From ‘Memoir of Joshua Watson,’ edited by Edw. Churton, Archdeacon of Cleveland. 2 vols. Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1861.
[By the kind permission of Messrs. J. Parker & Co.]
‘… The first clear indication of this new principle [a theory of Catholic union, to which all other considerations were to bow] was seen in the publication of the Remains of R. H. Froude, a young man of great promise, Fellow of Oriel College, who died at the early age of thirty-two, and of whose stray papers, letters, and remnants of conversation, a full collection was published by J. H. Newman, then a Fellow of the same College, now for some years past a member of the Society of the Oratory in the Church of Rome. The first two volumes of these Remains were published early in 1838. The work never obtained a wide circulation; but enough was done to give deep offence to many minds, and to unsettle the principles of many more.
‘Those who know Richard Froude best knew that he was in the habit of expressing himself, both by writing and in conversation, in strong, pungent sentences, such as are not altogether uncommon with young men of brilliant minds and vivacious temperament, and are often used by them as much with the design of provoking answer and contradiction, as that of conveying the speaker’s real sentiments. But when the Editor, in his Preface to an unlimited and indiscriminate accumulation of such winged words, claimed for them the consideration due to the deliberate opinions of a matured reason, it was a mode of treatment which stamped them with an importance not properly their own, and justified the censure of those who without concerning themselves much for the reputation of the dead, or making allowance for what was with too little decorum brought before the public, saw the publication announcing itself as an expansion of the principles of the Tracts. And this claim was made, although poor Froude again and again declared himself, in the pages of these volumes, as one whose mind was in a state of progress and puzzle, sympathising at one time with Roman, at another with Puritan, till, in a lengthened illness, and absence in foreign lands, it fed upon its own solitary musings, with that morbid dissatisfaction at all things which sometimes accompanies the decay of vital power. However, the appearance of such an unreserved exposition of distracted fancies was a great discouragement to the hopes which had for a while found their centre at Oxford; and the disease of Richard Froude’s mind seemed to have communicated itself to his more distinguished Editor.’