piazzas before them; but everything is now at a standstill, and the streets themselves, unpaved, are more like the courses of rivulets than anything else. It was a night of rejoicing, this being the Day of St. Dionysius, and all the common people were assembled in the bazaar, a sort of shambles, and the gentlemen in a coffee-room, smoking and playing cards, in their best dresses: most of them were fine-looking fellows, very quiet and polite. We had coffee there, and very capital it was, but thick and almost like chocolate. I should like to know how they make it. The Greeks there were all dressed in their white linen petticoats, embroidered coats, and shaggy capotes, except one old fellow, who had on an English box-coat, and one other fellow, whom, from his vulgar impudent countenance, I conclude to have been an English blackguard. They all say the Morea is in a most wretched state, full of banditti and pirates, so that you cannot go anywhere without an escort. Next day we found ourselves just off Ithaca, at breakfast-time, and got breakfast over before we entered the strait between Ithaca and Cephalonia. This was the first day that I attempted what is called sketching, and I made a tolerable hand of it; at least, I found out how to make memoranda that did to work upon afterwards. I can make no hand of colour, and think I shall hardly attempt it, till I have time to make some finished studies from nature. You and W[illy] care so little about classics, that I need not trouble you about Ulysses’ castle, Sappho’s leap, etc. We got here on Sunday night, and the rain came soon after us, and has persecuted us incessantly ever since. We got ashore yesterday and walked about the town, which is very picturesque, and exactly like the panorama….

‘We were at a ball at Corfu on the anniversary of the installation of the Ionian Government, at which all the native population were expected; but the day was so stormy that it made a poor show. I meant to have got you a real Albanian capote, but they were not to be had at Corfu, and the cherry-stick tobacco-pipes were too dear.’

To the Rev. Isaac Williams, Jan. 10, 1833.

‘We spent Christmas Day at Malta in an incessant row, taking in coals, while the bells of all the many Churches of Valetta told what was going on in that land of superstition;—watched one poor fellow in quarantine all day, saying prayers to himself, and looking towards the Church nearest on the shore, opposite to the Lazaretto.[101] The time is now drawing nigh when we shall spend fifteen long days in that abode of the unblessed. It is now the 10th of January, and we are just in sight of Malta, on our return from the Ionian Islands. We have not seen them under the most favourable circumstances, as the weather has been wintry, i.e., either very stormy or very cold. I have been often longing for the bright hot Spanish sun which conducted us from the Bay of Biscay to Gibraltar…. Among other things, we spent half an hour in the coffee-house [at Zante] where the Greek merchants were assembled for the holiday evening: a little wretched dirty place, but the company were very polite to us, and we were surprised at the cleanness of their dresses, and a certain refinement in their appearance and manner. We were under the guidance of Major L[ongley] brother of L[ongley] of H[arrow][102] who is Governor of Cythera, and knows something of the habits and language of the people. The company all rose to him, and sat down when he said κάθεστε; but they pronounce so queerly, that one can hardly ever make out a word, although their newspapers are quite intelligible, and differ but little from old Greek. I would give much to live among them for a bit, and get into their notions. As it is, we have seen nothing but the surface, and heard the notions of the resident English, which cannot be relied on…. In Corfu, the breed is very mongrel, mixed up with Venetian and Italian blood; so that, altogether, the sight was uninteresting, except that when one saw a splendid set of apartments, with magnificent English furniture, and brilliantly illuminated, with a band of music, etc., it contrasted itself oddly with the thought of old Thucydides and the Corcyrean sedition. The remains of the old town are very scanty, and one cannot make out anything satisfactory about τὸ Ἡραῖον, etc. There is a rock that they call Ulysses’ ship; but I suspect the name of a Venetian origin. In one place there is the remains of an Ionic temple, on a very small scale, lately discovered; but we had no time to go into antiquarian questions. We rode over most of the island, and saw several of the villages, all of which bear marks of having been tenanted by a rich population; but everything is of a Venetian character. I cannot make out whether the people are religious or not; yet they seem, on the whole, to be an innocent civil set. Every small knot of families have their priest and their chapel, but no parishes that we could hear of. Their Churches are very small, but great numbers of them: two or three to a small village. [Newman] and my father went into one in an out-of-the-way village, in which there [were] fine silver lamps, a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, well executed, and several pictures of Saints, in the hard German style of the fifteenth century. I went twice into the Church which is the depository of the body of St. Spiridion;[103] and people were praying there both times, one person apparently from the higher classes. In the chapel where the body lies, lamps are always kept dimly burning, and the people go in and kiss the shrine. The feet are stained with tears, and there are many splendid offerings there of precious stones. They keep all the Saints’ days by going to Church, and playing cards afterwards; and on the fast days they fast fairly…. On our way back from Corfu, the curtain was drawn back which had before hung over the scenery, and the long ridges of the Acarnanian mountains appeared in full splendour; among these many points in the range of Pindus were visible in the distance; and from Zante we certainly saw the summit of Parnassus, though partially intercepted with clouds. To look at, Mount St. Meri, in the north of Morea, is the most magnificent, but I do not know its classical name.[104] And now I suppose I must bid farewell to these extraordinary places for the rest of my life; having only just seen enough of them to know how well worth seeing they are.’

The fifteen days of detention were not quite so annoying or so monotonous as the travellers had feared. ‘This Lazaret,’ says Newman in the course of a long letter to his sister Jemima, ‘was built by the Knights [of St. John at Malta] for the Turks…. We burn olive wood. I assure you we make ourselves very comfortable. We feed well from an hotel across the water. The Froudes draw and paint. I have hired a violin, and bad as it is, it sounds grand in such spacious halls. I write verses, and get up some Italian, and walk up and down the rooms about an hour and a half daily; and we have a boat, and are allowed to go about the harbour.’ An incident on the quarantine island is responsible, in Newman’s biography, for the one and only tiff between himself and Froude.[105] In reality, it was no tiff at all, as Froude was wholly innocent of offence. (Newman, it may be remarked in passing, had just written his David and Jonathan.) It seems that during the January nights in the Lazaretto, all three of the English travellers used to hear unaccountable footsteps, in the rooms and galleries, their own doors having been locked from the outside. On one occasion Newman thought he heard the noises in Archdeacon Froude’s room. ‘The fourth time it occurred, I hallooed out: “Who’s there?” and sat up in my bed ready to spring out. A deep silence followed, and I sat waiting a considerable time: and thus I caught my cold.’ A week later, there is no clean bill of health to send Mrs. Newman. ‘The weather has been unusually severe here. My cold caught in the Lazaret ripened the day I came out of it into the most wretched cough I ever recollect having, as hard as the stone walls, and far more tight than the windows.’ In short, Newman was housebound, a close prisoner, and miserable enough, despite his successful completing of his ‘Patriarchal Sonnets.’ Archdeacon Froude forbade his going out to Church. The next day, Monday, he confides to the all-sympathetic bosom of his family: ‘I am properly taken at my word. I have been sighing for rest and quiet. This is the sixth day since I left the Lazaret, and I have hardly seen or spoken to anyone. The Froudes dine out every day; and are out all the morning, of course. Last night I put a blister on my chest; and never having had one on before, you may fancy my awkwardness in taking it off and dressing the place of it this morning. I ought to have had four hands. Our servant was with the Froudes…. Well, I am set upon a solitary life, and therefore ought to have experience what it is; nor do I repent…. I have sent to the library, and got Marriage[106] to read. Don’t smile—this juxtaposition is quite accidental! You are continually in my thoughts. I know what kindness I should have at home.’ He ends dismally, not without citing the Apostolic precedent of going not alone but two and two: ‘I wonder how long I shall last without any friend about me!’ One can imagine the anxiety and indignation of the devoted hearts at Iffley. Early in April their unfriended John Henry received his sister Jemima’s answer, distinctly uncomplimentary to Hurrell Froude; whereupon Newman rushed into explanation: he could not have Froude blamed; he had begged to be left alone (‘you know I can be very earnest in entreating to be left alone’): he had refused his repeated solicitations even to let him sit by him and read to him; he had, in short, driven him away. Hurrell, indeed, was not cut out by Nature for a nurse. Be that as it may, would it be far wrong to surmise that it was influenza which had been playing its now-well-understood tricks on Newman? But he made up like a lover for his passing semi-accusation. Froude, as it happened, was singularly well at this time, though the reprieve from discomfort was to be but brief.

The three companions went from Malta to Messina, where, in wretched weather, they had divers small misadventures, shared with Rohan-Chabots. Hurrell kept, that week, a sort of journal of events; and the pages describing the capture of lodgings at Palermo seem worth transcription, since they show the revered Vicar of S. Mary-the-Virgin defeated by female diplomacy, and in the unexpected rôle of a sprinter.[107]

‘We got to Palmero about eleven or twelve next morning [Feb. 11, 1833]: the sea calm, the sun hot, and everything beautiful to a degree. Here we knew that there was to be a scramble for rooms; so when we anchored, [Newman] and I made a rush for the ladder, and were first in the boat; but unfortunately, when we were in it we found that we had mistaken the landing-place. Our boat was nearest the Quay; and we had to clear out round all the others to make for the custom-house and town, which were a mile off; also, our boat had only one man. So we saw two other boats give us the go-by, in one of which was the wife of the Governor of Moldavia and Wallachia:[108] they landed about four minutes before us, and we thought to make up our way by running. I was soon left behind by [Newman] and the boatman. When they passed the Countess, I saw her tap a fellow on the shoulder, who ran off for a coach, in which she set off as hard as she could for the Albergo di Londra. We found afterward that she had secured Page’s whole house by letter; and not contented with this, she had two servants ahead, who, when [Newman] came up with them, raced him; and being fresh, they contrived to keep ahead by a foot or two, so as just to bespeak Jaquerie’s whole house before he could speak to the landlord. On this, we despaired, and put up with the first place we could find to hide our noses in: luckily, it had no fleas! and that was more than we had bargained for.’ Newman, in his own letters, does not single out for praise the one negative charm of their temporary dwelling. “It is astonishing,” he says from the depth of English decency, “how our standard falls in these parts!”

The Archdeacon, with his attendant spirits, was off at four in the morning for Egesta. They had a carriage to themselves, drawn by three mules with bells, and a boy and a guide, besides the driver; much æsthetic rapture and next to nothing to eat, seems to have been their portion. But the culminating point, the complete satisfaction of the heart’s desire, was Rome. ‘All the cities I ever saw are but as dust, even dear Oxford inclusive, compared with its majesty and glory,’ writes Newman to the Rose Hill auditory. This enthusiasm of his was not without its scruples and torments. He adds an occasional colophon of genuine self-comfort, being sure that ‘our creed,’ the while, is ‘purer than the Roman’: a matter which, apparently, Hurrell forgot to dwell upon. He never had to rid himself of the least taint of the Pharisee, although he had been scandalised enough at Naples. That alien city of all badness had given his notions of its nominal religion a rude shock. Frederick William Faber, passing through Cologne in 1839, got, unwillingly, the very same sort of painful disedification which Froude got at Naples.[109] The sadness of the decay of an ideal, even though a misplaced and mistimed one, hangs over some of the letters sped towards holy Oxford.

To the Rev. John Keble, March 16, 1833.

‘Rome.—… I should like to be back at the election much; sed fata vetant. Being abroad is a most unsatisfactory thing, and the idleness of it deteriorating. I shall connect very few pleasing associations with this winter, and I don’t think I shall come home much wiser than I went. The only μάθησις on which I can put my hand, as having resulted from my travels is, that the whole Christian system all over Europe “tendit visibiliter ad non esse.”[110] The same process which is going on in England and France is taking its course everywhere else; and the clergy in these Catholic countries seem as completely to have lost their influence, and to submit as tamely to the State, as ever we can do in England…. Egesta … by good luck we have been able to see, though we were obliged to abandon the rest of our Sicilian expedition. It is the most strangely romantic place I ever saw or conceived.[111] It is no use attempting to describe it, except that the ruins of the city stand on the top of a very high hill, precipitous on three sides, and very steep on the other, literally towering up to heaven, with scarcely a mule-track leading to it, and all round the appearance of an interminable solitude. After going some miles through a wild uninhabited country, you approach it by winding up a zigzag path cut in the face of what looks a perpendicular and inaccessible rock, and, till you have got some way up, it wears so little the appearance of a track, that without guides no one would venture on. At the top the old walls of the town can be distinctly traced, where one would think that mortal foot had never or rarely been, and numbers of tooled stones [are] scattered in all directions, evidently the remains of well-finished buildings. Here and there is a broken arch which makes one fancy the remains to be Roman, and in the most conspicuous place a fine theatre, nearly perfect. When you come to the ascent on the opposite side, you all at once see the Temple, in what seems a plain at the bottom, with its pediments and all its columns perfect, and only differing from what it was at first in the deep rich colouring of the weather-stains. When we saw it there was a large encampment of shepherds in the front of it, with their wolf-dogs and wild Salvator-like dresses; and, by-the-by, as we found afterwards, with no great objection to lead Salvator-like lives; for when by some accident we were separated from one another, they got round [Newman] shouting “Date moneta!” and, he thinks, would certainly have taken it by force, except for a man with a gun who is placed there by Government, as custode of the Temple, and who came up when the others were getting most troublesome. On getting close to the Temple, we found that it stands on the brink of a precipitous ravine 200 or 300 feet deep, which gives a grandeur to the whole scene even beyond what it gets from the mountains and the solitude. Compared with Egesta, Pæstum is a poor concern, and so is Naples when compared with Palermo.

‘But Rome is the place, after all, where there is most to astonish one, and [it is] of all ages, even the present. I don’t know that I take much interest in the relics of the Empire, magnificent as they are, although there is something sentimental in seeing (as one literally may), the cows and oxen Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis. But the thing which most takes possession of one’s mind is the entire absorption of the old Roman splendour in an unthought-of system: to see their columns, and marbles, and bronzes, which had been brought together at such an immense cost, all diverted from their first objects, and taken up by Christianity: St. Peter and St. Paul standing at the top of Trajan’s and Antonine’s columns, and St. Peter buried in the Circus of Nero, with all the splendour of Rome concentrated in his mausoleum. The immense quantity of rare marbles, which are the chief ornament of the Churches here, could scarcely have been collected except by the centre of an universal Empire, which had not only unlimited wealth at its command, but access to almost every country; and now one sees all this dedicated to the Martyrs. Before I came here I had no idea of the effect of coloured stone in architecture; but the use Michael Angelo has made of it in St. Peter’s shows one at once how entirely that style is designed with reference to it, and how absurd it was in Sir C. Wren to copy the form when he could copy nothing more. The coloured part so completely disconnects itself from the rest, and forms such an elegant and decided relief to it, that the two seem like independent designs that do not interfere. The plain stone-work has all the simplicity of a Grecian temple, and the marbles set it off just as a fine scene or a glowing sky would. I observe that the awkwardness of mixing up arched and unarched architecture is thus entirely avoided, as all the arched work is coloured, and the lines of the uncoloured part are all either horizontal or perpendicular. So Michael Angelo adds his testimony to my theory about Gothic architecture.

‘As to Raphael’s pictures, I have not had time to study them with attention. The most celebrated of them, especially your friend Heliodorus, are so damaged or dirty that one cannot see them distinctly except close; they say we should use an opera-glass. All that the painters say of Raphael tends to exalt him as a poet and a man of genius, but rather at the expense of his technical skill; he and Michael Angelo seem, by what they say, to be counterparts. But I wish I could hope to form an opinion of my own about it.

‘There is an English artist here, a Mr. S[evern],[112] to whom [Newman] had an introduction, and who certainly is a very clever man, who gave us a most curious and interesting account of a German school of painters that is now growing up in Rome. He says that several of them are here, living on pensions from German Princes, particularly the King of Bavaria, and are studying Raphael in a very singular way: curious fellows, with a great deal of original enthusiasm (utterly unlike the βαναυσοί of England), who have got it into their heads that the way to study Raphael is not to copy him, but to study the works he studied, and to put their mind into the attitude in which he formed his conceptions. So they poke away at the old hard pictures of early Masters, with stiff drapery and gilt backgrounds, and are so intent on dissociating Christian and classical art, that they think grace and beauty bought too dear, if they tend to disturb the mind by pagan associations. One of these fellows,[113] he said, had become intimate with him in a curious way. Mr. S[evern] has made colouring his principal study; he seems to be a bit of an enthusiast himself, and has been aiming at combining the colouring of the Venetian school with the designs of the Roman. Well, this German, who is a shy, reserved man, having been one day in Mr. S[evern’s] studio, returned the next day with ten or twelve of his German friends, and again, the day after, with as many more; and so on, for some time. At last Mr. S[evern], who took it as a great compliment, asked him what it was that had attracted his notice. He said he had always gone on a notion that colour had nothing to do with the poetry of painting, but was merely sensual, and that a Madonna he had seen of Mr. S[evern’s] made him alter his mind; so he had been bringing friends to see if they felt the same about it. Since this time they have been very intimate; but the man is so reserved, in general, that except for this accident he might have kept his notions to himself. Mr. S[evern] says his designs are quite in the spirit of Raphael, and that his whole mind is so taken up with Catholic ἦθος, that he has given up his Protestantism, and is a rigid conformer to all the ordinances of the Church. I have prosed about this because I was struck with it. I hope it is no mare’s nest…. I don’t know whether I mentioned to you that [Newman] and [Williams] are going to indite verses for The British Magazine, under the title Lyra Apostolica? [Rose][114] would not take a sonnet that I made, because it was too fierce; but says it may come by-and-by. I will write it out for your edification and criticism.

‘ΠΕΡI ΤΗΣ ΜΙΣΗΤΟΥ ΣΤΑΣΕΩΣ.[115]