‘The friendship between Newman and Mr. Hurrell Froude, the elder brother of the historian, which commenced in 1826, and became intimate in 1829, lasting thence to Mr. Froude’s death from consumption in 1836, was certainly one of the most important influences which acted on Newman’s career at the most critical period of his life. Newman’s was one of the minds which mature slowly; and it was not till he was twenty-six years of age that it became clear whether he would be, in the main, a religious leader, or one of the pillars of the Whately party; that is, the party who threw their influence into the scale of minimising the spiritual aspect and spiritual significance of Revelation, rather than of maximising it. Newman himself mentions that for two or three years before 1827, he was “beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral,” or, in other words, “drifting in the direction of Liberalism.” “I was rudely awakened from my dream, at the end of 1827, by two great blows, illness and bereavement.” And then, in 1829, came fuller intimacy with Hurrell Froude, which seems to have fully determined, if anything were then needed to determine, the direction in which his mind would proceed. Mr. Hurrell Froude was, as Newman describes him, a man of the highest gifts, gentle, tender, playful, versatile and “of the most winning patience and considerateness in discussion.” … I feel little doubt that Dr. Newman’s wrath against “Liberalism” (as for many years afterwards he always called it, identifying, as he did, Liberalism with Latitudinarianism) was, to a very considerable extent, a moral contagion caught from Hurrell Froude.

‘There you see some trace of the influence of Froude’s high ascetic nature speaking in the heart of a devotee of music, but a devotee of music of the most exalted kind. Hurrell Froude, in a letter home, mentions that the commander of the steamer in which they sailed sang several songs, accompanying himself on the Spanish guitar, and it must have been these songs which suggested to Newman “The Isles of the Sirens.” When the friends reach Ithaca, Newman seems to forget “the man of many woes” altogether; he is musing on the difficulty of keeping himself “unspotted from the world”: which is the last thing, I suppose, that Homer’s Ulysses ever thought about; while Byron, in the same scenes, thought only of how he could spot himself most effectually…. Newman’s nostalgia was more in sympathy with that of Moses than with that of Ulysses: the home he longed for was a home he had never yet gained. There is something very strange in the connection between these classical scenes and the thoughts they excited in the travellers, for I cannot help thinking that most of these poems must have owed their origin almost as much to Froude’s suggestion as to Newman’s pen. The lines, for instance, on England,[359] in which Newman calls her “Tyre of the West,” and accuses her of trusting in such poor defences as the fortified rock of Gibraltar, and such poor resources as her rich commerce supplied, look as if they had owed a good deal of their inspiration to Froude’s cavalier contempt for the wealth earned by trade, as well as his scorn for any ostentatious display of power not rooted in a devout theocratic Faith…. There is, to me, something very striking in the contrast between the class of thoughts which the old Greek and Roman localities suggest to a Whig poet like Byron, with a broad dash of licence in his Whiggery; to classical scholars like Clough, imbued with what is now called “the modern spirit” (as well its moral earnestness as its intellectual scepticism), and to grave spirits like Newman’s and Hurrell Froude’s, dominated not only by a religious, but by a strongly-marked ecclesiastical bias…. As regards the influence of this journey on Newman’s future career, it appears that while, in many respects, it diminished his horror of Romanism, in consequence especially of the influence of Hurrell Froude, it had a contrary effect on Hurrell Froude’s own mind, and later (again, through him, to some extent, I suppose) on Newman’s. Hurrell Froude writes from Naples[360] on February 17, 1833: “I remember you told me that I should come back a better Englishman than I went away: better satisfied not only that our Church is nearest in theory right, but also that practically, in spite of its abuses, it works better; and to own the truth, your prophecy is already nearly realised. Certainly, I have as yet only seen the surface of things, but what I have seen does not come up to my notions of propriety. These Catholic countries seem, in an especial manner, κατέχειν τῆν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικία, and the priesthood are themselves so sensible of the hollow basis on which their power rests, that they dare not resist the most atrocious encroachments of the State upon their privileges.” And after detailing the abuses of the Roman Catholic system in Sicily, he goes on: “The Church of England has fallen low, and will probably be worse before it is better; but let the Whigs do their worst, they cannot sink us so deep as these people have allowed themselves to fall, while retaining all the superficials of a religious country.” When it is considered that this was the impression of Roman Catholicism, judged by its fruits, which that one of the two friends who was by far the more inclined to the Roman system brought away from his life in a Roman Catholic country, we cannot wonder that Newman should have remained for eight more years a zealous Anglican, before he even began to foresee clearly whither he was tending.’