Part i

., Vol. i., p. 181). From Totnes, we walked up the Dart by Dartington House to the Parsonage: that place which ever since has been to me dearer than my native vales, of which I always say:

‘_Ille terrarum mihi præter omnes Angulus ridet._

‘The Froudes were eight in family, and the Archdeacon became a great friend. But the people after my own heart were at Dartington House.[351] … With the Archdeacon and Hurrell we rode along the coast, being very hospitably entertained at different houses; and at last, from the Holdsworths’ house at Dartmouth we came up the river Dart by boat…. Prevost, [the] summer of 1826, came to Cwm,[352] and was engaged to my sister; and afterwards Froude came there too, and gives an account of his stay there in his published Journal, where I am mentioned under the letter I., and Prevost under that of P. All this time I was very unwell, and preying on my own mind. I went to Oxford to reside my Bachelor’s term, and lived with Sir Charles Anderson, and saw much of Froude, who was very kind to me. I went to Dartington, with the Archdeacon, from Oxford, and spent the Easter there…. When I went to reside in Oxford, in October, [1831], as College Tutor, I felt what a great change had come on my mind since residing there before, on account of the influence of Bisley[353] and Windrush,[354] and I found this the more on returning to the society of Froude, for I was become so much more soft and practical, and he more theoretical and speculative…. Yet this change that had been going on, from difference of circumstances, in no way lessened my friendship and intimacy with Froude, but rather increased it; for though naturally inclined to speculation, he was himself entirely of the Keble school, which in opposition to the Oriel or Whatelian, set ἦθος above intellect…. Living at that time so much with Froude, I was now, in consequence, for the first time, brought into intercourse with Newman; we almost daily walked and dined together. Newman and Froude were just then turned out of their tutorships at Oriel, together with Robert Wilberforce, who left Oxford for his living of East Farleigh. Their course had, as yet, been chiefly academical, but now, released from College affairs, their thoughts were more open to the state of the Church…. I was greatly charmed and delighted with Newman, who was extremely kind to me; but [I] did not altogether trust his opinions. Although Froude was in the habit of stating things in an extreme and paradoxical manner, yet one always felt conscious of a thorough foundation of truth and principle in him, a ground of entire confidence and agreement; but this was not so with Newman, even although one appeared more in unison with his more moderate statements.[355] … At this time he was coming to look to Keble altogether, as he received him second-hand through Froude…. But I always thought Froude an unfair exponent of Keble’s opinions: they were stated by him in a manner so much his own, so startling and original, and put in so extreme a light, that I could hardly recognise them as the same, so different was his from Keble’s manner of expressing himself. [_Note._――Froude used to defend his startling way of putting facts and arguments on the ground that it was the only way to rouse people, and get their attention; and he said that when you had once done this, you might modify your statements. There is, of course, some truth in this, but it always seemed, and still seems to me, a dangerous line. John Keble could not do so: his great humility and diffidence would prevent it, and that strict conscientiousness which hindered him from even willingly overstating any fact, or pressing any argument, beyond what he said it really did prove….]

‘… The circumstance which I most remember about that time[356] was a conversation with Froude which was the first commencement of the _Tracts for the Times_. He returned full of energy and of a prospect of doing something for the Church; and we walked in the Trinity College gardens, and discussed the subject. He said, in his manner: “Isaac, we must make a row in the world! Why should we not? Only consider what the Peculiars” (_i.e._ the Evangelicals) “have done with a few half-truths to work upon! And with our principles, if we set resolutely to work, we can do the same.” I said: “I have no doubt we can make a noise, and may get people to join us; but shall we make them really better Christians? If they take up our principles in a hollow way, as the Peculiars” (this was a name Froude had given the Low Church party) “have done theirs, what good shall we do?” To this Froude said: “Church principles, forced on people’s notice, must work for good. However, we must try; and Newman and I are determined to set to work as soon as he returns, and you must join with us. We must have short tracts, and letters in _The British Magazine_, and verses (and these you can do for us), and get people to preach sermons on the Apostolical Succession and the like. And let us come and see old Palmer” (_i.e._ the author of the _Origines Liturgicæ_) “and get him to do something.” We then called on Palmer, who was one of the very few in Oxford (indeed, the only one at that time) who sympathised with us; and although he did not altogether understand Froude, or our ways and views (the less so as he was not himself an Oxford, but a Dublin man), yet he was extremely hearty in the cause, looking more to external visible union and strength than we did, for we only had at heart certain principles. We, _i.e._, Froude, Keble, and myself, immediately began to send some verses to _The British Magazine_, since published [in] the _Lyra Apostolica_….

‘… From this time forth, after Newman’s return, I was thrown more and more entirely into his society for about seven years, Froude waning more and more away, and disappearing from Oxford….

‘… I much regretted not being with poor Froude at or nearly before his death…. Poor Froude! he was peculiarly _vir paucorum hominum_: I thought that knowing him, I better understood Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Froude was a person most natural, but so original as to be unlike anyone else, hiding depth of delicate thought in apparent extravagances. _Hamlet_ and the _Georgics_ of Virgil, he used to say, he should have bound together. Many have imagined, and Newman endeavoured to persuade himself, that if Froude had lived he would have joined the Church of Rome, as well as himself. But this I do not at all think. There was a seriousness and steadfastness, at the bottom, in Froude, so that I had always confidence in him:[357] Newman told me once, half-seriously, that the publication of Froude’s _Remains_ was owing to me, as I had said to him, if persons could have so much brought before them that they could thoroughly understand Froude’s character, then they might enter into his sayings; but unless they knew him as we did, they could not understand them. For, indeed, one constantly trembled for him in mixed society, both in Common Rooms and in other places, feeling that he would not be understood…. On the day of the book coming out, I went into Parker the bookseller’s with Copeland; and there we were startled at seeing one who then was the chief opponent of the Church principles of Newman and ourselves. It was Ward of Balliol, author of the _Ideal_. He sat down with the book in his hands, evidently much affected; and then we afterwards heard, to our astonishment, that he had been very much taken by the book, had bought a copy for himself and another to give away, and was, in fact, quite converted.’

From ‘ORIGIN OF THE TRACTS FOR THE TIMES,’ A POEM IN THE 1852 EDITION OF ‘THOUGHTS IN PAST YEARS,’ by ISAAC WILLIAMS.[358]

‘It was before the summer holidays, A noon I well remember, as we sat Conversing in my College rooms, my thoughts Mingling unconscious with the trembling leaves Of poplars from the window; and meanwhile, In converse still unbroken, thence we passed Into the stately garden-walks, and there Paced to and fro beside the aged yews Which once like living guardians of the lawn Had marshalled all the place with verdant walls: Now, mere memorials of their former sway. ’Twas a dark vapoury noon, while ruddy gleams Were mingling with the sun, and fell athwart The cloistral lime-tree avenue beyond; And like a curtain, the moist atmosphere Hung heavily around us, yet withal Glowing and warm, not adverse to my friend (Lately returned from genial Italy, Death in his frame and cheek), and to his eye Lent more than its own brightness. He was one I loved: ah, would that I had loved him more! For he was worthy of a good man’s love. “Yes,” said he, with my name, as he was wont, Sportfully playing, “we must make a noise In the large world; why should we not? How they Of Low Church views, Peculiar, through the land Make themselves felt and heard; and ring aloud With a few truths, half-truths! and shall not we With the whole Truth forgotten for our theme, The pillar and the ground of all our hopes, Or, rather, say the Faith entire and one In all its due proportions, and the Church Our witness of old time,――why should we not Lift up, as like a trumpet through the land, With no uncertain sound, our warning voice?”

My answer I remember: “Noise abroad I doubt not we can make as well as they. And then to be as hollow partisans, Supporters,――this were easy, and the Church To be familiar in men’s mouths; but then Will they beneath all this be better men, More humble?”

“They will be so,” he replied. “For the great Truths themselves, depend on it, Will work, and work for good; but hollow men There will be, and needs must.”

Yet, to and fro, I urged the adverse part: “I fear the weight On spirits unprepared, undisciplined; Of others and ourselves I am afraid. Could men be fuller leavened with the thought Of Judgement and Hereafter, could we lay Foundations deep in honesty, ’twere well; But else, mere superstructure on the sand! Fashion, religious fashion, and the tide Of popular feelings,――I can never wish To have them with us. We must walk in doubt And fear, and do our parts, come what come may.”

“Yes,” said he, pausing, “very true”: with look Half-loving and half-pitying. “My friend, You now must creep no more; for all too long You have in country hamlets shady grown. For part of this our duty, ere we die, Is to be up and stirring; we must rise Or be for ever fallen: God will help.

Else all that’s good and holy in the land, Beneath the blasting influence of the State Will wither and dry up and droop and die, As neath the upas-tree. We must be up, And moving, now, at once; and when our friend Shall have returned from ancient Sicily,” (He spake of one whom he had left behind Bound for the classic shores of Syracuse), “Tracts we must have, and, by what means we can, Launch them abroad, short Tracts; we must begin, And you, too, you must aid, and with your verse. Come, see what you have ready for our hand. The _Monthly_, as you know, _The British_ named, Is open for our letters, prose, and rhyme. But deeper the foundations must be laid In these our Tracts; subsidial aid we need, Full many: to get friends (if here and there One may be found, or two) to bring to aid Their pulpits, and proclaim there is a Church Planted by Christ’s own hand within our isle.―― And let us now to Worcester.” Then of one He spake, well-honoured for good service done Linking our Liturgies unto the past. “Hearty he is, and earnest; though not meet Throughout to understand and sympathise, Yet in his line will lend us his good aid, Though looking for external front, and powers, More than on principles which we are bent To scatter broad and deep. Let’s now to him.” And thus, full-sailed in academic garb, Through the Collegiate gates, archway, and porch We passed in conversation, bent to raise The Signal: ’twas the day of little things.

That friend with whom I thus in council walked, Associate of my earlier years, long since Is in his peaceful grave; nor did he live To see our sorrows. There was that in him Wherein one might cast anchor. Often wont

To talk in paradox, it was his mood Of playfulness, as one that inly smiled Mocking at the conceptions which the tongue Is weak to utter; venting heart-felt truths In startling shape preposterous; with a smile At incongruity of our poor thoughts To match our endless weight of destiny; Yea, at himself, to see intention yoked So strangely with performance, which still paced Unequally, and limped or dragged behind. His intellect was keen-edged as the sword Of Saladin, well-matched with battle-axe Of Cœur de Lion; while in poetry And arts, his judgement was the sculptor’s nail; But, like the royal Dane of Shakespeare wrought, One by himself, not of a class or kind: Like to himself alone and no one else. There was within him such repose on Truth, Absence of self, such heart-controlling fear, I feel that, had he lived, he had not been The sport of his own sails, or popular winds That he had courted for our object’s sake. Men hurry to and fro; but he the while Hath found the Haven where he fain would be.’

From ‘CARDINAL NEWMAN,’ by RICHARD H. HUTTON. London: Methuen & Co., 1891. [English Leaders of Religion.]

[By the kind permission of the executors of Mr. Hutton, and of Messrs. Methuen & Co.]

‘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 are a few singularly beautiful lines, added by Newman after Hurrell Froude’s death, to the exquisite poem called “Separation of Friends,” written in 1833; and these sufficiently prove the tenderness of Newman’s friendship for Hurrell Froude, and the intimacy of the relation between them. The poem, as it was first written, on the separation of friends caused by death, ran thus:

‘“Do not their souls, who neath the altar wait Until their second birth, The gift of patience need, as separate From their first friends of earth? Not that earth’s blessings are not all outshone By Eden’s angel flame, But that earth knows not that the dead has won That crown which was his aim. For when he left it, ’twas a twilight scene About his silent bier, A breathless struggle Faith and Sight between, And Hope and sacred Fear. Fear startled at his pains and dreary end, Hope raised her chalice high; And the twin-sisters still his shade attend, Viewed in the mourner’s eye. So, day by day, for him, from earth ascends As dew in summer even, The speechless intercession of his friends, Towards the azure heaven.”

‘This was an abrupt close. Nearly three years later, it appeared that the true close had but been reserved till the friend with whom, in his illness, Newman had been travelling, had left him alone here to offer this “speechless intercession” on behalf of him who had departed. Then, after Froude’s death on February 28, 1836, Newman added the final lines:

‘“Ah, dearest! with a word he could dispel All questioning, and raise Our hearts to rapture, whispering all was well, And turning prayer to praise. And other secrets, too, he could declare, By patterns all divine, His earthly creed retouching here and there, And deepening every line. Dearest! he longs to speak, as I to know, And yet we both refrain. It were not good: a little doubt, below, And all will soon be plain.”

‘Such was Newman’s feeling for the friend (already suffering from the commencement of the consumption of which he died three years later) with whom he visited the Mediterranean between December, 1832, and April, 1833, when they separated at Rome…. They visited Ithaca, but in his poems written “off Ithaca” Newman never mentions the name of Ulysses, though in passing Lisbon he had recalled that strong pagan figure, in the lines which he headed “The Isles of the Sirens”:

‘“Cease, stranger, cease those piercing notes, The craft of siren choirs; Hush the seductive voice that floats Upon the languid wires.

Music’s ethereal fire was given Not to dissolve our clay, But draw Promethean beams from heaven, And purge the dross away.

Weak self, with thee the mischief lies! Those throbs a tale disclose: Nor age nor trial has made wise The man of many woes.”

‘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.’

From ‘THE ANGLICAN REVIVAL,’ by J. H. OVERTON, D.D., Rector of Epworth and Canon of Lincoln. London: Blackie & Son, 1897.

[By the kind permission of Messrs. Blackie & Son.]

‘The fact is that [in 1833] Rose, Palmer, and perhaps Perceval on the one hand, Froude, Keble, and Newman on the other, represented, not exactly two different parties, but two different classes of mind. The former group were essentially conservative: they did not share the dissatisfaction with the Church as it was, which was so strongly felt by Keble, Newman, and Froude; they only desired to see it freed from what they regarded as the oppression of the State. They were very different types of men, Rose representing the brilliant and fascinating, Palmer the learned, and Perceval the aristocratic or territorial element. But none of them was prepared to follow what Newman calls the “go-ahead” course, for which he and Froude were ready, and from which Keble was not at all averse…. As a matter of fact, the Movement was carried on by the latter, not by the former group.

‘… Pusey’s adherence was an instance of the right man coming in just at the right time. The public had now [1835] been fairly aroused; they had had sufficiently impressed upon them the duty of maintaining Church principles; they had now a right to demand that those principles should be fully and definitely explained to them in detail. The time for short, stirring appeals was over; the time for solid, sober treatises on divinity had arrived…. [Pusey’s] mild and conciliatory spirit introduced a healing element into the Movement which was certainly needed. The “fierceness” (to use his own expression) of Newman, and especially of Newman when “kept up to the mark by Froude,”[361] had the very natural effect of raising opposition; and even in Keble, the gentle, humble Keble, there was a strong spice, if not exactly of fierceness, yet of a tendency to give vent to the most unpopular sentiments in the most uncompromising way, without the slightest attempt to tone them down. Pusey, again, was far more apt to recognise two sides of a question than was Keble, Newman, or Froude…. The Movement gained Pusey, and lost Hurrell Froude, almost at the same time. When Pusey joined the party, Froude was practically a dying man; and in February 28, 1836, to the infinite regret of his many friends, he died at his native Dartington. With Froude passed away the most daring and “go-ahead” spirit connected with the whole Movement. Newman was enthusiastic, but Froude was far more so; Newman waged war against the complacency which was so characteristic of the old Church party, but Froude was still more exasperated against it; Newman was not over-cautious in his invectives against the fallacies and prejudices of the age, but Froude was ten times less so. With an intense earnestness and thoroughness of conviction, with a fiery energy which would ride over anything, with a courage which sometimes amounted to audacity, and with an irresistibly attractive personality, there is no saying what would have happened if his short life had been prolonged! But it is not a very profitable speculation to conjecture what might have been. Suffice it to say that in one respect the influence of Froude was likely to have had exactly the opposite effect to that of Pusey. The one seemed, of all men, the most calculated to trouble the waters, the other, to pour oil upon them; and the fact that Froude dropped out just when Pusey began to make his influence felt, seemed to promise that henceforth the Movement would create less hostility. After events, however, proved that this was not to be the case; and the causes are not far to seek….

‘One of the most startling … events was the appearance, in 1838, of the first series of Froude’s _Remains_, edited by Keble and Newman jointly. It is not surprising that this publication raised a violent outcry: it gave to the world the off-hand utterances of a young enthusiast whose opinions would probably have toned down with age, but were here expressed with all the recklessness of inexperience, and were only intended, in the first instance, to be read by sympathetic friends.

‘His views on the English Reformation and Reformers were sufficiently startling. “The present Church system is an incubus upon the country”; “the Reformation was a limb badly set: it must be broken again in order to be righted”; the English Reformers generally were “a set of men with whom [I wish] to have less and less to do”; Jewel, in

## particular, was “an irreverent Dissenter”; Latimer, “a Martyr somewhat

in the Bulteel line.” One can conceive the horror with which such sentiments would be read by men with whom “our happy Establishment in Church and State,” “our glorious Reformation,” and “our martyred Reformers” were almost articles of faith!

‘It has been thought that the Editors miscalculated the effect which the book would produce; but the theory is not very complimentary to their judgement. Surely must they have known that the glamour of Froude’s personality would not affect the general, still less the hostile, reader (and his name was legion), who would greedily seize upon any handle which could be turned, as Froude could so easily be, against the Movement. Moreover, how does it agree with the fact that when they found out their mistake, they nevertheless published in the following year, 1839, a second series as _outré_ as the first? And this they introduced with a Preface pointing out how Froude’s sagacity had anticipated all the improvements that had taken place, and representing him, not as a disturber of the people, but as a prophet indeed. This Preface is said to have been chiefly the work of Keble, and it is highly characteristic of the man, though not of the popular conception of him: for Keble was always for the bold course.

‘The other Editor, Newman, writing to his friend Frederic Rogers in July, 1837, gives six reasons why Froude’s private letters should be published; and to his Co-editor he writes at the same time: “We have often said the Movement must be enthusiastic. Now here is a man fitted above all others to kindle enthusiasm.” May it not have been that both Editors put forth the _Remains_ with their eyes perfectly wide open as to what the result would be? that they were not unwilling the _enfant terrible_ of the Movement should say his say, and startle the public? The public was startled: it took in all seriousness the audacious dicta of Froude as if they were stamped with the approval of the whole party, which it denounced with increased vigour, accordingly.

‘It is impossible to help connecting with the publication of Froude’s _Remains_ the starting of that project which gave to Oxford one of the most beautiful of its many beautiful monuments, the “Martyrs’ Memorial,” opposite Balliol College, on the spot on which Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer had been burnt.[362] The greatest offence of Froude was that he had spoken disparagingly of the English Reformers generally, and of these men in particular. The project of the Memorial originated in a small meeting held towards the close of 1838, at Oriel, in the rooms of Mr. Golightly, who, having begun as a friend of the Movement, had soon become its bitterest and most persistent foe. Everybody seems to have connected the Memorial with the _Remains_; but there was some division of opinion as to the course which should be pursued. Keble and Newman were from the first opposed to the project, and so were moderate men like Palmer and Benjamin Harrison. But Hook and S. Wilberforce were in favour, and so, strange to say, was Pusey, to a certain extent, at first, until he was persuaded otherwise by Keble and Newman…. Keble writes to Pusey … “I am not at all prepared to express a public dissent from Froude in his opinion of the Reformers as a party.” On the other hand, S. Wilberforce writes to Hook, regretting that “our good Oxford friends run down Reformers, and will not subscribe to the Martyrs’ Memorial.” It was said of the Memorial, “it will be a good cut against Newman”: but it was not a cut which made him smart.’

From ‘ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS,’ BY NICHOLAS CARDINAL WISEMAN. London: Dolman, 1853, 3 vols.[363]

[By kind permission of the Executors of His Eminence Cardinal Vaughan.]

‘It is not often that the leaders of opinions let the public into a view of their secret counsels and feelings; but when they do, we think it does credit to the uprightness and sincerity of their intentions…. Nay, the more unreservedly the human weaknesses of the individuals are revealed, and the more the feeling is expressed that with their exposure, or in spite of it, their cause will succeed, the more highly we shall estimate their confidence in the correctness of their views, and the disinterestedness of their zeal in propagating them. These reflections have been suggested to us by the perusal of Mr. Froude’s _Remains_. He was, while living, one of the most enthusiastic members of the theological school from which the _Tracts for the Times_ have emanated. He died in 1836, having attained only the age of thirty-three;[364] and was thus prevented from arriving at that full maturity of religious ideas which was evidently preparing in his mind, and bearing him onwards towards the perception of Catholic truths.

‘A preface of twenty-two pages betrays the Editors’ anxiety to repel a twofold charge: one against themselves, the other against their deceased friend…. When one whose noble and public proofs of great virtue far outweigh the errors of youth, or whose public reputation makes his example, when evil, a warning; and when repentant, a reparation and an encouragement,――when one, in short, like St. Augustine, boldly but humbly reveals to the eyes of the Church the wretchedness of his early sinful life, we admire, in awe, the strange manifestation of a sublime spirit of Christian virtue, and we bless the Divine Wisdom that hath caused it to be vouchsafed to us. But the struggles of one who has not compensated his weaknesses by any noble results, who withdraws from our sight a combatant, and not a victor; who only presents us the spectacle of a frail nature, such as we all may have, wrestling with daily and anxious trials, and not overcoming them; (these, too, not spontaneously exhibited, but transferred from the closet to the public arena)――have neither the grandeur nor the instruction of the other lesson. Still, there may be reasons unknown to us who are not in the secrets of the party, to justify, certainly in their own eyes, this sacrifice of private feeling to a sense of public utility…. [The Editors] would have materially strengthened their reasoning by the following passage in [Mr. Froude’s] Letters to Friends: “There was a passage in a letter I have just received from my father, which 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 were dead, why should I be cut off from the privilege of helping on the Good Cause? I don’t know what money I have 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_.” From these words, it appears that the author did contemplate his power of doing good to the cause wherein he was so ardently engaged, even after his death.

‘The censure of their friend which the Editors foresee, is that which forms their bugbear in all their theological researches: that of approaching too near the Catholic, or, as they call it, Romanist doctrines. But we must express our conviction that the Editors have not done much credit to their friend by the manner in which they have thought it right to shield his memory from the charge. It consists in a careful collection of some of the most hasty, unhandsome, and decidedly unreasonable judgements and opinions of the author, respecting chiefly what he saw in his travels…. We think we are justified in saying that proof of Mr. Froude’s disinclination to Catholicity must have been very scarce, to have led the Editors to bring together these superficial observations made during a brief residence in a Catholic city[365] not generally reputed the most edifying in its conduct! These, however, will not bear comparison with the growing and expanding tendency of his mind towards everything Catholic….

‘… The extracts from [his] Journal present us a picture at once pleasing and distressing, of a mind yearning after interior perfection, yet at a loss about the means of attaining it; embarked on an ocean of good desires, but without stars or compass by which to steer its course. The minute scrutiny into the motives of his actions, the distress occasioned by discovering his relapses into faults which most would overlook, show a sensitiveness of conscience in the youthful writer, far more honourable to him, and far more interesting to us, than abilities of a much higher order than what he really possessed could ever have appeared…. How far it may be advisable to commit to paper, even for personal benefit, these investigations of our most secret tribunal, we have considerable doubt; and instructive as is their record in the case before us, in nothing is it more so than in the proof it gives us of the necessity of guidance for the conscience and heart such as the institutions of the Catholic Church alone provide. In the account which he gives of his own infirmities, of his almost fruitless attempts to subdue them, and of the pain and anxiety produced by his solitary struggles, he presents a picture familiar to the experienced eye of any spiritual director in our Church, and a state fully described and prescribed for by the numerous writers whom we possess upon the inward life and the direction of consciences. Many are they who are tossed in the same billows of secret tribulation, many are they who are bewildered in the same mazes of mental perplexity; but they have not at least the additional horrors of darkness and night. Ere they can sink, a hand is stretched out, if they will only grasp it. The troubles and trials which haunt minds constituted as Mr. Froude’s, many a skilful guide would have shown him to be mere illusive phantoms that only serve to turn the attention away from serious dangers, or from solid good: snares cast by a restlessness of spirit upon the path, to entangle the feet that tread it…. The consequence of all his irregular and undirected austerity, into which, with youthful eagerness, he rushed, was, that instead of deriving thence vigour of thought, and closer intimacy with some spiritual feelings, his spirit, on the contrary, flagged and at length grew weary, and so fell into that despondency which failure will produce in sensitive minds. This discouragement is visible in many parts of his Journal…. In fact, Mr. Froude discovered that most important principle, that obedience to the ordinances of authority gives the great merit to the first degrees of penitential works, those which belong to ordinary Christians: such, that is, as have not reached the perfection of ascetic life…. While he seems so taken up, through his Journals, with examination of his fasts and austerities, we miss from his pages those cheerful views of religion which result from confidence and love, from the consciousness of a strong will to do [God] service, and an humble reliance on His mercy which will measure that, rather than our success. What snatches there are of prayer, bear more the character of one sinking under the fatigue of foiled attempts, and troubled with anxiety from hopelessness of success, than of a young and trusting mind that presses forward to a work it deems glorious: the work of God and His religion….

‘We certainly think that his ardent way, more perhaps of expressing himself than of feeling, leads him often to a harsh and reckless manner of speaking of others, that must give an unfavourable impression regarding his character, which we have every reason to believe was amiable and gentle. Still, there are so many fine points about him: so much distrust of himself, blended with no inconsiderable powers of genius; so much independence of thought, coupled with deference to the sentiments of others, those he esteemed more learned or more virtuous than himself; so much lightness of spirit, united to such seriousness of mind upon religious truths;――in fine, so earnest and sincere a desire to improve and perfect himself, that our feelings lead us to pass lightly over his faults, and dwell with pleasure upon his finer qualities. If we have dilated somewhat upon the former, it has been that we considered them the result of the system to which he was by education attached, and which is alone accountable for them.

‘As, however, he increased in years, his mind began to open to the defects and wants of that system, and boldly to conceive the necessity of correcting them. In this he ran manifestly before his fellows, and seems only to have been prevented by his premature death from reaching the goal of Catholic Unity…. First, as to the Blessed Eucharist, we find him early desirous of going beyond the timid phraseology of his party, and attributing to the priesthood such power as the Catholic Church alone claims…. In 1835, he condemns what he calls the Protestant doctrine of the Eucharist in strong terms. These are his words: “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.”[366] Still more, writing to the author of _The Christian Year_, he blames him for denying that Christ is in the hands of the priest or the receiver, as well as in his heart.[367] These passages show how far prepared he was to outstrip his friends in approximation to Catholic doctrines and Catholic expressions…. The state of celibacy, and with it the monastic life, seems also to have been an object of his admiration…. The last fragment published of his attests how anxiously, how candidly, and how powerfully his mind was at work with the great subject [of Church authority], the hinge on which the differences between us and these new divines may be justly said to turn. This piece[368] is a letter dated Jan. 27, 1836, a month before his death; and as his last illness was of some weeks’ duration, this document may be considered as his theological will and testament, the last declaration of his yet unbroken mind…. After this, what more can we desire in proof of what we asserted at the beginning of this article, that these _Remains_ prove Mr. Froude’s mind to have been gradually discovering more extensive and more accurate views of religious truths and the principles of Faith, with such steady and constant growth as gives us every reason to believe that longer life alone was wanting, to see him take the salutary resolve to embrace the conclusions of his theories to their fullest legitimate extent? While the writings of the new divines seem to represent their theories as perfectly formed, and their views quite fixed, the extracts we have just made show them to be but the shifting and unsettled opinions of men who are yet discovering errors in what they have formerly believed, and seeking further evidence of what they shall henceforth hold. Our concluding extract shall give fuller evidence of this fact: it is a letter to Mr. Newman, dated All Saints’ Day, 1835. “Before I finish this, I must enter another protest against your cursing and swearing at the end of the [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 Faith.”[369]

‘With this passage we close Mr. Froude’s _Remains_. Peace be to him! is our parting salutation. The hope which an Ambrose expressed for a Valentinian,[370] who died yet a Catechumen, we willingly will hold of him. His ardent desires were with the Truth; his heart was not a stranger to its love. He was one, we firmly believe, whom no sordid views, or fear of men’s tongues, would have deterred from avowing his full convictions, and embracing their consequences, had time and opportunity been vouchsafed him for a longer and closer search. He is another instance of the same mysterious Providence which guided a Grotius and a Leibnitz to the threshold of Truth, but allowed them not the time to step within it, into the hallowed precincts of God’s Visible Church.’[371]

From ‘THE ANGLICAN CAREER OF CARDINAL NEWMAN,’ BY EDWIN A. ABBOTT. London: Macmillan & Co., 1892.

[By the kind permission of Dr. Abbott and of Messrs. Macmillan & Co.]

‘Newman was now [1826] on the point of making a new friend who would do more than any other human being, perhaps more than any other single external influence, to direct his course, or to determine its final direction. “Bye-the-bye,” says Newman to his mother, telling her of the election to the Oriel Fellowship, March 31, 1826, “I have not told you the name of the other successful candidate: Froude of Oriel. We were in grave deliberation till near two this morning…. Froude is one of the acutest and clearest and deepest men in the memory of man.” Clearly, Froude had had, not only Newman’s vote, but also his strenuous advocacy in that prolonged deliberation. And it was no bad preparation for the reception of Froude’s influence into Newman’s heart, that the latter should thus have favoured and befriended him…. What took Newman, in Froude, was his originality and suggestiveness, his hatred of shams, his downright and aggressive earnestness, and perhaps, too, some glimpse of what was afterwards revealed in him: an anxious, ascetic, and almost superstitious aspiration after a mediæval type of holiness…. There were walks that Froude tells us of, in which the two talked a good deal together. Froude complains that he allowed himself to say to Newman more than he intended, revealed too much, suffered himself to be drawn into argument, and was puzzled … but if the older beat the younger in argument, that would rather help than hinder the influence of the latter. Expert in logical fence, Newman could not help gaining victories which he disdained as soon as won; but Froude was effective in protests, and all the more with one who, most vulnerable when victorious, had just achieved a dialectical triumph.

* * * * *

‘… To get at Newman, a friend had to appeal to him through the imagination; … indeed, one of the friends whom we shall have before us, did actually, though indirectly, influence Newman’s action at so many points in his career that if we omitted a sketch of him here, we should have to be constantly digressing for explanations afterwards. The three friends are: Edward Bouverie Pusey, John Keble, and, as a climax in respect of influence, Richard Hurrell Froude…. Froude’s opinions, [Newman] says, arrested him, even when they did not gain his consent…. In all these beliefs [enumerated in the _Apologia_] Froude certainly preceded, and evidence will hereafter clearly prove that he also led, the friend who had been gradually disengaging himself from the Evangelical School. Even in other matters where, at first, Newman and he differed, Newman, in the end, came round to him. Froude was “powerfully drawn to the Mediæval Church,” Newman to the Primitive; but the Mediæval finally triumphed. He set no great store on theological detail, nor on the writings of the Fathers, but “took an eager courageous view of things as a whole.”[372] Omit “courageous,” perhaps also the “eager,” and the sentence will describe the nature of Newman’s final decision. He, too, took “things as a whole”: it was the personified majesty of the vision of Rome that ultimately took him captive. Recognising the difficulty of enumerating all the additions to his creed which Newman derived from a friend to whom he owed so much, the _Apologia_ selects four: admiration for Rome, dislike of the Reformation, devotion to the Blessed Virgin, belief in the Real Presence. But there is perhaps not one in the long list of Froude’s other opinions [on sacerdotal power, ecclesiastical liberty, acceptance of tradition, the intrinsic excellence of virginity, miraculous interferences, delight in the Saints, and the principle of penance and mortification: see the passage in the _Apologia_] in which his influence on Newman is not perceptible. If not first planted, some of them were at all events “fixed deep,” and firmly rooted, by the friend who had previously received them. If, therefore, we would understand Newman’s development, we should spare no trouble in attempting to understand that one of all his friends who is shown by evidence, direct and indirect, to have contributed most to it. For this purpose all the more pains are needed, because the very friends who loved him best dealt somewhat hardly with his reputation. In his literary _Remains_, they gave to the world the most secret records of his private life, in which, besides hinting at deeper “vilenesses,” he sets down in detail, with unflinching severity, if not with exaggeration, the very smallest infirmities of will and deed. The _Apologia_ speaks of “the gentleness and tenderness of nature, the playfulness, the free elastic force and graceful versatility of mind, and the patient winning considerateness in discussion which endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart”; and other testimony enables us to believe that in the small circle of those who knew him well, he was really such as he is there described; but if we are to judge from his _Remains_, it is a question whether this gentleness and considerateness reached far beyond the close company of those who were struggling for the religious cause which he had at heart.

‘… The Journal begins in the year 1826, when he was elected to the Oriel Fellowship. The second line is as follows: “Feb. 1, Oxford. All my associations here are bad, and I can hardly shake them off.” He determines to wrestle with his conceit, affectation, wandering of mind, lassitude…. Then follows an allusion which Newman, devoted by a kind of inward vow to celibacy since the age of sixteen, would well understand: “The consciousness of having capacities for happiness, with no objects to gratify them, seems to grow upon me. Lord, have mercy upon me.” This is the mood which he elsewhere describes to Newman as “sawney”: natural at times to those who are under a kind of vow to serve a cause, without domestic distractions or encumbrances.

‘The problem exhibited in these pages … is the old but never antiquated one: “How to keep the human machine in order.” Roughly speaking, we may say that there are two solutions. Men can be delivered from the beast within them by love, or by fear. The second may be called no deliverance at all by those who have a keen appreciation of the first, but it is deliverance, of a sort; and Froude’s Journal shows us a man of immense strength of will: of acute intellect, and of high imaginations; restless and masterful almost to the extent of tyrannical malignity, in his youth; conscious of grievous lapses in the past and of something (he hardly knew what) terribly wanting in his present moral condition; now at last goaded by bitter remorse, and urged by the pressure of new responsibilities, to reform his corrupt nature, and attempting to work out his salvation through an asceticism dictated, at first, by something like terror…. In 1826, Froude had sent a letter to Keble, curiously tingeing with his own gloom the language of the Psalmist, who prays to be hidden under the “shadow of the wings” of the divine Protection: he speaks of God as a Being whose presence is mainly manifested by control, and by a holy “terror”:

‘“Lord of the World, Almighty King! Thy shadow resteth over all, Or where the Saints thy terrors sing, Or where the waves obey Thy call.”

‘… Froude’s religion, then, so far as it depended upon his conception of God, was a religion of almost unmixed fear. So far as it was of something better, it was purified, first, by a love and admiration for “the holy men of old,” such as the founders of the Oxford Colleges, in whose steps, after his election to his Fellowship, he aspired to tread; secondly, by his affection for Keble, for whom, in the prayer written at the same time, he thanks God, as one who had convinced him of the error of his ways, and in whose presence he tasted happiness; but above all, by his devotion to his mother, in whose recollection he found a consciousness of that blessedness which he had been taught to look for in the presence of Saints and Angels. These were feelings which were better than his religion, and which, if they could have developed and grown with the latter, might have delivered it from fears, and have converted it into a source of peace as well as of

## activity: but whether from the irremediable taint of the past, or

owing to influence that proved too strong for Keble’s, this growth did not go on.

‘Newman … taught at an early period that self-knowledge is the basis of all religious knowledge. Whether Froude adopted or originated this doctrine, it must have stimulated his fears: for it was a proverb with him that “everyone may know worse of himself than he possibly can of Charles the Second.” In less than six months after the thanksgiving recorded above, we find him protesting (January 10, 1827) that he dares not now utter the prayers of wise and holy men, and that God has affrighted him with hideous dreams, and disquieted him with perpetual mortifications…. It is to Keble that he owes his release, for how long he knows not, from the misery in which he has been recently bound. At the same time Keble advises him to give up his ascetic self-denial, and Froude acquiesces. Though it had the colour of humility, it now appears to him to have been in reality the food of pride: self-imposed, it seems to him “quite different from imposed by the Church.” What sort of self-denials they were, and what Froude’s self-introspection implied, the reader ought to be informed for two reasons: first, because they show the fierce determination and almost bitter self-hatred with which the young man turned against himself, in his resolution to suppress his own egotism and conceit; and secondly, because Newman and Keble (or perhaps Keble instigated by Newman), thought it worth while to record the minutest of these details, and spoke of the Journal as a most valuable contribution to Tractarian literature. Froude sets down, for example, (and they print!) that he was ashamed, on one occasion, to have it known that he had no gloves; that he was ashamed, on another, that he had muddy trousers (although he would not go to the length of concealing them); that he was pleased, on another, when there was no Evening Prayer; that he felt an impulse of pleasure on finding that W. was not at Chapel one morning; that he ostentatiously hinted to S. that he got up at six o’clock; that he read affectedly in evening Chapel; that he felt an inclination to make remarks with a view to showing how much he had thought upon serious subjects; and that once, after accidentally breaking one of W.’s windows, he felt a disposition to “sneak away.” … He seriously argues the pros and cons (“bothering” himself about it for three days), concerning the purchase of a great-coat. On the one side, there is the fact that he “wants,” _i.e._, needs it, which one would have thought would have been conclusive; but against this he sets the fact that he “wishes” it; and therefore it will be well to deny himself the satisfaction…. By his own confession, he occasionally made himself stupid and sleepy through his ascetic habits. But to the last he retained his admiration for them, at all events when they were imposed by external authority….

‘Why did the Editors of Froude’s _Remains_ give to the world these extraordinary confessions?… If, indeed, Froude had taken Keble’s advice, they could not thus have made his secrets the property of posterity; for he had advised his pupil not only to give up his self-imposed asceticisms, but also to burn his confessions. But this advice was given in 1826; whereas the _Remains_ were published in 1838. Are we wrong in inferring that during this interval, Keble may have been pushed forward by Newman his Co-editor, who taught that all religious knowledge must be based on self-knowledge? From the Letters, this seems probable…. It follows, at once, that there is very little thankfulness in Froude’s form of Christianity. The visible world seemed so full of delusion, mockery, and temptation, that a hostile or ironical attitude towards it was the only one possible. “This irony,” says James Mozley, “arose from that peculiar mode in which Froude viewed all earthly things, himself and all that was dear to him not excepted.” What was this peculiar mode? To define it briefly would be difficult. It must have recognised something of reality and goodness in those friends and allies towards whom his heart went out, and with whom he was ready to labour, to the end, for what he considered the “Truth,” freely placing his fortune, his faculties, and his last breath, at their disposal. But still, it was not the “mode” of St. Paul, nor of Keble; it was more like, though not quite like, that of Newman. It was certainly not the “mode” of the author who wrote that “God giveth us all things richly to enjoy.” Indeed, “irony” is perhaps hardly the right word to use of the superficial self-mockery, but more profound self-hatred and self-contempt, approaching sometimes to despair, with which, in some of his self-introspective moods, Froude smites and rends himself, and his faults; yes, and his resolves to correct his faults, sometimes even pouring scorn upon himself for writing down his own good resolutions, and for thinking well of himself, in the act of doing it. “The chief reason,” he says, “for my being interested in any object, is the fact that I happen to be pursuing it,” “nor can I look with serious feeling on the miseries of anyone but my own. The blight of God is on me for my selfish life.” … Is “irony” a term quite strong enough to denote this savage, sarcastic self-laceration, which, if persisted in, would result in moral and spiritual suicide? So far, it would seem that the two friends resembled each other in almost every one of their principles of religious thought. A religion of fear; a profound sense of an awful Holiness; an absence of general loving-kindness and human-heartedness; a vast and almost servile respect for power as power; an inclination to asceticism, in the older of the two as a test of sincerity, but in the younger, rather as a means of suppressing the passions; a dread of wilfulness, and a rooted suspicion of self,――these feelings appear to have been, in both, so powerful and original, that whatever influence either might exert upon the other would result, not in changing, but in confirming and hardening; or at most, in suggesting some new application of the theories common to both.

‘We now pass to the only principle in which the two seem first to have differed, but ultimately to have agreed. This principle (if it may be so called) is that of tact or management, especially in the diffusion, colouring, and sometimes in the reservation or suppression, of religious doctrine, with a view to surmounting prejudice and instilling truth. To this, Newman (though not the first to use the word in this sense) gave the name of “economy.” There are many reasons for concluding that in this one respect Froude was passive, a simple recipient from Newman…. Froude anticipated, and endeavoured to develop precipitately, the logical results, both of the principles which they held in common, and of those which he instilled into his friend, and also of this particular principle which alone his friend seems to have instilled into him. Such a development may be often noticed, when a strong-willed man who sees only one side of a question, takes up a plan invented by another who sees many. The inventor may be moderate; the adopter carries the invention to excess. Froude was at that time (1834) dragging Newman onwards towards Roman doctrine; but he may have submitted to learn from Newman the best method of diffusing it. He did not like the method, and therefore he called it by bad names, such as “undermining,” “poisoning,” and the like….

‘Newman’s formal usual doctrine [was] that as we cannot be sure about our own salvation, so neither can we about that of others; that we have enough to do with thinking and fearing about our own eternal concerns; that, as before God, no man can help another, for we must not only die alone but live alone, nor can there be any spiritual contact between soul and soul, in this life. Yet at least on one occasion his feelings were too strong for his dogma. When Froude drew near to death, Newman refused to fear for his sake. With him in his mind, he would not use his favourite metaphor of “grovelling worms,” to describe the relation between the human and the divine. Casting away all reserve, all doubts, and all terrors, he shoots up to a Miltonic height, in the confidence that God cannot waste this immortal soul which He has made. Thus he writes to Froude himself:

‘“It made me think how many posts there are in His kingdom, how many offices, Who says to one Do this, and he doeth it. 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.”[373]

‘The same passionate conviction, based not upon Authority or upon Scripture, but upon his own sense of what must be right, finds expression also in a sermon written about the same time.[374]

‘“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. Yea, doubtless they are keeping up the perpetual chant in the Shrine above, praying and praising God day and night in His Temple like Moses upon the mount, while Joshua and his host fight with Amalek.”

‘… Deprived of Froude, and now of his mother, with one sister married, and the other to be married a few months afterwards, Newman must have felt alone indeed. How much this feeling of communion with the departed had been growing in Newman may be seen from the only two poems of 1835[375] (the last until we come to the Roman period), both of which bring before us the intercession of the dead for the living. There can be no doubt whose voice Newman was henceforth to hear most distinctly amid all the earthly din and uproar of the conflict of the _Tracts_: it was that of the man whose Breviary (assigned to him by a chance utterance of some friend, which he accepted as a message from Heaven) lay always on his study table, destined to lie there for half a century; to the possession of which he attached such importance, that besides minutely describing the incident in the _Apologia_, he records it in the _Letters_, along with his mother’s death, as one of nine important events of this critical year: “My knowing and using the Breviary.”[376]

‘Froude (not Froude’s opinions, but Froude himself, or his personality, Froude first, living, and then, as a posthumous influence, still more powerful after death), did more than any other external thing to make Newman what he became, and to shape, through Newman, the Tractarian Movement. Some of Newman’s most important steps dated from the year of their intimacy. It was in 1829 that the two became close friends: Newman the non-political, and Froude the High Tory…. _A priori_, we ought to be prepared to believe that Froude pushed Newman on. Froude was a High Churchman from the first, with an inclination towards the Mediæval Church, and from this he never swerved: Newman was an Evangelical, extricating himself from Evangelicalism. The former had no doubts; the latter was at that time perpetually doubting. How could it be otherwise than natural that the former should take the lead of the latter?

‘… Froude is not quite fairly, or at least fully, represented in the _Remains_. The Journal, and even the Letters, fail, perhaps, to express some latent feeling which might have softened apparent harshness. To those who knew him well, his words were interpreted by his personality, which all concur in describing as bright, graceful, and even “beautiful.” … It was this brilliant and graceful embodiment, in one so earnest, so ascetically strict, so clear-headed, and so confident, [one] of definite consistent imaginations about spiritual things (which imaginations Newman describes as “intellectual principles”) that first arrested, and ultimately captivated the older friend, who was at first disposed to smile at, even while admiring, the erratic, “sillyish,” “red-hot” High Churchman….

‘… Fundamentally agreeing with Froude, from the first, in the principles of religious fear, obedience, and self-distrust, Newman differed from him only in the expression and application of them; and on these points Froude’s mind was settled while Newman’s was still in flux. No wonder that, by degrees, Newman lost confidence in any utterance of his own unless Froude first stamped it with his approval. Did not Froude always take the lead, experimenting, as it were, on himself? And had not Newman repeatedly to confess that Froude was right, and he himself wrong? One reason for this was, that Froude, being of an æsthetic bent, instinctively turned from the Primitive Church, which was, to him, an affair of books, and of which he knew very little, to the Mediæval Church, with which he was in complete harmony, or to the Anglican Nonjurors, about whom he had some sympathetic knowledge. This gave to his notions a naturalness and a practicableness in which Newman’s were deficient. For this, and for other reasons, Froude seemed to be a seer in regions where Newman was only a groper; and so, in time, the latter came naturally not only to depend on the former, but also to avow his dependence so far as to declare his unwillingness to commit himself to anything definite till the man who could see had given it his imprimatur. Still, the brighter and more pleasing side of Froude’s character must not allow us to forget that his search after holiness implied not only something bordering on abjectness towards God, but also strife on earth, and the appearance of ill-will towards a great multitude of men. These qualities explain in part the secret of his power over Newman, who would not have allowed himself to be influenced by any but a detached soul holding aloof from all the world, and especially, perhaps, from the rabble, that “knoweth not the law.” But Froude was by far the more combative of the two, and appears to have acted on Newman, as on Keble, in the way of an inciting cause, or, to use his own metaphor, a “poker.”

‘We find here depicted [in the _Remains_] a Christian in whose most secret records, self-examinations and prayers, there appears scarcely any mention of Christ as a Person, and very little trace of any love of Christ (who hardly appears at all in them except in some reference to the sacramental Body and Blood); yet one who with all his heart and soul is seeking after that salvation which he supposes to be derivable from Christ’s Church; a man who obstinately detested, first in himself, then in others, the least vestige of affectation, cant, and hypocrisy: who spoke what he meant, as he meant it, and would always have gone, if his friends had allowed him, by the straightest of ways towards what he deemed the best of objects; a man, therefore, of an essentially truth-loving disposition, searching for Truth in all sincerity, but restricted by a “system” to a search within certain limits and through certain methods; shut out from the great world of men, and shut into the comparatively small world――not indeed, as Newman was, of books, but――of ecclesiastical traditions and imaginations; by nature, without any deep feeling of human-hearted sociality, without love of man as a fellow-man; by ecclesiasticism led rather to hate than to love; loving indeed a few, but only as a Spartan might love his companions-in-arms, loving those select spirits by whose side he could battle for the interests of “the Church.”

‘Such a picture, though “instructive,” is not pleasing. Yet those who feel inclined to ridicule, or to give way to disgust, as they peruse records of one whom they may be disposed to call the Minute Ascetic,――telling us of his shame at feeling ashamed that he had muddy trousers, or no gloves, or of his remorse for talking “flash,” or for not finding it easy to keep awake during a sermon, or for wanting to win sixpences at cards, will, if they read a little further, generally find other entries of a different character, as, for example, touching a certain offertory: “Intended £2: 10s., but thought I should be observed, so vowed £5 to the ―――― Mendicity Society.” We cannot smile at the man who, beneath under-statements conveyed half in slang, half in the language of Tractarian reserve, concealed a resolution not only to deny himself, but even, so far as he could, to suppress himself; who so hated his own individuality, and was so alarmed at the least touch of the self-will of genius within him, that he made it his “great ambition to become a humdrum.” Doomed to an early lingering death, and to leave others to continue the religious conflict in which he, of all the combatants, took the keenest and most passionate pleasure, he drops no word of self-commiseration and repining; and in the last month of his life, having contributed the proceeds of his Fellowship to the cause, he asks Newman to use it at his pleasure, and to make people infer that the money was being contributed by a large number of subscribers. “Spend away, my boy, and make a great fuss, as if your money came from a variety of sources.” If this was “economy,” it cannot, at all events, be scoffed at. Nothing is here for contempt, least of all from commonplace, compromising, half-way-halting semi-Christians or quasi-Christians. Manifestly, we have here a man: no mere word-bag or lump of sensations, but a being with a will, and with a controlling purpose; one who knew his own mind, and therefore had a right to lead those who did not know theirs; a fine specimen of the ecclesiastic militant, essentially a champion of holiness, though essentially, if charity be essential, not a Christian. Such was Richard Hurrell Froude, who, while living, influenced Newman much, and after his death, more; “re-touching the faith,” and “deepening every line,” not as Newman’s poem suggested, of himself, but of the poet, his survivor, his second self. When [Froude] died, a book of his, by what most people would call an accident, passed into Newman’s possession. Newman deemed it more than an accident. From that time forward it lay on his study table; and by it, though dead, his friend continued to speak to and to guide him: always in one direction. Rightly does Newman record as one among nine important events of the “cardinal” spring of 1836, “my knowing and using the Breviary.”’

‘ORIEL COLLEGE,’ by DAVID WATSON RANNIE, M.A. London: F. E. Robinson & Co., 1900.

[By kind permission of D. W. Rannie, Esq., M.A., and of Messrs. Robinson & Co.]

‘The chief aim of the Fellowship [at Oriel] was to test dialectical power; a chief occupation of the Common Room was to practise it…. Newman himself, who did more than any other man to divert the College from criticism to submission, has left a vivid picture … of his own argumentative _brusquerie_ in the congenial atmosphere of the Oriel Common Room. And it is noticeable, both in his case and that of Richard Hurrell Froude, his chief coadjutor in sowing the seed of the coming Tractarianism in College, that their method was essentially dialectic and modern, even though its effect, on themselves and others, was to lead them into “fierce thoughts” against the modern spirit and the modern trend of things. Pusey might bury himself in theology, and Keble might be the singer and sweet saint of a revived devotion; but Newman and Froude, even when the gates of authority seemed about to close on them for ever, were questioners and controversialists and gladiators, striving to rationalise reason out of its own supremacy.

* * * * *

‘In hurrying on the birth of the new issue, both at Oriel and beyond it, the influence of Richard Hurrell Froude was very great. We have seen that he was elected a Fellow of Oriel in 1826. He was an Oriel man throughout, and had taken a double second in 1824. He was the eldest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes, and the eldest of three eminent brothers, all Oriel men: William, the engineer, born in 1810, and James Anthony, the historian, born in 1818. Hurrell was born in 1803. Always delicate, he fell into consumption early in the Thirties, and died in 1836. But though his career was short and enfeebled, and though there is little of him in print but what the affectionate appreciation of his friends put there, it is certain that Hurrell Froude had in his College an influence both intense and peculiar, which radiated widely, and was answerable for some of the most marked phenomena of Tractarianism. Froude was perhaps the most convinced, the most outspoken, the most throughgoing Mediævalist among the young men who thought the Church of England in an unsatisfactory condition; and he had the incommunicable and inexplicable gift of great personal influence, which, in his case, took the most irresistible of all its forms: that of impressing others with his equal pre-eminence in intellect and character. While the other Tractarian propagandists of the immediate future were recoiling in fear and anxiety from the advance of the Liberal and Erastian tide, Froude was ardently counselling reaction, loudly and scornfully proclaiming the loveliness and rightness of at least a large number of Roman opinions and practices, and laying a zealous axe at the root of the Protestantism of the Church of England.

* * * * *

‘In fact, one can plainly see that the religious revival which was coming to the English Church was the real cause of the tutorial quarrel at Oriel in 1830. The Tutors had the new wine of it in their veins; they were the subjects of an enthusiasm which they were impelled to communicate, and which was intolerant of restraint; whilst the Provost [Hawkins] was, and was to remain, outside the range of the new ideas. In such a situation compromise was impracticable…. This change had certain important and well-marked results on the College. In the first place, it riveted the authority of Provost Hawkins, and made him for the rest of his life the dominant force in Oriel. In the second place, as the deprived Tutors remained Fellows and attached members of the College, it did nothing to reduce the spread of their influence in Common Room, and indirectly, in College generally, but rather tended to increase it, by opposition. Lastly, and most important of all, it dealt a blow to the intellectual prestige of the College, from which it never recovered during Hawkins’s long reign.’

From ‘THE OXFORD COUNTER-REFORMATION’ IN ‘SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT SUBJECTS.’ Series IV. By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1883.

[By the kind permission of Miss Froude and of Messrs. Longmans.]

‘… The last forty or fifty years will be memorable hereafter in the history of English opinion. The number of those who recollect the beginnings of the Oxford Revival is shrinking fast; and such of us as survive may usefully note down their personal recollections as a contribution, so far as it goes, to the general narrative. It is pleasant, too, to recall the figures of those who played the chief parts in the drama. If they had not been men of ability, they could not have produced the revolution that was brought about by them. Their personal characters were singularly interesting. Two of them were distinctly men of real genius. My own brother was, at starting, the foremost of the party; the flame, therefore, naturally burnt hot in my own immediate environment. The phrases and formulas of Anglo-Catholicism had become household words in our family, before I understood coherently what the stir and tumult was about.

‘We fancy that we are free agents. We are conscious of what we do; we are not conscious of the causes which make us do it; and therefore we imagine that the cause is in ourselves. The Oxford leaders believed that they were fighting against the spirit of the age. They were themselves most completely the creatures of their age. It was one of those periods when conservative England had been seized with a passion for reform. Parliament was to be reformed; the municipal institutions were to be reformed; there was to be an end of monopolies and privileges. The Constitution was to be cut in pieces and boiled in the Benthamite caldron, from which it was to emerge in immortal youth. In a reformed State there needed a reformed Church. My brother and his friends abhorred Bentham and all his works. The Establishment, in its existing state, was too weak to do battle with the new enemy. Protestantism was the chrysalis of Liberalism. The Church, therefore, was to be unprotestantised. The Reformation, my brother said, “was a bad setting of a broken limb.” The limb needed breaking a second time, and then it would be equal to its business.

‘My brother exaggerated the danger, and underestimated the strength, which existing institutions and customs possess, so long as they are left undisturbed. Before he and his friends undertook the process of reconstruction, the Church was perhaps in the healthiest condition which it had ever known…. The average English incumbent of fifty years ago was a man of private fortune, the younger brother of the landlord perhaps, and holding the family living; or it might be the landlord himself, his advowson being part of the estate. His professional duties were his services on Sunday, funerals and weddings on week-days, and visits, when needed, among the sick. In other respects he lived like his neighbours, distinguished from them only by a black coat and white neckcloth, and greater watchfulness over his words and

## actions. He farmed his own glebe; he kept horses; he shot and hunted

moderately, and mixed in general society. He was generally a magistrate; he attended public meetings, and his education enabled him to take a leading part in county business. His wife and daughters looked after the poor, taught in the Sunday school, and managed the penny clubs and clothing clubs. He himself was spoken of in the parish as “the master,” the person who was responsible for keeping order there, and who knew how to keep it. The labourers and the farmers looked up to him. The family in the “great house” could not look down upon him. If he was poor, it was still his pride to bring up his sons as gentlemen; and economies were cheerfully submitted to at home to give them a start in life at the University, or in the Army or Navy.

‘Our own household was a fair representative of the order. My father was Rector of the parish. He was Archdeacon, he was Justice of the Peace. He had a moderate fortune of his own, consisting chiefly in land, and he belonged, therefore, to the “landed interest.” Most of the magistrates’ work of the neighbourhood passed through his hands. If anything was amiss, it was his advice which was most sought after; and I remember his being called upon to lay a troublesome ghost. In his younger days, he had been a hard rider across country. His children knew him as a continually busy, useful man of the world, a learned and cultivated antiquary, and an accomplished artist. My brothers and I were excellently educated, and were sent to School and College. Our spiritual lessons did not go beyond the Catechism. We were told that our business in life was to work, and to make an honourable position for ourselves. About doctrine, Evangelical or Catholic, I do not think that in my early boyhood I ever heard a single word, in Church or out of it. The institution had drifted into the condition of what I should call moral health. It did not instruct us in mysteries, it did not teach us to make religion a special object of our thoughts; it taught us to use religion as a light by which to see our way along the road of duty. Without the sun, our eyes would be of no use to us; but if we look _at_ the sun we are simply dazzled, and can see neither it nor anything else. It is precisely the same with theological speculations. If the beacon lamp is shining, a man of healthy mind will not discuss the composition of the flame. Enough if it shows him how to steer, and keep clear of shoals and breakers. To this conception of the thing we had practically arrived. Doctrinal controversies were sleeping. People went to Church because they liked it, because they knew that they ought to go, and because it was the custom. They had received the Creeds from their fathers, and doubts about them had never crossed their minds. Christianity had wrought itself into the constitution of their natures. It was a necessary part of the existing order of the universe, as little to be debated about as the movements of the planets or the changes of the seasons.

‘Such the Church of England was, in the country districts, before the Tractarian Movement. It was not perfect, but it was doing its work satisfactorily. It is easier to alter than to improve, and the beginning of change, like the beginning of strife, is like the letting out of water. Jupiter, in Lessing’s fable, was invited to mend a fault in human nature. The fault was not denied, but Jupiter said that man was a piece of complicated machinery, and if he touched a part he might probably spoil the whole.

‘But a new era was upon us. The miraculous nineteenth century was coming of age, and all the world was to be remade…. History was reconstructed for us. I had learned, like other Protestant children, that the Pope was Antichrist, and that Gregory VII. HAD BEEN A SPECIAL REVELATION OF THAT BEING. I WAS NOW TAUGHT THAT GREGORY VII. was a Saint. I had been told to honour the Reformers. The Reformation became the Great Schism, Cranmer a traitor, and Latimer a vulgar ranter. Milton was a name of horror, and Charles I. was canonised and spoken of as the holy and blessed Martyr St. Charles. I asked once whether the Church of England was able properly to create a Saint? St. Charles was immediately pointed out to me. Similarly, we were to admire the Nonjurors, to speak of James III. instead of The Pretender; to look for Antichrist, not in the Pope, but in Whigs and revolutionists and all their works. Henry of Exeter,[377] so famous in those days, announced once, in my hearing, that the Court of Rome had regretted the Emancipation Act as a victory of Latitudinarianism. I suppose he believed what he was saying….

* * * * *

‘These were the views which we used to hear in our home-circle, when the Tracts were first beginning. We had been bred, all of us, Tories of the old school. This was Toryism in ecclesiastical costume. My brother was young, gifted, brilliant, and enthusiastic. No man is ever good for much who has not been carried off his feet by enthusiasm, between twenty and thirty; but it needs to be bridled and bitted; and my brother did not live to be taught the difference between fact and speculation. Taught it he would have been, if time had been allowed him. No one ever recognised facts more loyally than he, when once he saw them. This I am sure of, that when the intricacies of the situation pressed upon him, when it became clear to him that if his conception of the Church, and of its rights and position, was true at all, it was not true of the Church of England in which he was born, and that he must renounce his theory as visionary or join another Communion, he would not have “minimised” the Roman doctrines that they might be more easy for him to swallow, or have explained away plain propositions till they meant anything or nothing. Whether he would have swallowed them, or not, I cannot say; I was not eighteen when he died, and I do not so much as form an opinion about it; but his course, whatever it was, would have been direct and straightforward; he was a man far more than a theologian: and if he had gone, he would have gone with his whole heart and conscience, unassisted by subtleties and nice distinctions. It is, however, at least equally possible that he would not have gone at all….

* * * * *

‘The terminus, however, towards which he and his friends were moving, had not come in sight in my brother’s lifetime. He went forward, hesitating at nothing, taking the fences as they came, passing lightly over them all, and sweeping his friends along with him. He had the contempt of an intellectual aristocrat for private judgement and the rights of a man. In common things, a person was a fool who preferred his own judgement to that of an expert. Why, he asked, should it be wiser to follow private judgement in religion? As to rights, the right of wisdom was to rule, and the right of ignorance was to be ruled. But he belonged himself to the class whose business was to order rather than obey. If his own Bishop had interfered with him, his theory of episcopal authority would have been found inapplicable in that

## particular instance.

* * * * *

‘… The triumvirs who became a national force, and gave its real character to the Oxford Movement, were Keble, Pusey, and John Henry Newman. Newman himself was the moving power; the two others were powers also, but of inferior mental strength. Without the third, they would have been known as men of genius and learning; but their personal influence would have been limited to and have ended with themselves. Of Pusey I knew but little, and need not do more than mention him. Of Keble I can only venture to say a few words…. The inability to appreciate the force of arguments which he did not like saved him from Rome, but did not save him from Roman doctrine. It would, perhaps, have been better if he had left the Church of England, instead of remaining there to shelter behind his high authority a revolution in its teaching. The Mass has crept back among us, with which we thought we had done for ever, and the honourable name of Protestant, once our proudest distinction, has been made over to the Church of Scotland and the Dissenters.

‘Far different from Keble, from my brother, from Dr. Pusey, from all the rest, was the true chief of the Catholic revival――John Henry Newman. Compared with him, they were all but as ciphers, and he the indicating number.’

Controversy from ‘THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW’ AND ‘THE NINETEENTH CENTURY’ between Prof. E. A. FREEMAN AND MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[From _The Contemporary Review_ for March, 1878, xxxi., 822 _et seq._ By E. A. Freeman.][378]

‘… Mr. Froude, in his present attempt to paint the picture of the great men of the twelfth century, puts on the outward garb of one who has read and tested his materials, and has come to a critical judgement on what he has read and tested. But he happily leaves a little cranny open which enables us to look within. The very first words of Mr. Froude’s _Life and Times of Thomas Becket_ are enough to show us that the seeming historical inquiry is really designed as a manifesto against a theological party which once numbered its author among its members. To those who know the whole literature of the subject, it has a look more unpleasant still. Those whose study of twelfth-century history goes back to times when those who are now in their second half-century were young, will not fail to remember a time when the name of Froude reminded them of another, an earlier, and (I have no hesitation in saying) a worthier treatment of the same subject. And some of those who go back so far may be tempted to think that natural kindliness, if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the honest work of a long-deceased brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother’s almost forgotten fame…. [Mr. Froude] is controversial, something more than controversial, from the beginning. He undertakes the study, not to throw fresh light on the history of the twelfth century, but to deal a blow at a party in the nineteenth. His first words are: “Among the earliest efforts of the modern sacerdotal party in the Church of England was an attempt to re-establish the memory of the Martyr of Canterbury.” It is not everybody who reads this who will fully take in what is here meant. The first attempt made, within the memory of our own generation, to examine and compare the materials for the great controversy between King and Primate, was made by Richard Hurrell Froude of Oriel College: the Froude of the once famous _Remains_, the elder brother of the man who makes this somewhat unbrotherly reference. The elder Froude doubtless belonged to what the younger calls “the sacerdotal party.” His wish undoubtedly was “to re-establish the memory of the Martyr of Canterbury.” To those with whom historic truth comes foremost, and who have no special fanaticism, sacerdotal or anti-sacerdotal, the effort of a “sacerdotal party” to re-establish the memory of Thomas of Canterbury may seem at least as worthy an object as to re-establish the memory of Flogging Fitzgerald, or of King Harry himself. To re-establish the memory of Thomas is, at the worst, a question of words and names, and of a certain law: it does not, like the other two re-establishments, imply the defence of any matter of wrong, or wicked lewdness. And the elder Froude’s history of controversy, if undertaken with a purpose of theological partisanship, was still a piece of creditable historical work. Done forty years or so ago, it was, of course, not up to the level of modern criticism on the subject. But it was the beginning of modern criticism on the subject. The elder Froude is entitled, at the hands of everyone who writes or reads the story of Thomas, to that measure of respectful thanks which belongs to a pioneer on any subject. As for his spirit of partisanship, those who stand outside the arena of all such partisanship might say that when the elder Froude wrote, it was time that the other side should be heard, in its turn. The name of Thomas à Becket had been so long the object of vulgar and ignorant scorn; his character and objects had been treated with such marked unfairness, even by historians of real merit, that fair play might welcome a vindication, even if it went too far the other way. Such a vindication was the object of the elder Froude: in the course of it, he got rid of several prevalent errors, and made ready the way for more impartial and critical examination at the hands of others. The elder Froude did something to put one who, whatever were his objects, whatever were his errors, was still a great and heroic Englishman, in a historic place more worthy of him. At all events, he deserves better than to have his work thus sneeringly spoken of by his own younger brother: “And while Churchmen are raising up Becket as a brazen serpent on which the world is to look to be healed of its incredulities, the incredulous world may look with advantage at him from its own point of view; and if unconvinced that he was a Saint, may still find instruction in a study of his actions and his fate.” This way of speaking may seem startling to those who know the relation between the long-deceased champion of the one side, and the living champion of the other…. The point of view of those whose sole object is historic truth may well be different either from the point of view of “Churchmen,” or from that of the “incredulous world.” At all events, historic truth has nothing to do with the point of view of either.’

From _The Nineteenth Century_ for April, 1878, iii., 621. ‘A Few Words on Mr. Freeman,’ by J. A. Froude.

‘Mr. Freeman commences with a sentence which is grossly impertinent. “Natural kindliness,” he says, “if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work of a long-forgotten brother.” How can Mr. Freeman know my motive for not speaking of my brother in connection with Becket, that he should venture upon ground so sensitive? I mentioned no modern writers, except, once, Dean Stanley. Natural kindliness would have been more violated if I had specified my brother as a person with whose opinions on the subject I was compelled to differ. I spoke of rehabilitation of Becket as among the first efforts of the High Church school. My brother’s _Remains_ were brought out by the leaders of that school after his death, as a party manifesto; and, for my own part, I consider the publication of the _Remains_ the greatest injury that was ever done to my brother’s memory. But this is venial, compared with what follows. He goes on: “And from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother’s almost forgotten fame.” “Stabs in the dark?” Can Mr. Freeman have measured the meaning of the words which he is using? If I had written anonymous articles attacking my brother’s work, “stabs in the dark” would have been a correct expression; and Mr. Freeman has correctly measured the estimate likely to be formed of a person who could have been guilty of doing anything so discreditable. Irrespective of “natural kindliness,” I look back upon my brother as, on the whole, the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any person,――not one! in whom, as I now think of him, the excellences of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure. Of my personal feeling towards him I cannot speak. I am ashamed to have been compelled, by what I can describe only as an inexcusable insult, to say what I have said.’

From _The Contemporary Review_, May, 1879, xxxv., 218 _et seq._ ‘Last Words on Mr. Froude,’ by E. A. Freeman.

‘… With regard to Mr. Froude’s treatment of his brother’s writings, I see that what I have said has pained Mr. Froude. I am so far sorry for it; but I do not admit that I said anything beyond fair criticism. I know that the friends of Mr. R. H. Froude were deeply pained by what Mr. J. A. Froude wrote in his _Life and Times of Thomas Becket_. I cannot say that I was pained, because I never knew Mr. R. H. Froude. He was, to me, neither a friend nor a kinsman, nor a man in whom I had any personal or party interest. But as a student of twelfth-century history, I do owe him a certain measure of thanks as a pioneer in one of my subjects of study. Therefore, if not pained, like his personal friends, I was indignant: because I thought that he was unworthily treated, and that the treatment was the more unworthy because it came from the hands of his own brother. When I spoke of “stabs in the dark,” I meant that the victim (I must use the word) was in the dark. Very few of Mr. Froude’s readers would know that it was his own brother of whom Mr. Froude was speaking, in a way which, brother or no brother, I hold to be wholly undeserved.

‘But if any impartial judge thinks that I ought not to have mentioned the fact of the kindred between the two writers, I regret having done so.’

From ‘THE REMAINS OF THE REV. RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE, M.A., Fellow of Oriel’ [edited by the Rev. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN and the Rev. JOHN KEBLE]. London: Rivingtons, 1838. 2 vols.

‘[Richard Hurrell Froude] was the eldest son of the Venerable Robert H[urrell] Froude, Archdeacon of Totnes, and was born, and died, in the Parsonage House of Dartington, in the county of Devon. He was born in 1803, on the Feast of the Annunciation; and he died of consumption, on the 28th of February, 1836, when he was nearly thirty-three, after an illness of four years and a half. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, having previously had the great advantage, while at Ottery Free School, of living in the family of the Rev. George Coleridge. He went to Eton in 1816, and came into residence as a Commoner of Oriel College in the spring of 1821. In 1824 he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts, after having obtained, on his examination, high, though not the highest honours, both in the _Literæ Humaniores_ and the _Disciplinæ Mathematicæ et Physicæ_. At Easter, 1826, he was elected Fellow of his College, and, in 1827, was admitted to his M.A. degree. The same year he accepted the office of Tutor, which he held till 1830. In December, 1828, he received Deacon’s Orders, and the year after, Priest’s, from the last and present Bishops of Oxford.[379] The disorder which terminated his life first showed itself in the summer of 1831; the winter of 1832, and the following spring, he passed in the south of Europe; and the two next winters, and the year between them (1834), in the West Indies. The illness which immediately preceded his death lasted but a few weeks.

‘He left behind him a considerable collection of writings, none prepared for publication: of which the following two volumes form a part. The Journal, with which the first commences, and which is continued in the Appendix, reaches from the beginning of 1826, when he was nearly twenty-three, to the spring of 1828. The Occasional Thoughts are carried on to 1829. The Essay on Fiction was written when he was twenty-three; the Sermons, from 1829 to 1833, when he was between twenty-five and thirty.[380] His Letters begin in 1823, when he was twenty, and are carried down to within a month of his death.

‘Those on whom the task has fallen of preparing these various writings for publication, have found it matter of great anxiety to acquit themselves so as to satisfy the claims of duty, which they felt pressing on them in distinct, and, sometimes, apparently opposite directions.

‘Some apology may seem requisite, in the first place, for the very magnitude of the collection: as though authority were being claimed, in a preposterous way, for the opinions of one undistinguished either by station or by known literary eminence.

‘That apology, it is believed, will be found in the truth, and extreme importance, of the views to the development of which the whole is meant to be subservient; and also in the instruction derivable from a full exhibition of the author’s character as a witness to those views. This is the plea which it is desired to bring prominently forward; nothing short of this, it is felt, would justify such ample and unreserved disclosures: neither originality of thought, nor engaging imagery, nor captivating touches of character and turns of expression.

‘Still more is this apology needed, on the more serious grounds of friendship and duty. The publication of a private Journal and private Letters is a serious thing. Too often it has been ventured on, in a kind of reckless way, with an eye singly to the good expected to be accomplished, no regard being had to the author himself, and his wishes. It is in itself painful, nay, revolting, to expose to the common gaze papers only intended for a single correspondent; and it seems little less than sacrilege to bring out the solitary memoranda of one endeavouring to feel, and to be, as much as possible alone with his God: secretly training himself, as in His presence, in that discipline which shuns the light of this world. To such a publication, it were objection enough that it would seem to harmonise but too well with the restless unsparing curiosity which now prevails.

‘No common motive, then, it may be well believed, was required to overcome the strong reluctance which even strangers of ordinary delicacy, much more kinsmen and intimate friends, must feel on the first suggestion of such a proceeding. It may be frankly allowed that gentle and good minds will naturally be prejudiced, in the outset, against any collection of the sort. But the present is a peculiar case, a case in which, if the survivors do not greatly deceive themselves, they are best consulting the wishes of the departed by publication, hazardous as that step commonly is. Let the reader, before he condemns, imagine to himself a case like the following.

‘Let him suppose a person in the prime of manhood (with what talents and acquirements is not now the question) devoting himself, ardently yet soberly, to the promotion of one great cause; writing, speaking, thinking on it for years, as exclusively as the needs and infirmities of human life would allow; but dying before he could bring to perfection any of the plans which had suggested themselves to him for its advancement. Let it be certainly known to his friends that he was firmly resolved never to shrink from anything, not morally wrong, which he had good grounds to believe would really forward that cause: and that it was real pain and disquiet to him if he saw his friends in any way postponing it to his supposed feelings or interests. Suppose, further, that having been for weeks and months in the full consciousness of what was soon likely to befall him, he departs, leaving such papers as make up the present collection in the hands of those next to him in blood, without any express direction as to the disposal of them; and that they, taking counsel with the friends on whom he was known chiefly to rely, unanimously and decidedly judged publication most desirable for that end which was the guide of his life, and which they too esteemed paramount to all others; imagine the papers appearing to them so valuable, that they feel as if they had no right to withhold such aid from the cause to which he was pledged: would it, or would it not, be their duty, as faithful trustees, in such case to overcome their own scruples? would they, or would they not, be justified in believing that they had, virtually, his own sanction for publishing such parts even of his personal and devotional memoranda, much more, of his letters to his friends, as they deliberately judged likely to aid in the general good effect?

‘This case of a person sacrificing himself altogether to one great object, is not of everyday occurrence: it is not like the too frequent instances of papers being ransacked and brought to light, because the writer was a little more distinguished, or accounted a little wiser, or better, than his neighbours: it cannot be fairly drawn into a precedent, except in circumstances equally uncommon.

‘On the whole, supposing what in this Preface must be supposed, the nobleness, and rectitude, and pressing nature of the end which [Mr. Froude] had in view, the principle of posthumous publication surely must, in this instance, be conceded? The only question remaining will be whether the selection has been judicious. On this, also, it may be well to anticipate certain objections not unlikely to occur to sundry classes of readers. If there be any who are startled at the strong expressions of self-condemnation occurring so frequently, both in the Journal and in the more serious parts of the Correspondence, he will please to consider that the better anyone knows, the more severely will he judge himself; and since this writer sometimes thought it his duty to be very plain-spoken in his censure of others, in fairness to him it seemed right to show that he did not fail to look at home; that he tried to be more rigid to himself than to anyone else.

* * * * *

‘Censure may be expected … [on] what will be called the intolerance of certain passages: the keen sense which the author expresses of the guilt men incur by setting themselves against the Church. In fact, both this and the alleged tendency to Romanism,[381] are objections, not to the present publication, but to the view which it is designed to support, and do not therefore quite properly come within the scope of this Preface. To defend the severe expressions alluded to would be in a great measure to defend the old Catholic writers for the tone in which they have spoken of unbelievers and corrupters of the Faith. The same portions of Holy Scripture would be appealed to in both cases; those, namely, which teach or exemplify the duty of austere reserve towards wilful heretics, and earnest zeal against heresiarchs. Perhaps it may be found that [Mr. Froude’s] demeanour and language on such subjects is a tolerably striking and consistent illustration of that sentiment of the Psalmist: “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee?” He hated them in their collective character, as God’s enemies, as the antichristian party; but to all who came in his way individually, he was, as many of his acquaintance can testify, full of unaffected, open-hearted kindness; entering into their feelings, and making allowance for their difficulties, not the less scrupulously because he sometimes found himself compelled to separate from them, or declare himself against them.

‘To judge adequately of this point, we must, further, take into account a certain strong jealousy which he entertained of his own honesty of mind. He was naturally, or on principle, a downright speaker, avoiding those words of course and of compliment, which often, it may be feared, serve to keep up a false peace at the expense of true Christian charity. His words, therefore (playfulness and occasional irony apart), may in general be taken more literally than those of most men. It is easy to see that this would make his criticisms, whether literary or moral, sound more pointed and unsparing than those in which a writer of less frankness would indulge himself. And this introduces another point, not unlikely to be animadverted on as blameable, in the present selection. Many, recoiling from his sentences, so direct, fearless, and pungent, concerning all sorts of men and things, will be fain to account them speeches uttered at random, more for present point and effect, than to declare the speaker’s real opinion; and, so judging, will of course disapprove of the collecting and publishing such sayings, especially on high and solemn subjects, as at best incautious, and perhaps irreverent. But they who judge thus must be met by a denial of the fact. The expressions in question were not uttered at random: he was not in the habit of speaking at random on such matters. This is remarkably evinced by the fact that to various friends, at various times, conversing or writing on the same subjects, he was constantly employing the same illustrations and arguments, very often the same words: as they found by comparison afterwards, and still go on to find. Now maxims and reasonings of which this may be truly affirmed, whatever else may be alleged against them, cannot fairly be thrown by as mere chance sayings. Right or wrong, they were deliberate opinions, and cannot be left out of consideration, in a complete estimate of a writer’s character and principles. The off-hand unpremeditated way in which they seemed to dart out of him, like sparks from a luminous body, proved only a mind entirely possessed with the subject; glowing, as it were, through and through.

‘Still, some will say, more selection might have been used, and many statements at least omitted, which, however well considered by himself, coming now, suddenly, as they do, on the reader, appear unnecessarily startling and paradoxical. But, really, there was little option of that kind, if justice were to be done either to him or to the reader. His opinions had a wonderful degree of consistency and mutual bearing; they depended on each other as one whole: who was to take the responsibility of separating them? Who durst attempt it, considering especially his hatred of concealment and artifice? Again: it was due to the reader to show him fairly how far the opinions recommended would carry him. There is no wish to disguise their tendencies, nor to withdraw them from such examination as will prove them erroneous, if they are so. Any homage which it is desired to render to his memory would indeed be sadly tarnished, were he to be spoken or written of in any spirit but that of an unshrinking openness like his own. Such also is the tone of the Catholic Fathers, and (if it may be urged without irreverence), of the Sacred Writers themselves. Nothing, as far as we can find, is kept back by them, merely because it would prove startling: openness, not disguise, is their manner. This should not be forgotten in a compilation professing simply to recommend their principles. Nothing, therefore, is here kept back, but what it was judged would be fairly and naturally misunderstood: the insertion of which, therefore, would have been, virtually, so much untruth.

‘Lastly, it may perhaps be thought of the Correspondence in

## particular, that it is eked out with unimportant details, according to

the usual mistake of partial friends. The compilers, however, can most truly affirm that they have had the risk of such an error continually before their eyes, and have not, to the best of their judgement, inserted anything, which did not tell, indirectly perhaps but really, towards filling up that outline of his mind and character, which seemed requisite to complete the idea of him as a witness to Catholic views. It can hardly be necessary for them to add, what the name of Editor implies, that while they, of course, concur in his sentiments as a whole, they are not to be understood as rendering themselves responsible for every shade of opinion or expression.

‘It remains only to commend these fragments, if it may be done without presumption, to the same good Providence which seemed to bless the example and instructions of the writer while yet with us, to the benefit of many who knew him: that “being dead,” he may “yet speak,” as he constantly desired to do, a word in season for the Church of God: may still have the privilege of awakening some of her members to truer and more awful thoughts than they now have, of their own high endowments and deep responsibility.’

‘REMAINS OF THE REV. RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE, M.A., FELLOW OF ORIEL’ [EDITED BY THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN and the Rev. JOHN KEBLE]. London: Rivingtons, 1839.