Chapter I: Preface (1)

THE epistolary matter in the first section of this volume is drawn from material already in print: chiefly from Part I. of _The Remains of the Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of Oriel_, published by the Rivingtons in 1838, and, incidentally, from _John Henry Newman: Letters and Correspondence to 1845_, published by the Longmans in 1890: from one notable work, that is to say, which is wholly forgotten, and from another yet recent, of great and unique interest, which has not yet won its full public appreciation. For the unrestricted use of the desired extracts from these books, the Editor’s grateful thanks are due equally to the representatives of the elder branch of the Froude family, and to Cardinal Newman’s literary executor.

The liberal selection from Hurrell Froude’s Letters which appeared in the _Remains_ is invalidated, to modern curiosity, by manifold suppressions and omissions necessary for private reasons then in force. Some clue, however, is to be found, if it be looked for, towards the identification of those to whom his correspondence was addressed. The Editors of the _Remains_ silently adopted, for the Letters, the same system of differentiation as they had already employed, two years before, in regard to the authorship of the collected poems in _Lyra Apostolica_: that is to say, in both books γ stands for Keble, δ for Newman, ε for Robert Wilberforce, and ζ for Isaac Williams. As Hurrell Froude’s own contributions to the _Lyra_ had appeared over the signature β, it was easy to surmise that _Beta_ in the _Remains_ might refer to his brothers or sisters, and _Alpha_, by a sort of primacy, to his father: as is certainly the case. But it was more difficult, for instance, to identify η as Mr. Frederic Rogers, or θ as the Rev. John Frederick Christie: for to these there was no key but that of internal evidence of an elusive sort. The Greek alphabet, in the _Remains_, served only as a heading to marshal the recipients of the Letters written by Froude; proper names figuring in the course of the Letters were almost in every instance replaced by a blank. The verification of these names will perhaps be accepted, though not all are based on a manuscript reading;[1] and of course no blank has been filled experimentally without due indication of that process. Nor has effort been made, at any point, to fill out sentences, or gaps of any kind, save those caused by the suppression of proper names. This line of procedure, and, indeed, the entire scheme of the _rifacciamento_, stands subject first and last to the circumstance that the Editor has had no access to the great mass of dated and classified manuscript correspondence now at Edgbaston. As it was impossible to collate the Froude-Newman Letters with the originals, there appeared something supererogatory in reprinting any of the others in their complete form, or including unpublished addenda most kindly placed at the Editor’s disposal, when an exception had to be ruled in regard to the most interesting and most important material of all. Unfortunately, moreover, Froude’s letters to his father, the Archdeacon, to Robert Wilberforce and to Isaac Williams, have perished; and those to Mr. Keble, if existent, had not been recovered by his grandnephew, the Rev. George C. Keble, at the time when this volume went to press. A few letters have been pieced together by comparison of passages, as they stand in the _Remains_, and in the Newman _Correspondence_, issued a half-century later. Examination of the fac-simile page of the amusing letter from Barbados, written on December 26, 1834, and of its counterpart in the text here given, copied from that of the _Remains_, will show that some de-editing might be called for, under the right conditions, in the matter of Hurrell Froude’s edited correspondence. It will be seen, on the whole, that neither close study nor long acquaintance with the subject could keep the reprinting, as it pressed forward, from degenerating into more or less of a game of guesswork. Yet exclusions and limitations may cast a befitting half-light upon used literature of long ago, which was in itself elliptical, and tends to create new ellipses, inasmuch as its purpose now is to throw stress less on historic or theological issues than on human character. Many given data, or few, yield pretty much the same residuum when the personality which reigns over them is as rich and strong as Hurrell Froude’s. Says one of the most penetrating of modern writers:

‘The art of biography has accustomed those who read to expect … as the word implies, the portrayal of a life, of a process: the record of the growth and unfolding of a soul and character. This it is which interests the subjective temper of our days…. Our mind has learnt that its choicest food need not be sought from afar, but lies scattered with the wild flowers by the wayside, and that nothing is so extraordinary as the ordinary. Thus we have come to care less for a full inventory of the events which make up a man’s life, or for the striking nature of those events in themselves, than for such a judicious selection and setting of them as shall best bring out and explain that individuality which is our main interest. We care less for what a man does and more for what he is; and it is mainly as a key to what he is that we study the circumstances which act upon him, and the conduct by which he reacts upon them.’[2] A selection and setting to explain individuality: such is the aim, such (it is to be feared) is only very partially the achievement, of this book.

Concerning its second section a few remarks may be called for. That section actually had, from the first, in the Editor’s intention, the right of way. It is quite independent, not called into auxiliary play as a mere illustrative collection of _pièces justificatives_. Many of these essays and reviews have authority; a few have great literary beauty; the Editor’s work, which could not vie with them, has borrowed almost nothing from them, and thus preserved two integrities. Although limits of space forbade the reproduction of any one chapter of appreciable length quite in its entirety, yet there existed no reason, but only the whim of artistic choice, for the inclusion or exclusion of one part of any paper at the cost of another part. The process of making excerpts, at best, has something of disagreeableness and of danger. Where that process cannot be avoided, it is well, at least, if its lever be not a preconceived theory. An Editor not of Froude’s own religious communion should scruple all the more to interfere in any wise with the witnesses. Such lines or pages as are here scored out are not inaccessible in their original forms. It will be seen that they are not deleted to favour any special plea, but are either somewhat irrelevant to the subject in hand, or a repetition of facts and impressions more succinctly stated in other accompanying papers. Where aught of moment is involved, the fullest and clearest expression of it is in every case allowed to carry the field: _e.g._, Dean Church’s apologetics concerning Froude’s so-called ‘Romanising’ will be found more satisfactory to the uneasy than the paler defence in the first Preface to the _Remains_. A broad selective principle has ruled the Editor also in minor matters: _e.g._, a poem of Froude’s own, imbedded in the text of an early review by Lord Blachford, or a poem of his great friend’s imbedded in an analysis by Mr. R. H. Hutton, are, though coveted, left where they are, and are not transferred to the main narrative sketch. A slight overlapping, as it were, is inevitable: what is super-serviceable sometimes serves more than one pen. Nothing written in English about Hurrell Froude which has colour and individuality, has been altogether passed by, though the present scheme is not in the least bibliographical. On the whole, there is set forth a richly varied testimony: comment buttressed on comment, sometimes, and contradiction against contradiction. Everything about the man calls for criticism, and gets it: his private examen of conscience, his verses, his letters, his traditional sayings, his ecclesiastical theory and religious practice; everything, in fact, except his dreaded arguments. These are conspicuously let alone by those who disapprove of them. They lurk, however, beyond the borders of parley, and they constitute the aggressiveness of one, who but for insistence on them, and whatever they imply, was essentially courteous and gentle. By his commentators he is incessantly quoted: the ‘party of the second part,’ whoever may be writing, successfully holds the stage. It is always instructive to watch reflections of so simple and boyish, yet powerful a personality, on the complex surface of literary interpretation. We count Hurrell Froude’s a long-forgotten name; yet during the sixty-eight years since he died, more serious students than would seem at first thought likely, have felt for this fighting recluse true attraction, or the equally legitimate attraction of repulsion; and their number bids fair to increase.

‘Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies, and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same; and still the more, the more it breaks.’

The apprehension of all he was, if not the whole truth about him, should be, in this synod of philosophical friends and deeply interested foes, no difficult thing to win and hold.

It may not be usual to treat a man of genius like an unglossed manuscript, and to set him forth impartially with all his variants. As dear Izaak says in his innocent-seeming irony, this is, perhaps, to impale him ‘as if you loved him.’ But a free hearing is good law and good art; diverging guesses, contrasted points of view, exercised by the competent, have their uses, especially in England; and some natures and motives bear analysis gallantly well. The reason, at bottom, for so catholic a treatment of Hurrell Froude, is that Hurrell Froude, with his singular detachment and sound humour, would not have disclaimed it: that is, if he had come to know that posterity would fain hear of him again. And there is but one conclusion to be drawn from the spirited discussions about him. As M. Henri Malo was pleased to write, not so long ago, of his historic hero: ‘_En somme, quelle que soit l’opinion que l’on ait sur son compte, c’est une figure!_’[3]

The sole purpose of this unconventional yet homogeneous volume is to show Froude, the mind and the man, in his inferential completeness, and without primary reference to that application of his best-cherished principles which meant so much then, and which means so much now. Without primary reference, we say: yet to part him by one hair’s breadth from the Oxford Movement, who would, and who could? A book which aims at being not a disquisition, not even a biography, but simply a convenient rearrangement of obvious data for the study of a temperament, may plead its own voluntary poverty as a general extenuation. In the matter not of exegesis but of mere quantity, no reader will complain of too little!

The chronology of many of the footnotes has been compiled from the _Alumni Oxonienses_, the _Registrum Orielense_, and the _Dictionary of National Biography_. In a book of this nature, appealing chiefly to those who know by heart the golden commonplaces of the educated world, it has not been thought pertinent to ‘overset’ or verify the classical quotations.

Something may be added concerning the illustrations. William Brockedon, before he was famous, once started to paint a life-size head in oil of Hurrell, then aged about eleven. It was left unfinished, and is now in the possession of the young sitter’s namesake and nephew, R. H. Froude, Esq., of Bernstein, Newton Abbot, by whose kindness a half-tone ‘restoration’ of it serves as frontispiece to this book. Outside a casual pencil sketch, it is the only portrait at present known of Hurrell Froude; nor has it ever before been reproduced, save once as a small scratchy characterless detail of a Keble College panorama. The painting was unfortunately abandoned while in its half-chaotic condition: eyebrows and ears are but barely indicated; the entire background, the collar, a portion of the hair growing so wilfully on the large shapely head, remarkable then and always for its even convexity, are a mere disordered wash; and it was difficult to follow, and to fix by process after process, a vision of the beautiful boy, with his melancholy and his racial fire. No idealisation, as need hardly be said, has been attempted. Patience and sincerity, brought to a rather discouraging task, have succeeded, in some measure, in recapturing an imperfect image, and in having it recognised (so far as a man can be recognised in a child), with gratified pleasure, by the one or two known to the Editor who are the enviable rememberers of Hurrell Froude. The reduction of the original head to an almost miniature size justified itself at once in the disappearance of many blemishes. The print from which the block was made is an outcome of the photographic skill and artistic feeling, now historic in England and beyond it, of Mr. Frederick Hollyer. The ‘casual pencil sketch’ just mentioned figures also in this book, and has in even higher degree the preciousness of a unique thing: for the reproduction is made directly from an unaltered original in a portfolio of 1832. Students of that period in England will recall Miss Maria Giberne, the ‘Queen of Tractaria,’ the animated, romantic, and loyal friend of the Newmans, who followed her art with long devotion, and became, later, Sister Maria Pia in the Visitation Convent at Autun, where she died at a great age. Of her, in her early prime, one who knew her well wrote:

‘[Maria Giberne] was always a most excellent talker and narrator, but her great power lay in the portraits she did in chalks. At a very short sitting, and even from memory, she would draw a portrait which was at least perfectly and undeniably true. I have heard her drawings criticised, and her drapery called conventional, but her faces, to my apprehension, were proof against all criticism. Perhaps they are better in outline than when filled up and tinted…. Her interest in the whole [Tractarian] circle was insatiable, and there was hardly anything she would not do and dare for a sight of one she had not yet seen.’[4]

Given, therefore, Miss Giberne’s ardour in the matter, and her frequently-recurring opportunities as a visitor, it would seem almost certain that she would not have let slip any chance of portraying so noticeable a luminary as Hurrell Froude, often absent, like herself, from Oxford, during 1831-1833, and away from it almost altogether afterwards. Her discovered sketch-books, preserved in the hands of relatives and friends, yield, so far, but a single page in which Froude appears. She groups and labels him with other conspirators’ at a historic moment,[5] in the one Oxford Common Room which ‘stank of logic.’ Something in the too quiescent gesture of the graceful person ‘on the box,’ as well as in the nature of the circumstance, make one suspect that the whole was drawn not on the spot, nor from memory, but from hearsay at the time. Were such the case, the implication would be that Miss Giberne had a good prior knowledge of Froude’s face and figure, and even that she was not committing these to paper for the first time. This little drawing is the property of her nephew, George Pearson, Esq., of Manchester; it is owing to his courtesy and kindness that it is here made public.

The picture of Dartington Parsonage, the antique house in the vale three miles from Totnes, Devonshire, where Hurrell Froude was born, and where he died, is from a larger water-colour drawing by Arthur Holdsworth Froude, in the possession of his sister, the Baroness Anatole von Hügel. The Parsonage, in its mediæval simplicity, was first sketched by Archdeacon Froude, then the newly-appointed Rector, in 1799; this sketch yet exists on a fly-leaf of the Parish records. He at once rebuilt the whole west wing, planted shrubs and vines, and drained away the pond; but there were no other alterations until after his death and the removal of the family in 1859-60, when his grandson Arthur drew the house from memory. Even now, the porch, and everything to the right of it, upstairs and down, is practically the very same as in Hurrell’s time; elsewhere the gables have disappeared, and the tourelle has changed its place. The Parish Church (of fourteenth century work, like the Hall) is from an old negative by Messrs. Brinley and Son, of Totnes. This view from the south-west shows the low railing over the Froude vault, which lay in the angle of the porch, next the wall. The Church being taken down in 1878, the strong plain Tower was left alone and intact, standing sentinel over the dead; and the large slab shown in the foreground of the modern photograph, covering the burial-place of Hurrell Froude and of his kindred, is as it looks to-day. The print of Oriel College great quadrangle is from a photograph copyrighted many years ago by Messrs. Henry W. Taunt and Co., of Oxford, and here used by their permission. The inner top tier of three windows next the angle of the Chapel marks the rooms occupied by Froude. They are on the second floor of Staircase No. 3, the door being at the right hand as one mounts the stairs. The beautiful Porch and the whole front have since been renovated, and the tall bold _Regnante Carolo_ again runs around the ruined open stone-work parapet, shown in our illustration, which an Oriel man of the Thirties saw every day as he went in and out of Hall.

It remains only to thank the family of William Froude, Esq., and the Rev. Charles Martin, the present Rector of Dartington; the Rev. G. Kenworthy, Vicar of Bassenthwaite, whose generosity and knowledge have supplied the Editor with many biographical data of the Spedding family; the Rev. T. Herbert Bindley for authentic information about Codrington College; the Rev. J. Christie for much painstaking friendliness, and the use of a page of one of the Theta letters for a fac-simile; the Rev. G. A. Williams, and several other kind correspondents of Tractarian lineage, who have patiently answered inquiries. Lastly, a more intimate acknowledgment is especially due to the Rev. W. H. Carey, of SS. Michael and All Angels, Woolwich; for chiefly through the sense of his steady encouragement, based on an enthusiasm for Hurrell Froude, the Editor’s task, more than once interrupted and laid by, was pushed on to its completion.

OXFORD, _October, 1904_

HURRELL FROUDE

I

SOME MEMORANDA OF HIS LIFE AND OF HIS IDEALS

FAC-SIMILE SIGNATURE FROM A LETTER OF HURRELL
FROUDE TO HIS FRIEND GEORGE DUDLEY RYDER
ESQ., (AFTERWARDS REV.), 1832.

(_By the kind permission Of the Rev. H. I. D. Ryder, D.D., of the
Oratory._)]

HURRELL FROUDE

I

SOME MEMORANDA OF HIS LIFE AND HIS IDEALS

THE persons who most compel our interest in this world are not often the great, exemplars of what we call intellectual eminence: they are rather the men and the women of genius. On that ground they win the eye. Vital and unexhausted spirits, under no subjection to results, can afford, if they choose, to die anonymous; and never having established a pact with their times, nor with Time at all, they are contemporary backward and forward as far as thought can reach. Of this strangely numerous company in England, though he be but

――‘a fugitive and gracious light
Shy to illumine,’

stands Newman’s early friend, Richard Hurrell Froude, the lost Pleiad of the Oxford Movement. Akin to some others, names earlier and later, ‘which carry a perfume in the mention,’ he left little to prove and approve himself. Such as he, in the pageant of eternity, are not the tallest harvesters with the most recognisable sheaves. Like Crichton and Falkland and Pergolesi, like Arthur Hallam and Henri Perreyve, he is known to history as it were by a smiling semi-private hint, or a sort of May-orchard coronal which the wind has no power to scatter, rather than by virtue of any personal innings in the complex game of life. He was a mere man of genius. His inheritance was richly varied: of mental currents possible in one cross-bred island, there could hardly be a more spirited blend. ‘The thinkers of the West,’ as an analytic pen has lately written,[6] ‘reveal a certain practical sagacity, a determination to see things clearly, a hatred of cant and shams, a certain “positive” tendency which is one of the notes of purely English thought.’ Exact in the wider application, the sentence has an almost startling appropriateness when it is narrowed down to fit the one ‘thinker of the West’ (not in Mr. Ellis’s lists) with whom these pages deal. Never to maunder, never to mince matters, never to pet an illusion, never to lay down arms while there are ‘cant and shams’ to fight,――all that is very Devonian; and Hurrell Froude, true at every point, was true Devon in this. His ancestral Speddings, on the other hand, had imagination and a love of letters, and were ironic and opinionative after another fashion. They had also, for generation after generation, as an unexpected corollary, a strong turn for science, and even for mechanical science, as the less bookish Froudes, to offset their hard common sense, were restless and romantic lovers of the open air and of the sea. The shy, critical, solitary, but ardent and adventurous character which belonged not only to our particular Fellow of Oriel, but in some measure to all his nearest kindred, seems to have been inherited equally from the contrasted streams which ran in their blood. All Hurrell’s religiousness, all his poetry and fire and penetrative thought, came straight from his beautiful and highly intelligent mother, whom he lost just as he really came to know her, and whom he worshipped during the rest of his life. His stature, colour, and expression, as also his delicacy of constitution, he received through her.

The Speddings were Anglo-Irish, migrating during the sixteenth century to Scotland, then, early in James II.’s time, to Cumberland. John Spedding and his wife Margaret were seated at Armathwaite Hall, in Bassenthwaite parish, Keswick, when their second daughter Margaret, afterwards Mrs. Froude, was born in 1774. Her elder sister Mary, her brothers John, James, Anthony, and William (in order of their age), comprised with her, her father’s family; and she was but seven when he died. Armathwaite Hall was left in the hands of trustees, who so wasted it that when John Spedding, the son, came of age he found his patrimony gone, and resolved to leave the country to join the army, then in the thick of the Peninsular War. Meanwhile, four miles away, at the head of Bassenthwaite Lake lay Mirehouse, the owner of which was Thomas Story, Esquire, a bachelor, attached to his Spedding neighbours. In the most opportune and romantic way, he made young John Spedding his heir, just in time to prevent his self-imposed exile, and in 1802 died, and was succeeded by him in the estate. It was thus that the Speddings, who had occupied Armathwaite Hall for over a century, came ultimately to live at the other end of the Lake. John Spedding married Miss Sarah Gibson of Newcastle. They lived to old age, and had a numerous issue. James Spedding, the distinguished scholar, the intimate friend of Tennyson, and leader of the famous Cambridge set ‘The Apostles,’ known afterwards in the world of letters as the vindicator of Bacon, was their third son. He spent most of his life (1808-1881) at Mirehouse, and is buried not far away, in the old churchyard of Bassenthwaite. He and his knew all the Froudes well; visits were constantly interchanged; and it was he who introduced James Anthony Froude, his cousin, and brother-in-law at one remove, as it were, to Carlyle. For James Spedding’s eldest brother, Thomas Story Spedding, married his cousin Phillis Froude, the second daughter of the household at Dartington.

To revert to the elder generation――Margaret Spedding, her own mother’s namesake, born, as we have seen, in 1774, was dearly loved at home for seven and twenty years; at that somewhat mature age (as it was considered in 1802), she married the Rev. Robert Hurrell Froude, Rector of Dartington in Devonshire. His own people were not less interesting, and even more ancient, than hers. Hurrells, an armigerous family, and Froudes, rising yeomen from Kent, had struck deep and wide roots in Devon soil at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. The second of these was probably a place-name, though there are those who derive it from the Icelandic _frod_, wise, not from the likelier Celtic _ffrwd_, a rushing stream.[7] We find the race numerous and active, and settled chiefly about Kingston, and about Modbury, where in the year of Culloden, Richard Hurrell, gentleman, was married to Mistress Phillis[8] Collings. Their daughter, Phillis Hurrell, became the wife of Robert ffroud of Walkhampton, third son of John, to whom descended the Modbury manors of Edmerston and Gutsford; these two lived at Aveton Giffard, and are buried there in the Parish Church, where their monuments still exist. ‘Robert ffroud Armiger’ died young, four years after his marriage, which had for issue one son, and three daughters. Phillis the widow, a person of strong character, lived on for sixty-six years longer, and saw the grave opened, or opening, for nearly all her brilliant and fated grandchildren. Her babes, left fatherless in 1770, were Mary, Margaret, and Elizabeth; her son Robert Hurrell was a posthumous child. The latter was to rise to more than local eminence, known throughout an exceptionally long life as Rector of Dartington, and from 1820 on, as Archdeacon of Totnes in the diocese of Exeter.[9] He matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, in January 1788, aged seventeen, and in due course, in 1795, proceeded Master of Arts. He came from Denbury, of which he was already Incumbent, to his new parish of Dartington, in 1799. Many children were born in Dartington Parsonage to him and to Margaret Spedding his wife, of whom Richard Hurrell Froude, named for his paternal grandfather Richard Hurrell of Modbury, was the eldest. His birth was on March 25, 1803. Certain critics who disliked the aroma, real or imaginary, of the Oxford Movement, seemed to harbour, in after years, a special grudge against Hurrell for his Marian circumstances. It was, as it were, piling offence on offence that he entered the world on the Feast of the Annunciation, and consciously, votively belonged to the College of S. Mary at Oxford. He was privately baptized at home, and with his next brother, carried up the hill to be received in the ancient Church at the Hall gates (again S. Mary’s), on the 17th of April, 1805. Hurrell seems to have been from the first a stormy sort of child, handsome, and odd, and adored by his relatives. Like the young Persians in their national prime, he learned ‘to ride, and to speak truth.’ He was sent early to the Free School at Ottery S. Mary, where he lived in his master’s house. This was the Rev. George May Coleridge, nephew of that poet who has made classic the lovely neighbourhood to all readers of English. He survived until 1847, dear to all the Froudes. (Perhaps it is not generally known that Mr. James Anthony Froude, then in deacon’s orders, was responsible for Mr. Coleridge’s funeral sermon at S. Mary Church, Torquay.) Hurrell was as happy at his first School as a dreamy rebel boy always subject to moods and to home-sickness could well be. Everything was done, at any rate, to keep him happy. His own memories of the green village, with its great minster and its bright stream, seem to have been pleasant ones. A lady who was but a young child during his last months at Dartington recalls his frank smile at drawing in a lottery a picture of Ottery Church, which she had coveted, lotteries not being abhorred then, as now, by Christian folk. Had the winner known of the little girl’s envy, he would certainly have parted with his treasure on the spot; for he was a born de-collector. Hurrell began, almost as soon as he could hold a pen, to draw well, and to write agreeable letters. At thirteen he was sent to Eton. A year or two before, that is, in or about 1814, he sat for his portrait to that lovable interesting man and capable artist, William Brockedon, Archdeacon Froude’s particular protégé and most grateful friend.[10] It may have been begun as one of many thank-offerings; for some reason, it was left unfinished. Brockedon was a patient person, by all accounts. Perhaps wild little Master Froude, for all his innocent looks, may have been, in the immortal words of Pet Marjorie, ‘whot human nature cant indure.’ The Archdeacon, too, was critical, and thought his friend happiest in sketch-work, and that to finish, with him, was, sometimes, to over-refine. Who could have foreseen that the abandoned canvas was long to take on unique accidental value to persons then unborn who should be interested in his sitter? For though that childish sitter was to live over a score of years longer, and endear himself to men of a certain school of thought for ever, there was no discoverable hand but William Brockedon’s to tell them how he looked. There was not known until the other day a single other portrait, not so much as a silhouette, of a draughtsman associated with so many, both at home and at College, who could draw.

The boy, with his half-indolent, half-clairvoyant way of studying, and his high spirits in and out-of-doors, got on fairly well at Eton,[11] though his years there seem to have made no great impress on his mind and character. He developed, perhaps, too slowly, and too much by instinct and intuition, to be much harmed or helped by a Public School. Winthrop Mackworth Praed was one of his memorable contemporaries there; Edward Bouverie Pusey, though in an upper Form, was another.[12] Like Pusey, Hurrell had a talisman and a safeguard in the love of a pious mother. The extreme natural sympathy between them was heightened by the boy’s fickle health, and his unconscious appeal for continued care. One experience of early invalidism and its results, lasting for some time, drew from Margaret Froude an oblique comment or protest which is enough to make one love and admire her womanliness. She drew up a letter to an imaginary correspondent, which was really intended for her tall son himself. It sounds wholly like a page from the _Spectator_, in Steele’s tenderest whimsical vein; and it would be an ungenerous lad (her Hurrell certainly knew not how to be ungenerous) who would not be touched by the genuine foreboding sorrow breathing through it. Whether it was ever actually left in his way is doubtful; a passage in his Journal may imply that he knew nothing of it until after her death. Its date lies early in 1820.

‘SIR,――I have a son who is giving me a good deal of uneasiness at this time, from causes which I persuade myself are not altogether common; and having used my best judgment about him for seventeen years, I at last begin to think it incompetent to the case, and apply to you for advice. From his very birth his temper has been peculiar: pleasing, intelligent, and attaching, when his mind was undisturbed, and he was in the company of people who treated him reasonably and kindly; but exceedingly impatient under vexatious circumstances; very much disposed to find his own amusement in teasing and vexing others; and almost entirely incorrigible when it was necessary to reprove him. I never could find a successful mode of treating him. Harshness made him obstinate and gloomy; calm and long displeasure made him stupid and sullen; and kind patience had not sufficient power over his feelings to force him to govern himself. His disposition to worry made his appearance the perpetual signal for noise and disturbance among his brothers and sisters; and this it was impossible to stop, though a taste for quiet, and constant weak health, made it to me almost insupportable. After a statement of such great faults, it may seem an inconsistency to say that he nevertheless still bore about him strong marks of a promising character. In all points of substantial principle his feelings were just and high. He had (for his age) an unusually deep feeling of admiration for everything which was good and noble; his relish was lively, and his taste good, for all the pleasures of the imagination; and he was also quite conscious of his own faults, and, untempted, had a just dislike to them. On these grounds I built my hope that his reason would gradually correct his temper, and do that for him which his friends could not accomplish. Such a hope was necessary to my peace of mind; for I will not say that he was dearer to me than my other children, but he was my first child, and certainly he could not be dearer. This expectation has been realised, gradually, though very slowly. The education his father chose for him agreed with him; his mind expanded and sweetened; and even some more material faults (which had grown out of circumstances uniting with his temper) entirely disappeared. His promising virtues became my most delightful hopes, and his company my greatest pleasure. At this time he had a dangerous illness, which he bore most admirably. The consequences of it obliged him to leave his School, submit for many months to the most troublesome restraints, and to be debarred from all the amusements and pleasures of his age, though he felt, at the same time, quite competent to them. All this he bore not only with patience and compliance, but with a cheerful sweetness which endeared him to all around him. He returned home for the confirmation of his health, and he appeared to me all I could desire. His manners were tender and kind, his conversation highly pleasing, and his occupations manly and rational. The promising parts of his character, like Aaron’s rod, appeared to have swallowed up all the rest, and to have left us nothing but his health to wish for.――After such an account, imagine the pain I must feel on being forced to acknowledge that the ease and indulgence of home is bringing on a relapse into his former habits. I view it with sincere alarm as well as grief, as he must remain here many many months, and a strong return to ill-conduct, at his age, I do not think would ever be recovered. I will mention some facts, to show that my fears are not too forward. He has a near relation, who has attended him through his illness with extraordinary tenderness, and who never made a difference between night and day, if she could give him the smallest comfort, to whom he is very troublesome, and not always respectful. He told her, in an argument, the other day, that “she lied, and knew she did,” without (I am ashamed to say) the smallest apology. I am in a wretched state of health, and quiet is important to my recovery, and quite essential to my comfort; yet he disturbs it, for what he calls “funny tormenting,” without the slightest feeling, twenty times a day. At one time he kept one of his brothers screaming, from a sort of teasing play, for near an hour under my window. At another, he acted a wolf to his baby brother, whom he had promised never to frighten again. All this worry has been kept up upon a day when I have been particularly unwell. He also knows at the same time very well, that if his head does but ache, it is not only my occupation, but that of the whole family, to put an end to everything which can annoy him.

‘You will readily see, dear Sir, that our situation is very difficult and very distressing. He is too old for any correction but that of his own reason; and how to influence that, I know not! Your advice will greatly oblige

‘A very anxious parent,
‘M. F.

‘_P.S._――I have complained to him seriously of this day, and I thought he must have been hurt; but I am sorry to say that he has whistled almost ever since.’

The kind relative, who was so ungraciously repaid for her goodness, was his aunt Miss Mary Spedding, the eldest of all her family, devoted to her only sister Margaret, and to that sister’s memory; the baby brother, who must have conceived of the wolf as a perseveringly disagreeable animal, was James Anthony Froude, then nearly two years old. A year later, on February 16, 1821, Margaret Froude breathed her lovely soul away, and was laid to rest next the south porch of Dartington Church, where her children’s feet passed in and out on Sunday mornings over the flagstones, between the first spring flowers. ‘The Froudes were eight in family,’ wrote Isaac Williams, on a happy visit long after. On the morrow of their bereavement, this was the junior roll-call in Robert Froude’s desolate Parsonage:

Richard Hurrell, aged not quite eighteen.
Robert Hurrell, aged sixteen years, ten months.
John Spedding, just fourteen.
Margaret, aged twelve years, nine months.
Phillis Jane, nearly eleven and a half.
William, aged ten years, three months.
Mary Isabella, not quite seven and a half.
James Anthony, under three.

Hurrell Froude was admitted Commoner by the University of Oxford and matriculated at Oriel College, within a few weeks of his mother’s death, on April 13, 1821. His delicate health had kept him back: his father and his brothers all matriculated at seventeen. Robert Froude, ‘Bob,’ was then entering upon his Sixth Form at Eton. Little Margaret began at once, under guidance, her tender and long continued task of comforting her father and mothering the motherless. She found no time to seek her own happiness, till her marriage in 1844,[13] when only her father and herself, William and Anthony, survived. John Spedding Froude died in 1841, thirty-four years old, and, like his two elder brothers, unmarried. Of Phillis, William, Mary, and (James) Anthony, Hurrell’s own annals will have more to say. Beside one of the leafy winding roads of Dartington rose afterwards a little grey almshouse, and over the doorway a stone tablet with this inscription:

‘IMPENSIS MARIAE SPEDDING
PIA RECORDATIONE SORORIS SUAE
MARGARETAE FROUDE
HAEC DOMUS
IN PERPETUAM ELEEMOSYNAM
EXTRUCTA EST.
AGELLUM CIRCUMJACENTEM IN
EOSDEM USUS EROGAVIT
HENRICUS CHAMPERNOWNE.

A.D. MDCCCXXXV.’

It must have been building during the last year of Hurrell’s life, and no doubt with his ‘very managing sort of mind’ he worked into it some of his rather primitive Gothic theories. There still is the home which Mary Spedding’s love built, where age and poverty have privacy and peace, and roses at every window, and thankful sweet remembrance of human kindness, as in the ancient time.

Away from home, and without his mother, Hurrell fell silent enough; and his sadness would have hurt and corroded him, had it not been for the exquisite friendship which sprang up between him and his tutor at Oriel. That tutor was John Keble. It is pleasant to think of these two, with their spiritual foreheads and strong chins, in that fashionable Georgian College full of decanters and gold tufts, and ‘rows in quad.’ No one in all England whom Hurrell Froude in his youth was likely to know could have so fostered in him, even by his unconscious presence, whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. According to Mr. J. A. Froude’s _Short Studies_ account, there was no very high level of supernatural religion at Dartington Parsonage. ‘My father,’ he says, ‘was a High Churchman of the old school. The Church itself he regarded as part of the Constitution, and the Prayer-Book as an Act of Parliament which only folly or disloyalty could quarrel with.’ This theory perfectly harmonised with the wonted order and general practice fixed for a century before. The Royal Arms, flanked by the lamentable monuments of all the local gentry, dominated the chancel; the Squire’s pew had its fat cushions, and a stove in the middle, and was walled away from any view of the ignored Communion-table chastely covered with green baize; plebeian hats were piled in the Font, and there was a ‘national custom of bending forward in Church,’ as an almost too fond concession to Christian etiquette. Truthful observers have given us the whole catalogue in print; and it has been corroborated on every side within living memory. The finer spirits who did not turn infidel must have felt all this ugliness to be dreary and hideous enough, though perhaps necessary to feed the sacred spite against the Middle Ages, so Popishly ‘dark’ with candles and incense-coals, pageants and bright Alleluias, brought into the service of God. But to no one in the Church of England before the Oxford Movement, did it seem an abnormal state of things. Nor was it so, dogma being dead. When poor Hurrell’s decided opinions had formed, he must have felt himself in some domestic difficulty. Ritual was nothing to him except as the language of belief: scant where that is feeble, full where that is steadfast and profound; how it can be anything else to man is not quite apparent to an inquiring mind. As he never lived to work out his beliefs very far, he had no drastic changes to suggest in the local ordinances, but he must have dedicated some uphill work to the excellent parent whom he truly reverenced, and ended by making over into a valuable defender of sacramentalism. The numerous clerical progeny of Squire Western, worthies like the famous fox-hunting ‘Păsson Freüde’[14] of his own blood, in another part of Devon, remained faithful to the Constitution and Parliament, to pay up for the Archdeacon’s partial defection.

Hurrell’s attitude towards the mother for whom his heart ached, and towards those who won his fealty at home, discovered itself day by day in letters to Mr. Keble, a record of occasional thoughts, and the private journals which he kept for his own conscience to whet itself upon. Sacred as these pages are, they have been printed before in the opening volume of his _Remains_; and they prove how very far he was from being a mere intellectual theoriser, oblivious of daily duty and common ties. His strife for perfection, a difficult and joyless one at best, began with these. Some excerpts, scattered or consecutive, will serve to show his sincerity and thoroughness: how his thoughts ran; how he fed upon his mother’s memory; with what lowliness he prayed for the divine help, and with what merciless constancy he learned to discipline himself, arraign his own motives, and master the bitter and sovereign science of self-knowledge.

――‘Yesterday I was very indolent, but … my energies were rather restored by reading some of my mother’s journal at Vineyard. I did not recollect that I had been so unfeeling to her during her last year. I thank God some of her writings have been kept: that may be my salvation; but I have spent the evening just as idly as if I had not seen it. I don’t know how it is, but it seems to me that the consciousness of having capacities for happiness, with no objects to gratify them, seems to grow upon me, and puts me in a dreary way. Lord, have mercy upon me.’

――‘Spent the morning tolerably well; read my mother’s journal and prayers, two hours: I admire her more and more. I pray God the prayers she made for me may be effectual, and that her labours may not be in vain, but that God in His mercy may have chosen this way of accomplishing them; and that my reading them so long after they were made, and without any intention of hers, may be the means by which the Holy Spirit will awaken my spirit to those good feelings which she asked for in my behalf. I hope, by degrees, I may get to consider her relics in the light of a friend, derive from them advice and consolation, and rest my troubled spirit under their shadow. She seems to have had the same annoyances as myself, without the same advantages, and to have written her thoughts down, instead of conversation. As yet they have only excited my feelings, and not produced any practical result.’

――‘Read my mother’s journal till half-past twelve: here and there I think I remember allusions. Everything I see in it sends me back to her in my childhood: it gets such hold of me that I can hardly think of anything else. It is a bad way to give a general account of oneself at the end of a day: people at that time are not competent judges of their actions; besides, everyone ought to be dissatisfied with himself always: it is better to give a detailed account like my mother’s by means of which I may hereafter have some idea of what was my standard of virtue, rather than my opinion of myself.’

――‘O Lord, consider it not as a mockery in me, that day after day I present myself before Thee, professing penitence for sins which I still continue to commit, and asking Thy grace to assist me in subduing them, while my negligence renders it ineffectual. O Lord, if I must judge of the future from the past, and if the prayers which I am now about to offer up to Thee will prove equally ineffectual with those which have preceded them, then indeed it is a fearful thing to come before Thee with professions whose fruitlessness seems a proof of their insincerity! But Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and knoweth my thoughts, independently of the actions which proceed from them. “O that my ways were made so direct that I might keep Thy statutes! I will walk in Thy commandments when Thou hast set my heart at liberty.”’

――‘Read my mother’s journal. I hope it is beginning to do me some serious good, without exciting such wild feelings as it did at first.’

――‘I must fight against myself with all my might, and watch my mind at every turning. It will be a good thing for me to keep an exact account of my receipts and spendings: it will be a check on silly prodigality. I mean to save what I can by denying myself indulgences, in order to have wherewith I may honour God and relieve the poor.’

(To KEBLE, but never sent.)

――‘Perhaps you may think it very odd, but this summer[15] has been the first time I have had resolution to ask for the papers which they found of my mother’s after her death. The most interesting to me are some prayers, and two fragments of [a] journal, one for the year 1809, I think, and the other in 1815. The prayers seem to have been a good deal later.’

(Not sent either.)

――‘All this summer I have been trying a sort of experiment with myself, which, as I have had no one to talk to about it, has brought on great fits of enthusiasm and despondency, and being conscious at the time of most contemptible inconsistencies, both in my high and dejected feelings, I set to work to keep a journal of them, to answer the purpose of a sort of conversation between my present and my future self: an idea which I got from reading an old journal of my mother’s, which they found after her death, and which I never could make up my mind to look at till this summer.’

――‘I have confessed to myself a fresh thing to be on my guard against. Every now and then I keep feeling anxious that by bringing myself into strict command, I may acquire a commanding air and manner, and am in a hurry to get rid of the punishment of my former weakness. I sometimes try to assume a dignified face as I meet men, and am never content to be treated as a shilly-shally fellow. I must not care the least, or ever indulge a thought, about the impression I make on others;[16] but make myself _be_ what I would, and let the _seeming_ take its course; or, rather, be glad of slights, as from the Lord. This will be a hard struggle. O Lord, give me strength to go through with it!’

――‘I felt as if I have got rid of a great weight from my mind, in having given up the notion of regulating my particular actions, by the sensible tendency I could perceive in them to bring me towards my τὸ καλόν. I had always a mistrust in this motive; and it seems quite a happiness to yield the direction of myself to a Higher Power Who has said: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”’

――‘It seems to me a great help towards making myself indifferent to present things, to conjure up past events, and distant places and people before me: things that happened at Eton, or Ottery, or in the very early times of childhood. I felt again to-day as if … the secret world of new pleasures and wishes to which I am trying to gain admittance, is a mere fancy. I must be careful to check high[17] feelings, [as] they are certain to become offences in a day or two, and must regulate my practice by faith, and a steady imitation of great examples: in hopes that, by degrees, what I now have only faint and occasional glimpses of may be the settled objects on which my imagination reposes, and that I may be literally hid in the presence of the Lord.’

――‘I might not indeed be too penitent, but penitent in a wrong way. Abstinences and self-mortifications may themselves be a sort of intemperance: a food to my craving after some sign that I am altering. They ought not to be persevered in, farther than as they are instrumental to a change of character in things of real importance: … how hard it is to keep a pure motive for anything!… I will refrain, rather, by forcing myself to talk, and attend to the wants of others [at table] than by constantly thinking of myself.’

――‘Made good resolutions about behaviour when I go home. Never to argue with my father, or remonstrate with him, or offer my advice, unless in cases where I feel I should do so to the [Provost?]. For even if it subjects me to unnecessary inconvenience, it would do so equally in both cases; and, if I would submit to it in one case through pusillanimity, I ought in the other for a punishment. It would be a good way to make opposite vices punish each other so, and be likely to cure both in time. In the same way to behave to Bob and my sisters as I would to [College equals?]: to comply with their wishes, and not interfere with their opinions, except where I would with the latter. I must try at home to be as humble, and submissive, and complying, as I can; and here as resolute and vigorous, till I get to be the same in all places and all company. I do not preclude myself from making amendments in this resolution, till I have left Oxford.’

――‘It has turned out a beautiful day, and fasting will cost but little pain. I have just been shocked at hearing that ――――’s acquaintance, Mr. ――――, had shot himself yesterday. How strongly it reminds me that I understand little of the things invisible which I talk and think about, when the most terrible occurrences having taken place quite close to me affect me so little! I could work up my feelings easy enough, but it is enthusiasm[18] to anticipate in this way the steady effects of moral discipline; even supposing both effects are, whilst they last, the same. I could not help crying violently just now, on reading over my mother’s paper. The ideas somehow mixed up together, and forced on my thoughts what a condition I may be in as to things unseen, and yet be unconscious of it. O God, keep up in my mind a feeling of true humility, suitable to my blindness and the things that I am among.’