‘I mean to do one on Lord Grey’s interpretation of the Coronation Oath.[116] Will you do some? A mixture, some fierce and some meek: the plan is to have none above twenty lines…. My cough is just the same as when I left England. The climate is worse than an English autumn, and sight-seeing does no good. I was almost well at Malta, and if I had stayed there should have been quite so now. I expect to see the original Epistolæ S. Thomæ in the Vatican Library.’

Overbeck seems to have attracted Froude purely, or chiefly, on moral grounds, but he found at Rome an abiding object of enthusiasm in the lovely genius of Francesco Francia. One of his letters to his second brother, from Leghorn, illustrates both his own passion for thoroughness, and the range and zest of his lifelong interest in arts and crafts. He was ‘an ingeniose person,’ and constantly invites the application of that favourite and comprehensive seventeenth-century word.

‘… If you choose, you may easily find out in London what is the particular process by which the red colour of glass is produced from gold, and also in what way they would go to work to give glass a vitrified coat of gold, retaining its own colour; and whether any accident in attempting the latter might effect the former. For it has always struck me as a puzzle how so recondite an idea as that of producing a ruby tint from a yellow metal should come into the heads of the early glass-painters; and it has occurred to me that some such accident as I have guessed at above might be the key to the puzzle, for the practice of giving glass a vitrified coat of gold for the purpose of mosaic work was very common, long before the use of coloured glass in windows had been thought of, and specimens of it are to be seen in Rome of almost every age between [A.D.] 400 and [A.D.] 1000. Please not to forget this question, or be contented with vague answers. It will be likely to take some time and trouble to get at the truth, but it is curious, and there is no hurry, and you will at any rate have more opportunities than I shall. The best red colour that has been produced in modern times has been managed by a French chemist, and there is a wholesale house of his goods somewhere in Holborn. The Pope’s mosaic manufactory in Rome is curious: there are eighteen thousand shades of colour in it, which can be looked out as in a directory. Some of the imitations of pictures which they have made are so perfect that you must look close before you can see joinings and transitions of colour; and they have the advantage over every kind of painting, being mellow from the first and brilliant to the last. In St. Peter’s there are many very fine ones, copies of all the most famous pictures, and they are said to have cost 4500l. a piece. St. Peter’s itself is the great attraction of Rome, worth all the classics put together. I think the dome is built with all the layers of stone horizontal, so that the principle of the arch applies not to the vertical section, but only to the horizontal. I am not sure of this, but I think so.’

It does not appear, though Newman and Froude saw the Pope’s mosaic manufactory, that they saw the Pope himself, Gregory XVI. They seem to have gained their chief vistas of Roman society through their acquaintance with the Prussian Chargé d’Affaires, Baron Bunsen,[117] and his English wife, at whose house of all hospitality Sir Walter Scott, then near his end, had been the beloved guest less than a year before. Hurrell must have had his own impressions of the excellent Bunsen, with his pleasant Teutonic habit of holding up his finger and hushing the company, before he began to speak. There is no mention of our modest and all-observing pilgrims in the published correspondence either of Bunsen or of Joseph Severn, for 1832-1833.

On April 13, 1833, Hurrell sends to the Rev. John Frederick Christie one of the most discussed letters in the first volume of the Remains.

‘It would not become me to apologise for not having written before, since I much doubt my capacity[118] to produce anything worth the postage. Nevertheless, I have for some time been intending to write to you, and can’t account for having let so much time slip through my fingers. My father and I are now on our way home, having left [Newman] to retrace his steps to Sicily…. I hope to be at Genoa to-morrow morning…. Between [Lyons] and Paris, I hope to visit and make drawings of some of the Abbeys, etc., which are connected with the history of St. Thomas of Cant. “Sixth and lastly,” if the Fates allow, we shall cross from Havre to Southampton by the first steamer in May … soon after which you may expect to see me in Chapel. I congratulate you on having got over your first audit so prosperously;[119] … it is better occupation than travelling, take my word for it. It is really melancholy to think how little one has got for one’s time and money. The only thing I can put my hand on as an acquisition is having formed an acquaintance with a man of some influence at Rome, Monsignor [Wiseman][120] the head of the [English] College, who has enlightened [Newman] and me on the subject of our relations to the Church of Rome. We got introduced to him to find out whether they would take us[121] in on any terms to which we could twist our consciences, and we found to our dismay that not one step could be gained without swallowing the Council of Trent as a whole! We made our approaches to the subject as delicately as we could. Our first notion was that the terms of communion were, within certain limits, under the control of the Pope … or, that in case he could not dispense solely, yet at any rate the acts of one Council might be rescinded by another; indeed, that in Charles the First’s time it had been intended to negociate a reconciliation on the terms on which things stood before the Council of Trent. But we found, to our horror, that the doctrine of the Infallibility of the Church made the acts of each successive Council obligatory for ever, that what had been once decided could never be meddled with again, in fact, that they were committed finally and irrevocably, and could not advance one step to meet us, even though the Church of England should again become what it was in Laud’s time….

‘… So much for the Council of Trent, for which Christendom has to thank Luther and the Reformers. [Newman] declares that ever since I heard this I have become a staunch Protestant, which is a most base calumny on his part, though I own it has altogether changed my notions of the Roman Catholics, and made me wish for a total overthrow of their system. I think that the only τόπος now is “the ancient Church of England,” and, as an explanation of what one means, “Charles the First” and “the Nonjurors.” When I come home I mean to read and write all sorts of things; for now that one is a Radical, there is no use in being nice![122] I wish you had sent a longer postscript to [Newman] about the position of things; all I have heard, directly or indirectly, has made me long to be home again. You don’t say whether you have done anything for the L[yra] A[postolica]?[123]…. Tell [Isaac Williams] that I think he has used me basely to send me a mere scribble of a few lines, prosing about some theory of poetry, when there were such a lot of atrocities going on on all sides, of which one can get no tolerable account through the papers.

‘Genoa, April 15.—Here we are, as at Leghorn, detained a day beyond our time, though there is a perfect calm, because these absurd fellows are afraid of a swell which was got up by last night’s wind. The more I have to do with these wretched Neapolitans, the more my first impressions about them are confirmed. I wonder how anyone can tolerate either them or their town, which is as nasty and uninteresting a place as I ever set foot in. As to this Genoa, I should not grumble at being detained here, if I were in plight for sight-seeing, for it is truly magnificent, both in itself and in its situation; but, unfortunately, I was taken with a very severe feverish cold the morning we landed, i.e., the day before yesterday; and that day and yesterday was confined to my bed, where I should probably be now but that I had to get up early, in hopes the vessel would keep its appointment…. Never advise a friend of yours to come abroad for his health! It would be very well if one could have Fortunatus’ cap, and wish one’s self at Rome; but travelling does more harm than change of climate does good.

‘While we were at Rome [Newman] and I tried hard to get up the march-of-mind phraseology about pictures and statues, and we hoped we were making some little progress under the auspices of a clever English artist, to whom we had an introduction: but, unfortunately for our peace of mind, just before our departure we became acquainted with [a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge], who, though he had not been in Italy much longer than ourselves, had attained an eminence so far beyond what we could even in thought aspire to, that we gave the thing up in despair, and retire upon the τόπος, that “we don’t enter into [those] technicalities.” Certainly those C[ambridge] men are wonderful fellows; I know no one but [Head][124] that could compete with them at all. They know everything, examine everything, and dogmatise about everything; they have paid particular attention to the geological structure of this place, and the botany of that, and the agriculture of another, and they are antiquaries, and artists, and scholars, and, above all, puff off one another with the assiduity of our friends the [W.]s. W[hewell’s][125] book, and S[edgwick’s][126] Lectures, and T[hirlwall’s][127] research, and H[are’s][128] taste, pop upon one at every turn…. We mean to make as much as we can out of our acquaintance with Monsignor [Wiseman], who (by the by), is really too nice a person to talk nonsense about. He desired me to apply to him, if on any future occasion I had to consult the Vatican Library: and a transaction of that sort would sound well….’

The ‘transaction would sound well’: this, as if the writer’s study were only to heighten others’ opinion of him! Newman was surely right in calling attention, years after, to this habit of Froude’s of depreciating, nay, belying, his own motives. It was not an affectation, but it was a little piece of sheer cruelty.

‘Marseilles, April 22.—This France is certainly a most delicious place: we landed in Hyères Bay, owing to a storm from the north-west, and found everything so warm and green that I could quite enter into John of Salisbury’s[129] feelings. The people, too, [are] so extremely civil that I cannot help hoping there may yet be the seven thousand in Israel, and that sometime or other we may be able to talk of la belle France with some kind of pleasure. I feel like a great fool here, from not being able to talk French. In Italy half the population kept me in countenance, but here it is a constant humiliation. And what is worst, I can’t hope to make progress; for having learned the little I know by writing and not [by] speaking, I annex wrong-shaped words to all the sounds. It is like talking Latin[130] to a foreigner.’

Again, on May 23, to William Froude, is expressed further commendation of the French people, founded on the keenest instinctive understanding of them: an understanding even more unusual then than now. Newman, until later, was certainly far from sharing it, or wishing to learn to share it. The ordinary attitude of the contemporary Oxford mind was frankly, though playfully expressed, by the young W. R. Churton, some years before. He gallantly addresses France: ‘What have I seen in thee that should make me long to see thee again? Have I seen a gentleman from Calais to Beauvoisin? Have I seen one gleam of poetry in the country or its inhabitants?’[131] Hurrell Froude was ‘un-English’ enough to be arrested, but not repelled, while on the Continent, by the spectacle of extra-English human nature. We have heard him longing, at Zante, to ‘live among them a bit, and get into their notions.’ This beautiful and uncommon openness of mind stamps him an ideal traveller, despite his lack of opportunity; at no single point of a hurried route, beset with difficulties, could he look far below the surface of things. But it is strikingly inaccurate to say of him, as Mr. Mozley does, that he lacked not only opportunity, but curiosity, ‘to see the interior of either the political or the religious systems they came upon.’[132]

‘What I have seen since my last letter ends, has been more interesting than anything else except Rome. We stopped about at many places in the central part of France, to see out-of-the-way things connected with Becket’s history, and found some of them so very curious and striking in themselves, that they would have amply repaid us by their own merits. But what I was most interested with was, that the French seem to me to have been so grossly belied as a nation. I never saw a people that tempted me to like them so much, on a superficial observation. I declare, if I was called upon to make a definition of their national character, I should say they were a primitive innocent people. The fact seems to be that France is governed by a small despotic oligarchy, the aristocracy of wealth, who by their agitating spirit have contrived to get the franchise so restricted as to secure to themselves a majority in the Chamber, and the command of the military, by which they keep France under such a strong hand…. There is now in France a High Church party who are Republicans,[133] and wish for universal suffrage, on the ground that in proportion as the franchise falls lower the influence of the Church makes itself more felt; at present its limits about coincide with those of the infidel faction. Don’t be surprised if one of these days you find us turning Radicals on similar grounds.’

‘Very flat, I know,’ the author says, in his usual undecorative manner; but he adds: ‘I wrote it the night before you went; I wanted to show it you, that you might do one on “He that testifieth these things saith: Surely I come quickly”; and then, after the verse, to finish with: “Even so, come, Lord JESUS.” I think that so it might make a composition on which some people’s thoughts would run.[135] You may think all this bother; but I cannot help fancying that this sort of arrangement is worth some little trouble.’ Hurrell’s poem stands collocated with Keble’s ‘Encouragement’ in the Lyra, with its opening ‘Fear not’: and its heartening beauty is almost a direct address to the burdened spirit who called it forth:

εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι, οἵτινεσ εὐνούχισαν ἑαυτοὺς διὰ τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν.
—S. Matt. xix. 12.[136]

And immediately after, linked with a quotation from the beloved Eclogues: ‘I send you some sawney verses…. Can these be doctored into anything available, or are they dotings?’

‘Old Self and New Self.[138]

Four other sacred poems which Hurrell wrote in 1833 may as well be given here. He and Newman burst into song together, though he with far more remote and infrequent music. Probably no lyrist ever had such a poor opinion of himself. But in the qualities of clearness, simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity, there is something very remarkable in Hurrell’s few brief scattered verses. They have a strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of them a little chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful; they, like himself, are impersonal, and full of character; abstinent, concentrated, true. The unexpected grace is their cunning harmony, and the trick of that is neither derived nor deliberately invented. His every line instinctively sings and flies. He has nothing to match a certain refrain of Newman’s, in what he calls his ‘ecclesiastical carol,’—

It is a good instance of an always interesting literary anomaly that such a line, in its raucous sibilation, should have been produced by an accomplished musician, whereas unfailing melody belongs to Froude, who, loving naturally what he once called ‘the bright and silent pleasures of poetry,’ had small sense of music as an independent art. Yet Newman certainly was capable of a sustained grandeur, as in his verses on Greek models, which Froude did not attempt, and could not attain.

‘Sight against Faith.

‘“And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons-in-law that married his daughters, and said: ‘Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city.’ But he seemed as one that mocked, unto his sons-in-law.”

‘Farewell to Feudalism.[141]

‘“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”

‘Weakness of Nature.

‘“Be strong, and He shall comfort thine heart.”

The following fragmentary lines are appended to the poem as given in the Remains, though they do not, of course, appear in Lyra Apostolica:

From poetical ‘dotings,’ Hurrell, having reached England, throws himself gladly into the interests of the young scientist his brother, who was already at work on the unique experiments concerning the resistance and propulsion of ships, which now stand connected, all over the world, with his successful name. He was going forward to be, as Hurrell anxiously wished, no ‘mere engineer,’ no ‘Liberal,’ i.e., agnostic or materialist, ‘at heart.’

To William Froude, July 11, 1833.

‘… I cannot understand how the dock-gates can make any further resistance to the water after the curvature has been squatted out of them, nor how, if the curvature is right, the pressure should have any tendency to alter it. Tell me if you succeed in getting a verdict against them; also, how your resistance experiments succeed. I will never believe that a sail will do as much work if you split it in two; but, if R ∝ area, you might have each cloth independent, and all would do as well. I never gave you an answer about the Book of Job, for I cannot get a distinct idea of its argument. It is said to be a discussion on the moral government of God; but my view of it is not more distinct than what ladies get of Butler’s Analogy.’

Secular authority was on the eve of abolishing in Ireland ten Bishoprics, which, in that country at least, it is not pretended that it had not created. But there could be no guarantee whatever that secular authority, so gorged, would be sated; and operations in England being only too likely, it was time for the objectors to rise. Besides, the general change effected during 1832-3, in the relations of Church and State, was the most disheartening or enraging thing in the world to the sentinels at Oxford, according to individual mood. Up to then, ‘spiritual cases were referred by the Sovereign to the Court of Delegates, which contained a majority of spiritual persons. But in those years, the final appeal was transferred, by Act of Parliament, from the Court of Delegates to, first, the Privy Council, and then a Committee formed from it.’[143] In that bondage, a worthy legacy from the ‘unidea’d’ reign of William IV., the Church of England stood, and stands. Things had been bad enough before. Already Hurrell had cried out in private: ‘The Church can never right itself without a blow-up.’ This was more sanguine than Dr. Arnold’s simultaneous jeremiad, and quite as loyal. ‘The Church as it now stands,’ he said, ‘no human power can save.’ But now Froude’s song is: ‘If the State would but kick us off!’ caught from Lamennais and the great democrat-Ultramontane agitation in France. The wish is translated into the weighty and telling pages of the long essay which stands first in his Remains, and which he wrote in 1833. More suo, he uses in it all the original documents which he can lay his hands on, and furthers his argument by italicisation and capitalisation of leading words and phrases. Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle once remarked that the step of throwing off the supremacy of the State had been dreamed of, in England, only by the Nonjurors, and ‘the first authors of the Tracts for the Times.’ Has it not been dreamed of ever since? The deification of a Privy Council was the occasion, not the cause, of the High Anglican onset, itself but one movement of several against the intrenchments of British materialism, but distinct from them all, inasmuch as Scott and Coleridge, riding just before, with the armed protest of Carlyle, of Ruskin, and of Emerson to follow, bore no known emblems of a Christian Crusade. The hour of latent dissatisfaction had crept up to flood-water mark. As we are well aware, no great movement springs full-armed from the brain of any local Jupiter; and this one was a birth, and only a birth, of 1833. For years previously, semi-active agitation, fed by the feeling all over the country, was quite patent and open. There was much popular stir and screaming, all making, no doubt, for righteousness and right ideas. The thinkers, the Universities, were far clearer as to what they did not mean, or wish, than as to what they did. ‘Newman and I are both so consequential,’ Froude writes in a leave-taking letter of 1832, ‘that we fear all sorts of things going wrong while we are away.’ It is perfectly true that these men did not create, but evoke, the religious spirit of their time. The Chinese narcissus bourgeons at a miraculous rate from a bulb a year old. The Platonic theory of individual knowledge should be extended to meet the case of nations: they, too, remember, and have rhythms which antedate the conscious life, and recur throughout it. We are always forgetting the commonplace that a spirit rather than intelligent persons with a polity, a law rather than its visible agencies, is the true operative force. Well-meaning students of the Movement have looked upon one name or another as the generating cause, whereas the real leader is ever nameless, like Odysseus in the cave of his baffled giant. There was ‘an unseen agitator,’ as Newman knew. His earliest friend of undergraduate days, whom he called, afterwards, Princeps Apostolicorum, was, for one, independently aware of it, as soon as events began.

‘… What a wonderful drama is going on,’ Mr. Bowden[144] writes, ‘if we could but trace it as a whole, and know the multiplied bearings of each varied scene upon our nation and our Church! However, we can see our own parts, and that must for the present suffice us.’ Newman confessed the same wide vision, writing later in that year to Froude: ‘I do verily believe a spirit is abroad at present, and we are but blind tools, not knowing whither we are going. I mean, a flame seems arising in so many places as to show no mortal incendiary is at work, though this man or that may have more influence in shaping the course, or modifying the nature of the flame.’

‘This man or that’ was not lacking, and there was work for him: work for ‘the bright, vivacious, and singularly lovable figures with whom the eyes of Oriel men were then familiarised.’[145] Mr. Charles Kingsley thought them, as it would appear, not ‘virile’: a necessary opinion for any ‘virile’ Kingsley to hold. So much depends upon definition! It was a passing conversational remark made by Hurrell Froude concerning the great Churchmen of the Middle Ages, that their portraits had ‘a curious expression as of neither man nor woman, a kind of feminine sternness.’ A very similar remark was made at almost the same moment by the prince of English metaphysical critics. Of the coincidence Froude was not aware; but his Editors, in a footnote, fail not to refer to it. ‘[Wordsworth’s] face is almost the only exception I know,’ said Coleridge, ‘to the observation that something feminine, (not effeminate, mind!) is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius.’[146] This angelic or epicene aspect is, indicatively, the most terrible force in the world. It is certain that the Tractarians lacked the girth, the gait, the entire and triumphant visibility of John Bull going out with his gun. They lived with abstract ideas, and came to look like them.

‘Mr. Froude, if anyone,’ wrote Newman anonymously in The British Critic of April, 1839, ‘gained his views from his own mind.’ But indeed, as is implied, none of us ever gain our views from our own minds: views coming with an underived spontaneous air are born of a man’s superior attentiveness to the working Mind of things. Hurrell, pacing Trinity Gardens, his hand on Williams’ shoulder, with the off-hand edict: ‘Isaac, we must make a Row in the world!’ recalls to us another agitator of whimsical disinterestedness, Camille Desmoulins. Or he is speaking a too free translation of the message of high and urgent poetry which La Pucelle once poured into the ears of Durand Laxart at Domremy. (It is always of French genius that his genius reminds us.) In all the polemics of the day his voice is the Æolian one, fitful and laconic, unexpected and alarming, yet oddly sweet. He is very busy chastising and correcting himself; but that other strife going on is far more interesting: he is a soldier of fortune, he must fight, he must interfere. When the outriders of the whole sea of returning Catholicism charge at first singly and silently, then with uproar, along the levels of the sleeping Protestant kingdom, the Hurrell Froude who loved duty and hard work, and abhorred display and conspicuosity, rises, despite himself, a little dominant, a little spectacular. He is inevitably marked, to ear and eye, as the legendary ninth wave, the foamiest green breaker of the line, ever re-forming and breaking, so long as he is visible, brighter, taller, and farther in-shore than the rest. With the year 1833 he comes into public play, and vanishes almost as soon.

‘… By the bye, I write [“Newman”] as if you knew he was returned. He came back last Tuesday week.[147]… He has been delayed by what one can now look back on without uneasiness, as he has not suffered eventually; but the fact is, he has had a very narrow escape of his life, owing to a severe epidemic fever which he caught in Sicily, and in a place where he could get access to no kind of medical aid. At the place where he was seized he was laid up for three days, unable to move, and at the end of that time strangely took it into his head that he was well. In consequence, he set out on his journey, and after having gone about seven miles, was carried almost lifeless into a cabin, just at a moment when, by a strange accident, a medical man was passing. This person relieved him sufficiently to enable his attendants to remove him to a town some way farther on, in which a doctor resided: Enna, or Castro Giovanni. Here he was eleven days before the crisis of his fever arrived, and it was long thought he had no chance of recovering…. He was afterwards delayed at Palermo by the stupid vessel, which did not sail for three weeks after it had promised, and thus lost all the advantages of a good wind. However, he is back safe at last, and really looks well, though his hair is all coming off, and his strength is not yet thoroughly restored. Do something for the [Magazine] and the Lyra. Wherefore stand ye all the day idle? I am going to [Hadleigh] in an hour or two to concert measures.’

Hadleigh Rectory, in Suffolk, was the scene of the little four-days’ congress called together on July 25, by the independent Cambridge forerunner of the Movement, the Rev. Hugh James Rose; ‘the most eminent person of his generation as a divine,’ Dean Church calls him. It is interesting to recall that the young Richard Chevenix Trench was Curate of Hadleigh at this time. Neither Keble nor Newman was able to attend. It was the first rally of those willing to fight ‘for the doctrine of Apostolical Succession, and for the integrity of the Prayer-Book’; and means were about to be taken to found a powerful Association of Friends of the Church. Froude, impatient of talk and of preliminaries, distrustful of the need of organisations, cherishing a preference such as Newman was to express long after, writing to Pusey, for ‘generating an ἦθος rather than a system,’ went down from Oxford somewhat grumblingly. The subjects brought forward at Hadleigh were chiefly disciplinary. The complicated relationship of Church and State, the call for Lay Synods, and the ever-burning topic of the manner of the Appointment of Bishops in the Church of England, seem to have engrossed the four men present, Froude then as always, in his extreme abstract way, pushing on to conclusions the others were not ripe for. He found Rose, disinterested as he knew him to be, ‘conservative’; he lamented that Rose and Palmer of Worcester clung to what he calls the ‘gentleman heresy,’ to ‘the old prejudices about the expediency of having the clergy gentlemen, i.e., fit to mix in good society; and about “prizes” to tempt men into the Church, and the whole train of stuff…. What I have learned,’ he adds, generalising, ‘is not to be sanguine, not to expect to bring other people into my views in a shorter time than I have been in coming to them myself.’ And again to Newman, with candour: ‘You seem to think I am floored, and in fact, I partly am so; at least the predominant impression left on my mind is that I am a poor hand at entering into other people’s thoughts.’ There follows a description of a fellow-guest, which must have made both Newman and Keble smile, as being possibly applicable to another and more fiery spirit who, as Mr. Rose their host said afterwards, with his delicate Gallic justness of criticism, was ‘not afraid of inferences.’ It can hardly be proved that Hurrell appreciated Mr. Rose, who was a sort of precursor in Pusey’s spiritual dynasty, as Hurrell himself was in Newman’s. But he overrated Mr. Perceval. Newman was given to understand, at the close of the session, on the thirtieth day of July, some of Mr. Perceval’s excellences and moral dangers.

‘Perceval,’[148] Hurrell writes, ‘is a very delightful fellow in ἦθος, a regular thorough-going Apostolical; but I think Keble should warn him about putting himself in the way of excitement. Some of the things he says and does make me feel rather odd. I am sure he should be set to work on something dull that would keep his thoughts from present interests. I never saw a fellow who seemed more entirely absorbed, heart and soul, in the cause of the Church, and without the remotest approach to self-sufficiency.’

‘Both Rose and Palmer,’ wrote Newman on the other hand, after he had heard from those allies, ‘think Froude and Perceval very deficient in learning, and therefore rash.’ Considerable time had been spent in revising the Churchman’s Manual, by Mr. Perceval. Books, committees, bylaws, and such tangible machinery, seemed important to Mr. Rose, who was intelligently planning a great local campaign, to improve the position of his disadvantaged party. Froude, ahead of Newman or Keble, seems from the first to have outrun anything of this sort. To these three, the very existence of religion, whether expressed in the public worship and formularies, or in the conduct and belief of Englishmen, was at stake. He alone lacked a just conception of minor needs, what was the nature of these, or how far they should be satisfied: he felt only the need of supernaturalism in a society again grown godless since Wesley’s time. He did not, therefore, march forward in order, but by a long leap threw himself half-blindly upon ‘incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch.’ Certainly, cohesion, as not being the note of the Church of England, was not the note of the conference at Hadleigh. Froude especially, with his terrible consistency, his capacity for getting all there was to get out of the mere innuendoes and half-lights of circumstance, his passion (to employ a serviceable expression of Locke’s) ‘to bottom everything,’ must have obstructed unconsciously the deliberations of a great liturgiologist and a true ecclesiastical statesman, both born to move with caution, and to end in the deltas of compromise or sheer weariness. Froude felt then, as afterwards, what he calls his ‘stigma of ultraism’; what really worried him more than that, was the slow foot of reform, toiling behind his own. He wished nothing less, as we have seen, than a ‘blow-up,’ and reconstruction. His poetic foresight made him implacable; consequences, not processes, were in his foreground. He had the individual vision. Galahad-like, he saw, while wise men were spurring up and down upon the quest. Mr. Palmer’s adjectives were well chosen: Hurrell was not ‘learned,’[149] and he was ‘rash.’ But it is also true that learning will call anything rashness which travels towards a given goal by a shorter route than its own. An extremely fine definition of Froude’s might be wrested from its context, and applied to his discomfiture at Hadleigh, and his position in general. ‘The understanding,’ he says, ‘pursues something which it does not know by means which it does; while genius endeavours to effect what it has a previous idea of, by means of which it has to ascertain the use.’[150] The ‘bold rider across country’ would perhaps look unnatural as a mounted collaborator in a procession. It is to be feared that the Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude was a difficult factor, a Montagnard, in the debates of nascent Anglo-Catholicism.

In the strife of ideas, during the summer, there were not lacking pastoral interludes.

To the Rev. John Keble, August, 1833.

‘… You can’t think what delicious weather we have had here [at Dartington]. It is like May back again…. I saw the other night what I can hardly convince myself not to have been a supernatural fire. I and one of the [Champernownes?] and two other boys, and a labourer, were coming up the river in a boat when it was dark, and we all saw as distinctly as possible under a tree, close by the water, what we took for a wood fire: hot embers, which did not blaze, but gave off sparks; the boys thought a wasp’s nest must have been burned out there, and landed to stir up the embers and examine; in landing we lost sight of the fire for a minute behind the bush, and in going to the place found nothing; no smell of burning, no ashes, no marks of fire on the leaves or grass: in fact, there certainly could not have been any fire there! The labourer was really frightened, and I cannot account for my not having been so; but somehow the thing has made an impression on my imagination. I never dream of it, nor think of it in the dark, or anything: yet I am absolutely certain of the facts, and wholly unable to account for them. Sometimes I look on it as a half-miracle, of which the counterpart is in store for us. The return of rough times may revive energies that have been dormant “in the land of peace wherein we trusted.” Is this nonsense?… I am very well, all but my cough, which is exactly what it was, and is likely to continue….’