Chapter IV: Preface (4)

‘I despatched a hasty letter yesterday from Torquay which must have disappointed you from its emptiness; but I wished you to know my progress. As we lost sight of the Needles, twilight came on, and we saw nothing of the coast. The night was beautiful, and on my expressing an aversion to the cabin, Froude and I agreed to sleep on deck…. When I awoke, a little before four, we were passing the Devonshire coast, about fifteen miles off it. By six we were entering Torbay…. Limestone and sandstone rocks of Torbay are very brilliant in their colours and sharp in their forms; strange to say, I believe I never saw real rocks before, in my life! This consciousness keeps me very silent, for I feel I am admiring what everyone knows, and it is foolish to observe upon. You see a house said to have belonged to Sir Walter Ralegh;[73] what possessed him to prefer the court at Greenwich to a spot like this?… I know I am writing in a very dull way, but can only say that the extreme deliciousness of the air, and the fragrance of everything makes me languid, indisposed to speak or write, and pensive. My journey did not fatigue me, to speak of, and I have no headache, deafness, or whizzing in my ears; but, really, I think I should dissolve into essence of roses, or be attenuated into an echo, if I lived here!… What strikes me most is the strange richness of everything. The rocks blush into every variety of colour, the trees and fields are emeralds, and the cottages are rubies. A beetle I picked up at Torquay was as green-and-gold as the stone it lay upon, and a squirrel which ran up a tree here just now was not the pale reddish-brown to which I am accustomed, but a bright brown-red. Nay, my very hands and fingers look rosy, like Homer’s Aurora, and I have been gazing on them with astonishment. All this wonder I know is simple; and therefore, of course, do not you repeat it. The exuberance of the grass and the foliage is oppressive, as if one had not room to breathe, though this is a fancy. The depth of the valleys and the steepness of the slopes increase the illusion, and the Duke of Wellington would be in a fidget to get some commanding point to see the country from. The scents are extremely fine, so very delicate yet so powerful; and the colours of the flowers as if they were all shot with white. The sweet peas especially have the complexion of a beautiful face: they trail up the wall, mixed with myrtles, as creepers. As to the sunset, the Dartmoor heights look purple, and the sky close upon them a clear orange. When I turn back and think of Southampton Water and the Isle of Wight, they seem, by contrast, to be drawn in Indian ink, or pencil. Now I cannot make out that this is fancy, for why should I fancy? I am not especially in a poetic mood. I have heard of the brilliancy of Cintra and still more of the East, and I suppose that this region would pale beside them; yet I am content to marvel at what I see, and think of Virgil’s description of the purple meads of Elysium. Let me enjoy what I feel, even though I may unconsciously exaggerate.’

Newman’s senses were extraordinarily delicate: he writes as if at thirty he was half unaware of some of his most special faculties.

A week later, a postscript follows, addressed to Harriett Newman, telling of ‘a sermon to write for to-morrow, which I do believe to be as bad a one as I have ever written, for I was not in the humour; but I do not tell people so. It may do good, in spite of me!’ and this confidence: ‘The other day the following lines came into my head. They are not worth much; but I transcribe them:

‘There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart,
One who could love them, but who durst not love:
A vow had bound him ne’er to give his heart
To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove.
’Twas a hard humbling task, onward to move
His easy-captured eye from each fair spot,
With unattached and lonely step to rove
O’er happy meads which soon its print forgot.
Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot.’[74]

There was a lifelong strife in Newman’s mind between created and Uncreated Beauty, or rather, a lifelong choice. He seems to have felt that he could not be as much of a poet as his own heart prompted, and be also as much of a hard-working saint as Divine Grace called him to be. For him, as in the beginning, a loved landscape was ‘pagan’: a temptation towards false gods. How little his attitude was understood, during his life, is well illustrated by the published complaint of Mr. Aubrey de Vere that his friend Dr. Newman of the Catholic University would never make time to go driving with him through the exquisite scenery about Dublin, though invited again and again. In all this, as in much else, he was entirely Augustinian. _Ejiciebas eas et intrabas pro eis._ It does not seem clear that Hurrell Froude, who outran Newman in many austerities, shared fully in the exercise of this signal one. His loneliness of spirit, far more developed than his friend’s, was also far less conscious, and his boyish relish of the beauties of moor and sea based itself, rather, on a philosophy which was Keble’s, and Henry Vaughan’s long before him:

‘Thou who hast given me eyes to see
And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out Thee,
And read Thee everywhere!’[75]

Certainly, Newman was never so tormented by his affection for music, or for anything else in the same class, as he was by the glamour of out-of-doors at Taormina, and the homelier charms of ‘Devon in her most gentle dimplement.’ Spiritual matters apart, one does not perceive what else could have inwrought him more effectually with the very fibres of Hurrell’s being, than his felt infatuation for the Dartington he visited but twice in his busy life. They shared the same passion, again, for Rome. The spirit of place can always create a final test between any two cultivated minds. To differ in kind or even in degree of response to it, is indeed to differ.

The principle which lay at the bottom of Newman’s renunciation was one, however, which was equally familiar to his friend. It may not always have involved, for him, the need of so determined a depreciation of the loveliness of rural England, as too keen a reminder of

‘Isaac’s pure blessings, and a verdant home,’

things forsworn by both young men in that ‘highly religious and romantic idea of celibacy’ which they had adopted for good and all, between them, without Keble’s help. As Newman says of S. Basil and S. Gregory, retiring together from the world: ‘somehow, the idea of marrying-and-taking-Orders, or taking-Orders-and-marrying; building or improving their parsonages, and showing forth the charities, the humanities, and the gentilities of a family man, did not suggest itself to their minds.’ Nothing is plainer than that the arch-celibate was Froude, and not Newman: perhaps it would be quite exact to say that the idea, in Froude, as in Pascal, was wholly endemic, and in Newman only so in part. We are told in the _Apologia_ how the idea was strengthened and supernaturalised by contact with Froude. Hurrell sometimes deplored with unmixed simplicity the social disqualifications of a total abstainer. ‘I wrote S[am] a letter the other day,’ he tells Robert Wilberforce, when the future Bishop had plighted his troth. ‘I suspect it was of the dullest! for I have no knack at writing to people in his interesting situation.’ In all this lack of sympathy with ordinary conduct and motive, there was no touch whatever of conscious oddity, but only of childishness. Newman, by far the tenderer heart of the two, never shared it.

Newman has left us an account of the origin of the sermon he mentions, which was preached in the old Church on July 16, 1831: that on the Pool of Bethesda, ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow,’ in the first volume of _Parochial Sermons_. ‘Twice in my life,’ he writes about 1862, ‘have I, when worn with work, gone to a friend’s house to recruit…. When I was down at Dartington for the first time, in July, 1831, I saw a number of young girls collected together, blooming, and in high spirits; “and all went merry as a marriage-bell.” And I sadly thought what changes were in store, what hard trial and discipline was inevitable. I cannot trace their history; but Phillis and Mary Froude married, and died quickly. Hurrell died. One, if not two, of the young Champernownes died.[76] My sermon was dictated by the sight and the foreboding. At that very visit [from Oxford] Hurrell caught, and had his influenza upon him, which led him by slow steps to the grave. He caught it sleeping, as I did, on deck, going down the Channel from Southampton to Torbay. Influenza was about, the forerunner of the cholera. It went through the Parsonage at Dartington. Every morning the sharp merry party, who somewhat quizzed me, had hopes it would seize upon me. But I escaped; and sang my warning from the pulpit…. I am a bird of ill omen.’[77]

Correspondence of course broke out anew, the moment the two were parted. Hurrell’s Greek reading progressed on his own summary lines. ‘_Timæus_ gets worse and worse. I can see no point in which it is interesting, except as a fact to prove what stuff people have sucked down…. I have cut _Timæus_,’ he announces a bit later, ‘and have nearly finished _Gorgias_, which is as elegant and clever and easy as possible.’ His weather comments (such being unavoidable in England) are concise and instructive. By way of letting Newman know that there had been a fortnight of fine weather since the latter’s own rainy experiences at Dartington, he throws out an abrupt postscript of July 29: ‘What a lie old Swith.[78] has told!’

The Rev. Thomas Mozley seems to have received conditional offers or promises from Hurrell of sharing with him a country cure. The former proposed first the vacant Moreton Pinkney, thirty miles north of Oxford, then the parish of S. Ebbe’s, within its ancient limits. But both projects failed of realisation. Hurrell’s strength had to be hoarded, and Archdeacon Froude was averse to any measure which would create new duties, and cause a stricter separation between them. Keble, on behalf of his friend, would have favoured Northamptonshire rather than the city. He saw Newman on August 10 of this Long Vacation of 1831. ‘He wishes you to have a country parish,’ Newman writes; ‘he did not give his reasons.’ Newman himself coveted Hurrell’s parochial co-operation. These plans for an active employment of superfluous energies, formed, one after another, by appreciators of them, were destined to be vain. Meanwhile, relish for historical study was indicating to him how he could be of use, in a day full of most unscholarly conceptions of the past, long before the documentary firmament had been unrolled by Government for the man in the street. _Dandum est Deo eum aliquid facere posse._ He knew the path he meant to take, and communicates his dream to Newman, prefacing it with a bit of encouraging domestic news: ‘W[illy] continues very steady, getting up at half-past five, and working without wasting time till two or three.’ His next surviving brother William was then twenty years old, and reading for Honours.

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Aug. 16, 1831.

‘Since you wish to have a definite categorical answer to M[ozley’s] question, I will say, No; and having said this, will proceed to my reasons and qualifications. First, whatever you may think, I have a serious wish, and (if I could presume to say so) intention of working at the ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages. Now, my father assures me that such a parish as [S. Ebbe’s] would be a complete occupation of itself, so that I am unwilling at once, and without giving myself the trial, to give up the chance of doing what I cannot but think as clerical, as improving, and much better suited to my capacity, such as it is, than the care of a parish. A small parish, and a less bothering one, might be a recreation, almost; but such an absorbing one as this I should be sorry to take, till I found that I could not work at anything else. Secondly, my qualification of the ‘No’ is this: if you either feel very certain I shall do nothing else, or have a strong opinion as to the improvement I should get from the occupation you propose, believe me willing to be convinced that my present view is incorrect.

‘I have read a good deal of Plato, have stuck in _Parmenides_ as in _Timæus_, but think all which keeps clear of metaphysics is as beautiful and improving as anything I ever read. As to Socrates, I can scarcely believe that he was not inspired, and feel quite confident that Plato is responsible for every tint of [puzzleheadedness] which shows itself in his arguments. One is apt, of course, to be carried away with a thing at the moment; but my present impression is, that _Gorgias_, _Apologia Socratis_, _Crito_, and _Phædo_, rank next to the Bible in point of the greatness of mind they show, and in grace of style and dramatic beauty surpass anything I have ever read. I think I am improved in composition, and attribute it to imitation of Plato. I am going to serve D[enbury?] for the next month, and shall have to write a number of sermons.

‘How atrociously the poor King of Holland[79] has been used; but nothing yet is so painful as the defection of the heads of the Church. I hear that the Bishop of Ferns[80] is dying: _spes ultima_.’

During the early autumn, Froude returns to the curacy question, and reiterates the conviction which his own idiosyncrasy was strengthening in him every day, and which surely was as warranted as it was sincere.

‘I have read the Lives of Wycliffe and Peacocke[81] in Strype; but must read much more about them and their times, before I shall understand them. At present I admire Peacocke and dislike Wycliffe. A great deterioration seems to have taken place in the spirit of the Church after Edward III.’s death. I hope I shall have perseverance to work up the history of the period. If I do this, I shall not think myself bound to take a curacy.’

It is a thousand pities that we can never have on our shelves the Froude of historical verity, to counterbalance the Froude of historical romance. Hurrell, so far as he got, was certainly all for ‘the ideas underlying history, and their organic connection,’ and was but poorly adapted for ‘the insertion of his own ideas into history … the professing to find in history what he had in reality put there.’[82] Is it not clear that such a fault may spring not from perverseness, but from the too pictorial eye? This the elder brother lacked, as likewise the other disadvantage of a magical prose style. That perturbing possession, the luckiest asset of the essayist, seems to delight in playing tricks on historians, for in the past, at least, the dullest have been the safest.

As one who understood the dangers of style, Hurrell chides Newman for the hair-splitting preliminary method to which he was treating _The Arians_. ‘If you go on fiddling with your Introduction, you will most certainly get into a scrape at last!’ And then: ‘I have for the last five days been reading Marsh’s _Michaelis_, which I took up by accident, and have been much interested by it. I see that old Wilberforce[83] owes to it much of the profundity which I have before now been floored and overawed by. It has put many things into my head that I never thought of before.’

The first unmistakable symptoms of Hurrell’s chronic illness had developed by the January of 1832. ‘I don’t think he takes care of himself,’ Keble says anxiously, in a letter to Newman, shortly after his election to the Professorship of Poetry. And Hurrell himself had confessed to Newman, as it were, ‘how ill all’s here about my heart: but ’tis no matter.’ Hence the reply from Oxford, on the 13th.

‘Your letter was most welcome, sad as it was; I call it certainly, from beginning to end, a sad letter, and yet somehow sad letters, in their place, and in God’s order, are as acceptable as merry ones. What I write for now is to know why you will not trust your brother to come up by himself? Let him go into your rooms; and do stop in Devonshire a good while, in which time you not only may get well, but may convince all about you that you _are_ well――an object not to be neglected…. Your advice about my work is not only sage, but good, yet not quite applicable, though I shall bear it in mind. Recollect, my good Sir, that every thought I think is thought, and every word I write is writing, and that thought tells and that words take room, and that though I make the Introduction the whole book, yet a book it is; and though this will not steer clear of the egg blunder, to have an Introduction leading to nothing, yet it is not losing time. Already I have made forty-one pages out of eighteen.’ The correspondence between the two, then as ever, gives diverting glimpses of the mordant and ineffably frank critic away from Oxford, and the divine and man-of-letters in residence who continually sought, ‘in the beaten way of friendship,’ the advice he did not invariably need. Thus he sends a rough draft to Dartington of ‘a sermon against Sir James Mackintosh, Knight,’[84] expecting strictures, ‘should you discern anything heretical,’ and calling special attention to the argument: ‘therefore be sharp.’ The young censor was pleased to approve ‘on the whole,’ though with minor reservations. ‘As to your _Annotationes in Neandri[85] Homiliam_,’ Newman writes cheerfully, ‘to be sure I have treated them with what is now called true respect; for I have spoken highly of them, and done everything but use them! I did not have them till Saturday morning; so having your authority for what I wanted (_i.e._, the soundness of the main position and the τόποι), I became indolent.’

Meanwhile, towards the end of January, Hurrell sends an asked-for bulletin of his physical progress, and follows it up with several others, in all of which he makes it unconsciously plain that he has more pressing interests than his own sinking barometry. His mind was going forward by leaps and bounds towards convictions then unguessed-at, now quite general, about ‘the Tudor Settlement.’

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Jan. 29, 1832.

‘I promised I would give an account of myself, if I did not appear in person by the beginning of Term. I am getting rid, though by slow degrees, of all vestiges of cough, and, what is more to the purpose, my father is quite easy about me, which he was far from being when I first came home…. I have been very idle lately, but have taken up Strype now and then, and have not increased my admiration of the Reformers. One must not speak lightly of a martyr, so I do not allow my opinions to pass the verge of scepticism. But I really do feel sceptical whether Latimer was not something in the Bulteel[86] line; whether the Catholicism of their formulæ was not a concession to the feelings of the nation, with whom Puritanism had not yet become popular, and who could scarcely bear the alterations which were made; and whether the progress of things in Edward the Sixth’s minority may not be considered as the jobbing of a faction. I will do myself the justice to say that those doubts give me pain, and that I hope more reading will in some degree dispel them. As far as I have gone, too, I think better than I was prepared to do of Bonner and Gardiner. Certainly the ἦθος of the Reformation is to me a _terra incognita_, and I do not think that it has been explored by anyone that I have heard talk about it.’

With what astonishing prescience this novice surveys his _terra incognita_!

Again, writing to Newman on Feb. 17, the obsession for historical truth, as the handmaid to religious reform, breaks through some melancholy detail. He has been asked for a full bulletin; he confesses that the doctor states, and that he himself cannot deny, that there has been an attack on the lungs, attended, however, with but little pain or fever. He finds it ‘disheartening,’ for he had been taking long rides, and was in great spirits. Then he runs on to a topic which occurs to him not for the first nor for the last time. Might it not be a good thing to turn journalist, to have a Quarterly, and to speak in it the thing which is? ‘Imagine me in a yellow jacket,’ he says elsewhere to Newman; imagine him seated, and goose-quilled, and editorial. It was never to be. Was it not quite as well? Would not Mr. Froude (if the pun will pass muster) have proved gunpowder in a Magazine? He talks as he always talks of his own inspirations, derisively. But plainly, his heart is in it. He would start, this time, ‘on a very unpretending scale,’ and design his foxy Quarterly ‘to be at first only historical and matter-of-fact, so that writing for it would be the reverse of a waste of time even if it failed entirely, which I really hardly think possible, considering the ridiculous unfounded notions most people have got, and the vast quantity of unexplored ground. A thing of that sort might sneak into circulation as a book of antiquarian research, and yet, if well-managed, might undermine many prejudices. I am willing to think that I could contribute two articles per annum to such a work, without losing a moment of time, indeed getting through more than I should else. Memoirs of Hampden would be a subject [Keble] would take to with zest, as he hates that worthy with as much zeal and more knowledge than your humble servant. However, this is a scheme formed at a distance, which, as Johnson remarks, makes rivers look narrow and precipices smooth. Can you tell me where to go for the history of Lutheranism? I must know something of it, before I get a clue to Cranmer and the rest.’

Lastly, to the same correspondent, on Feb. 26.

‘… I trouble you with a few lines of grateful acknowledgment for the concern you are so kind as to take in my welfare, though I cannot at the same time refrain from observing that your advice does more credit to your heart than your head…. I was at Dr. [Yonge’s[87]], where I stayed three days, and was thoroughly examined. He assures me that whatever may have been the matter with me, I am now thoroughly well, and that I may return to Oxford at once without imprudence. At the same time, he says I must be extremely cautious, as the thing which formed in my windpipe proves me to be very liable to attack, and he looks on it as an extraordinary piece of luck that I got rid of it as I did. I am to wear more clothing than I have hitherto done, and to renounce wine for ever; the prohibition extends to beer: _quò confugiam_?’

Before Hurrell left home, his father had notified Newman of their conditional intention to visit the Continent. ‘If the doctor advises it,’ the Archdeacon writes on Feb. 22, ‘I have offered to be Hurrell’s companion to the Mediterranean, or any other part of the world that may be supposed most favourable in such a case as his. I own [that] my faith in the advantages to be gained by going abroad is not very great, unless they can be procured under the most favourable circumstances. At any rate, I think your suggestion for his giving up the office of Treasurer[88] shall be followed.’ He had held this office of Junior Treasurer since 1828, to the great general satisfaction, sharing with Newman the mental quickness, the ‘constitutional accuracy’ and the conscientiousness which go towards the casting-up of a perfect accountant. Hurrell, however, came up in the spring, whence he blithely reports his improved health.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, May 5, 1832.

‘… Thinking that you may wish to know something of my concerns, and wishing to know something of yours, … I send you the following. As to myself, about which valuable thing I am most concerned, you must know that I have at last found a κρησφύγετον in barley-sugar; only to think that my stars should let me off so easily! Sucking has had a most wonderful effect on me, and has removed nearly all that F[airford][89] had left of tendency to irritation; I might say all, if I could suck continually, but just now these east winds take advantage of casual intervals, and remind me that I am not perfectly at liberty. However, I have left off my handkerchief, and never feel the want of it; also, I am up at half-past six every morning; and taking an enlarged view of myself, I think my condition to be approved of.’

Up to July 31, Froude remained in Oxford, being and doing with all his usual zest, writing his papers on architecture, proving a very well-head of vitality to his friends, and ‘living his life.’ Could it have been indeed as early as this that he cut across the preliminaries described by Lord Blachford,[90] and paralysed an intended appeal to Bishops and Deans by announcing that he, for one, meant to ‘get on the box’ in person? This is thought to be the moment of Miss Giberne’s inspiration. It would seem as if the date should be a year later. In July of 1832 the Tutorial question was over; and there was no other _agendum_ in debate between Froude and Newman. However that may be, there in the handsome lady’s sketch-book is Hurrell, smoothly, almost infantinely, mischievous, with one obedient Mozley to listen and abet; there is Newman, at an angle of the ottoman, distinctly not surveying with fond adoring gaze and yearning heart his friend (as he says he does, in a poem, part of which, at least, was written that very week), but back to back with him, sulking furiously, and putting on a silent stare which sufficiently expresses human disapproval: that little sudden void stare, entirely characteristic, as of one who is forced to survey, for the time being, an endless vista of Siberian snows.

It was a boding time; the cholera was raging all about; Newman himself was tired and dejected from overwork, and none too hopeful concerning Hurrell’s health or the impending prospect of separation. Long after, annotating his own correspondence at Edgbaston, he tells us something special about the lines just referred to, in what may be called, from a merely literary point of view, one of the most successful, though one of the least known, of his shorter lyrics. Hurrell’s share in it is no more, so to speak, than a tiny marginal portrait of him, tender, in passing, as the work of some old Flemish illuminator. Newman ascribes the origin of the last lines to this July. ‘With reference to the memory of that parting, when I shook hands with him, and looked into his face with great affection, I afterwards wrote the stanza:

‘And when thine eye surveys
With fond adoring gaze
And yearning heart, thy friend,
Love to its grave doth tend.’[91]

But it is remarkable that the completed poem is dated Valetta, January 30, 1833: as if to mark the vanishing of the only shadow which ever crossed the united path of Newman and Froude; and that shadow was due, as we shall see, to a fancy of Newman’s, conceived in illness. Abstract and gnomic as his verses are, two human faces, nameless but recognisable, look through them with ‘sad eyes spiritual and clear.’ One is Mary Newman’s, in her sisterly youth;[92] the other is Hurrell Froude’s. Dearly as Newman loved his many friends, then and after (and as Dean Church reminds us, mutual affection as profound as that of the early Christians, was the very hall-mark of the Tractarians), there is but one friend discernible in the long vista of his poetry, most of which was written in his living presence. Hurrell may never have suspected as much. The temper of both, shrinking from the least emotional emphasis, would have precluded any open give-and-take. The privilege of being English has its own system of taxation. The Cardinal, in his old age (possibly when _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ was overrunning the stage), had to assure some inquirer, by post, that he hardly had been in the habit of addressing Hurrell as ‘Dearest,’ in the prose exigences of every day.

The truant Fellow, restored to his father’s Parsonage, was able to send a definite announcement of his future movements, within a fortnight of his leaving Oxford.

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Sept. 9, 1832.

‘I am afraid poor [Willy] will make no hand of his Second Class. He has no interest, and can pick up none, for what he is about; and all his interleaves and margins are scribbled over with lug sails. You will be glad to hear that I have made up my mind to spend the winter in the Mediterranean, and my father is going with me, the end of November, and we shall see Sicily and the south of Italy. We are both very anxious that you should come with us. I think it would set you up…. I have read M. Thierry’s stuff.[93] His ignorance is surprising. He supposes Oxford to have been a Bishopric in Henry the Second’s time, and he sticks in Saxons _ad libitum_, quoting authorities with which I am familiar, and where nothing of the sort occurs. My translations have been at a standstill…. Also, I am getting to be a sawney,[94] and not to relish the dreary prospects which you and I have proposed to ourselves. But this is only a feeling: depend on it, I will not shrink, if I buy my constancy at the expense of a permanent separation from home. I think this journey will set me up, and then I shall try my new style of preaching. We must indulge ourselves and other people with a little excitement on such matters, or else the indifferentists will run away with everything!’

William Froude, at Michaelmas, took his First Class in Mathematics, and a Third in Classics, quite as Hurrell expected. As to the microbe of travel thus featly introduced into the post, it did its work upon the recipient, though not without much hesitation and debate. One of Newman’s arguments against a plan with which, it is plain, he fell violently in love at once, was the state of his own health, involving, possibly, some additional responsibility for Archdeacon Froude. ‘You need fear nothing,’ Hurrell gallantly assures him, ‘on the score of two invalids: I am certainly better now than I have been for more than a year. I bathed yesterday with great advantage, took a very long walk, drank five glasses of wine, and am better for it all. My contemplated expedition is wholly preventative, so don’t be uneasy on that score…. As to my sawney feelings, I own that home does make me a sawney, and that the First Eclogue runs in my head absurdly. But there is more in the prospect of becoming an ecclesiastical agitator than in _At nos hinc alii_, etc.’

On Monday, December 3, Newman set out on the Southampton coach, reaching Exeter next day, and Falmouth, whence the Maltese packet of 800 tons, called the _Hermes_, was to sail, early on the Wednesday morning following. He wrote there his poem,

‘Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?’

the first of eighty-five dating from the Mediterranean voyage, the eighty-fifth being the ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ which has endeared to English-speaking pilgrims the Straits of Bonifacio. When the Froudes arrived at Falmouth, Newman had a nocturnal adventure to relate to them. He had been very roundly sworn at by a person, apparently a gentleman, who sat near him on the box. ‘I had opened by telling him he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maid-servant stuck atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain!’ The hasty fellow-traveller afterwards apologised. In the moonlight he had attributed a highly laic motive to Newman’s interference, so the latter explains to his mother. On the 8th of December the _Hermes_ sailed. The three friends were to be together for five months, and their route is minutely and enchantingly mapped out in the first volume of the Newman _Correspondence_. The journey held unique experiences, filled with interest, for the two younger men, and they, on their part, seemed to have interested deeply many whom they met. Hurrell kept a log as they moved, for his brothers and sisters, for Mr. Keble, for Mr. Williams, and a few others; and out of it a fairly connected narrative can be extracted, of a colour and form quite other than Newman’s, the better correspondent, but graphic enough. Before starting on his voyage, Hurrell had seen in print, in the first and second volumes of _The British Magazine_, both his pioneer papers on Gothic Architecture, and the earlier chapters of his history of S. Thomas à Becket; these were followed, in volume iv., by The Project of Henry II. for Uniting Church and State, A.D. 1154.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Dec. 12, 1832.

‘We started from Falmouth about eleven, on the 8th. “_Jamque tibi e mediis pelagi_ mirabilis _undis_,” about sixty-eight miles to the south of Oporto, and thirty from the shore: the sea a perfect sheet of glass, showing the reflection of the stars, particularly Sirius, which is most splendid. The Pole-star sinking perceptibly: I am sure the Great Bear’s tail must have had a dip as he went his rounds. It has been very calm all day, and we have gone seven-and-a-half miles an hour: when the sun came to the meridian our latitude was 41° 36´. In the daytime the sea was a pale blue colour; I will not attempt to describe the sunset. Yesterday was very interesting: when we came on deck in the morning we could just make out Cape Ortegal to the south-east of us, at a distance of about forty miles. It was very pale, and scarcely to be distinguished from the sky, but rose very high above the horizon, and, as we neared it, seemed to be quite precipitous; we did not get within thirty miles, so that it has left on my mind only the ghost of an impression: but it is a grand ghost. We saw where Corunna lay, and must have been within twenty miles of some part of the coast between that and Cape Finisterre, which we doubled in the dark. All of it was of a very singular character, but insignificant compared with Cape Ortegal. All that day the wind was fresh from the east, and the sea very wild and grand, of a deep black-blue, covered with breakers: we went rather more than eight miles an hour, though the ship tossed amazingly. This was the first day that we had had a clear sky, and marvellous it was: a strong east wind in the middle of December, and the climate like May! our latitude at noon 44° 3´. There is something in the colour of the sea out of soundings, which is very striking to one who has only seen the shallow water that surrounds England. There is not a tint of green in it; to-day it has been a pale blue, like a beautiful lake; yesterday it was a black-purple. We find that this steamer is to touch at Cadiz and Algiers, and to spend two days at Gibraltar, in the way to Malta, and that afterwards it is to spend four days between Zante, Cephalonia, Ithaca, and Leucadia, touching at Patras (_olim_ Patræ), then to spend six at Corfu, and afterwards return to Malta the same way; so we shall certainly extend our trip. The commander and the midshipmen are a very gentlemanlike set, and we the only passengers: so it is most luxurious…. And now I am stupid; if there is nothing more to tell to-morrow, I shall fill up the blank between Falmouth and Cape Ortegal, which may be regarded as our Dark Age.

‘_Thursday evening._――The day has again been beautiful, and quite summery, with scarcely a cloud. When the sun rose we were off the Berlingas (some small sharp rocks, which you will see in a map), and from thence we kept near shore all the way to the rock of Lisbon. The greater part of the way we could not have been much more than a mile off. The sea has been its old green to-day; the coast all along very peculiar, not very high, but wild, and strongly marked; the rock precipitous, and deeply indented, and every promontory relieved by a thin mist of spray from the breakers of the Atlantic. We watched them curl in upon the shore, each rising in a green transparent line as it came to its turn to break, and then turning partially into a delicate mist where it met the more prominent rocks, till at last the whole line seemed to burst, and another rose behind its aërified relics, and put me in mind of Ἀφροδίτη…. When we passed Mafra we saw the cupolas of the palace of Cintra, and, through an opening of the hills, made out the greater part of it through glasses. The situation is strange for so magnificent a building. And now we had a clear view of the ridge on which the Duke took up his position on the northern side of the lines of Torres Vedras. I will not attempt to describe it, except that it is grand to a degree, rising in spire-like shaggy tops, and cut by deep ravines, the sides of which were fringed with what we were told were cork trees. As we got near we saw many villas about half-way up, and on the two highest points were two convents. The Roman Catholics are queer fellows: they are determined to be admired and not envied; we, unhappily λαχόντες ἀντιοστρόφον τυχὴν, are envied and not admired. We doubled Capo Roca at three, and then went down to dinner. The mouth of the Tagus was too distant to make anything out, except the masts of the English ships, who are there to bully Don Miguel.[95] On Friday we got up at seven to see Cape St. Vincent, and passed close under it. The light on it was very fine, and the form of the rocks bold; but yesterday had spoiled us. The day is fine, cloudless, and windless――almost too hot…. Just now we saw a fishing-boat, and made towards it. The people were in a great fright, and pulled with all their might, while they thought there was a chance to get away; at last they gave up in despair. When we came up we found they had no fish: there were four of them, very dark complexions, and, as well as I could judge, Moorish features: the boat, sails, and all, perfectly un-English (a word which has ceased to be vituperative in my vocabulary). The coast which we are now passing is too distant to be very interesting, but a grey ridge of mountains rises behind, out of a dead flat, reminding one that we are off a strange land. The lateen sails, too, of which many are about, and two turtles which we almost ran over just now, and a shark’s fin just showing above water, all tell the same story…. On Sunday morning it was foggy and disagreeable, and we were in the dreaded Bay of Biscay: however, I was still well enough to do Service on board…. All the ship’s crew attended except the steersman and the stokers, _i.e._, the fellows that feed the fire of the engine. The commander had them all upon deck in the morning and gave them a practical discourse on good behaviour, which amused [Newman] and me by being so much to the point: he is a nice fellow, I think. After Service I was fairly done up, and lost my character…. Next day we were in the middle of the Bay: still cloudy and damp, and a long gentle swell: but we had served our time, and were all alive and merry…. In the evening we found that the commander was a musician and a painter; he had a very elegant miniature of his wife that he had finished up for his amusement at sea; and he sang us several songs, accompanying himself on the Spanish guitar, in very good taste, as [Newman] said: we the ἀμύητοι liked it much; and we have not had any qualms since: and now I have got on to where the rest begins. We live splendidly on board, have a cabin each, capital dinners, and good company: the three midshipmen, gentlemanlike obliging fellows as can be: yesterday they went out of the vessel’s course, to show us the coast to advantage.

‘_Saturday._――On getting up, found ourselves in Cadiz harbour; the convent bells put us in mind that we are in a religious country: it sounded just like Oxford before Morning Chapel. We found ourselves in quarantine and unable to land. The Consul’s boat came off for the letters, rowed by eight Spaniards, such odd-looking fellows! they row without rullocks, having a strap and a τροπωτήρ…. We saw the unfinished Cathedral very distinctly through a glass: it had not at all an ecclesiastical look, but was large and picturesque. It will never be finished now, I suppose, as the day of apostasy seems at hand in Spain.

‘_Sunday morning._――Here we are at Gibraltar.’

Newman’s letters, enthusiastic over sky and sea, are full of the horrors of the ship (which he says was not properly cleaned before being sent down from Woolwich), and of the little stuffy rooms which are enough to kill a valetudinarian; but valetudinarian Hurrell seems to have enjoyed it all.

To the Rev. ISAAC WILLIAMS, Dec. 27, 1832.

‘… We were at Gibraltar only forty-eight hours, and of that we were in quarantine forty. The remaining eight hours, however, we turned to account, under the auspices of the Colonel of engineers, who was kind enough to lend us horses, and go over everything with us: unfortunately we were there so short a time, that we could only see what was curious, and had no leisure for the picturesque; to enjoy which, it would have been necessary to ride away five or six miles, on what they call the neutral ground: the low sandy isthmus which joins the rock to the continent; but from the fortifications we saw enough to convince us what a magnificent object it must be. In our scramble we had the luck to see three or four monkeys, scrambling, with the greatest ease, up and down what seemed a smooth precipice. I know how odious descriptions are, yet I must just tell you that, among other things, we were taken through a gallery cut out in the most precipitous face of the rock, about 650 feet above the base, and 800 feet below the top, so that when you peep out through the port-holes, which are cut every here and there for cannon, you seem suspended in mid-air, and feel giddy, in whatever direction you look. Thanks to Colonel R[ogers] we saw so much that we had no right to grumble at the quarantine: but it really is something so exquisitely grotesque, that one cannot help being provoked. We were moored close alongside of a coal-wharf, and all the day that we were imprisoned, a parcel of fellows of the town were at work, wheeling coals into our vessel, and upsetting them on the deck, so that they were in all but contact with our crew for a whole day; also, all packages were received, after undergoing the ceremony of a partial ducking in the water; and letters had a chisel dug into them, which was supposed to let out the cholera. And while all this absurd farce was going on, we were imprisoned in one of the most interesting places in the world, not knowing when we should be released, or whether at all; however, even in this time, we had some amusement from the variety of curious figures that came down to the Quay to look at us. One fellow, a Moorish Jew, was dressed so picturesquely, and looked so exotic altogether, that I tried to draw him; but he saw what I was at, and first hallooed out: “You no paint me,” and, when I went on, he bolted as fast as he could. The Moors are magnificent-looking fellows, with very high stern features, dark eyes, and very marked nostrils that give to the full face rather a look of ferocity; even the lowest of them look like aristocrats. The Spanish women, too, were worth looking at: three of them came down to visit a merchant who came with us from Cadiz; the high head-dresses were the only peculiarity in their dress, but one of them was very fine-looking, and very unlike an Englishwoman. I should have thought her ladylike, only she spat with the most perfect indifference, just as ―――― would in C[ommon] R[oom]. We left Gibraltar at ten on Monday night, and had very calm beautiful weather for two days…. We got to Algiers [Thursday morning] about three, and it was then rough, cloudy, and blowing fresh. This is the most wretched, wicked-looking place I ever set eyes upon. I can associate its idea with nothing but a wasp’s nest. It is huddled together, leaving no apparent room for its streets; its windows are loop-holes, as if to fire through. All beyond its walls looks perfectly desolate, except a number of white specks, which are houses where the rich inhabitants retire in time of plague. The town itself is a mass of white, as perfectly white as a chalk quarry; and the monotony of the glare[96] is only relieved by the rust of weather-stains, which are not white-washed by the French so regularly as by the Moors.

‘The Quay, as every one knows, is a strong battery, expressly for the shelter of pirates; and, when one thought of the horrors that had been practised in that detestable place, and felt the personal discomfort of an approaching storm, and saw, for a foreground, the infamous tricoloured flag on the ships, the general impression was as much the reverse of favourable as can easily be fancied. A boat came alongside with the Vice-consul, for letters. His Excellency was an English Jew, and there was an half-starved Frenchman for his πάρεδρος. He was rowed by four fellows, of what race I know not…. Their features were perfect apathy, and looked like stuffed red leather more than flesh and blood. If we had touched any one of the crew we should have been in for a hundred days’ quarantine in every port of Europe, and yet the wretches had the impudence to insist on our slitting all the letters, to let out the cholera. We stayed an hour, and then started; and sure enough, the storm came. The wind was north-west, and blew right across from the Gulf of Lyons, which I shall always think more formidable than the Bay of Biscay. The wind lasted till we got under the lee of Sardinia; and what with the stink of the bilge-water, which was stirred up by the tossing, and the constant noise, and the difficulty of standing and sitting and eating and drinking, we were constantly wretched enough. My father spent the whole time in his berth; [Newman] and I the greater part of ours. But ills have their end. The sea and the stink subsided, and we made the rest of our voyage to Malta stilly and quickly, arriving there on Monday morning after breakfast. [Newman] does not think his health perceptibly improved yet,[97] but he has entirely got over sea-sickness, and has written an immense deal for the _Lyra Apostolica_.[98] He has written so many letters to his mother and sisters, that I need say no more about him. He will write to you soon. I know you will think this a very dull letter, as it is about places and not people; but we have been so little on shore, that I have not been able to indulge your taste. Kindest remembrances to O.[99] I will write to him soon.――Yours affectionately, R. H. F.’

From Malta also, on Christmas night, a letter was despatched to Dartington, addressed, apparently, to John Spedding Froude, which carries on the record of the travellers. All the Froudes, like all the Hares, could draw.

‘… There is so much that is picturesque and singular about this place, that I do not despair of occupation for all the fifteen days in drawing, if the weather is only tolerable. The boats, and the dresses, and the colours and forms of the buildings are all as good practice as anything I can fancy, and I shall not be sorry to have time on my hands for studying them at leisure. We shall be allowed to go about the harbour [in quarantine] as much as we like, and there are several places where we may land. This will have to start a day or two after our return, so you will not hear much more of Malta till the next packet. As yet I have made egregious failures in attempts to colour; indeed, I have had no opportunity of doing anything from nature, and recollection supplies one too indistinctly. My father has made many very interesting coast drawings as we have come along, but he has done nothing in a finished way.

‘_Corfu, Jan. 1._――We got here the day before yesterday, after a most interesting voyage. The sea has been as still as a lake, and we have had a light breeze in our favour; but it must be owned that we have sailed away from the fine weather. Ever since we got here it has rained torrents, and is now blowing a violent gale, so that we thank our stars we are in harbour. On Friday morning we (as you would say) made Zante on our larboard bow, at a distance of about fifty miles. The high land of Cephalonia appeared at the same time, so they kept her away three-quarters of a point, and made for the passage between the islands. The south point of Cephalonia is a very high mountain; it was covered with snow, which here and there appeared through the clouds. Zante is cliffy, and not so very unlike some of the Isle of Wight.[100] We got to the town just after dark, and went ashore to make out what we could. We went to a billiard-room, a coffee-house, the head inn, and two or three shops. Everything was filthy to a degree, but there seemed to be some really handsome houses, such as Sir John Vanbrugh might have built. The shops are all open to the street, and one would think that the shopkeepers had never taken more than coppers in their lives; yet in a tobacco shop, on asking the price of a cherry-stick pipe, which I should have guessed at twelve shillings in England, they told me it was one hundred dollars, and a midshipman who was with us, and had lived a great deal in those parts, said that it was not at all dear at the money. The mouthpiece was amber inlaid with turquoise, and in that miserable-looking shop there must have been thirty or forty more pipes as costly: I wonder where they get customers? We drank a bottle of Zante wine at the head inn, and very nice it was; on asking the price, the landlord most unaffectedly said there was nothing to pay, and when we gave him a shilling he seemed to think it was most munificent.