‘This man or that’ was not lacking, and there was work for him: work for ‘the bright, vivacious, and singularly lovable figures with whom the eyes of Oriel men were then familiarised.’[145] Mr. Charles Kingsley thought them, as it would appear, not ‘virile’: a necessary opinion for any ‘virile’ Kingsley to hold. So much depends upon definition! It was a passing conversational remark made by Hurrell Froude concerning the great Churchmen of the Middle Ages, that their portraits had ‘a curious expression as of neither man nor woman, a kind of feminine sternness.’ A very similar remark was made at almost the same moment by the prince of English metaphysical critics. Of the coincidence Froude was not aware; but his Editors, in a footnote, fail not to refer to it. ‘[Wordsworth’s] face is almost the only exception I know,’ said Coleridge, ‘to the observation that something feminine, (not effeminate, mind!) is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius.’[146] This angelic or epicene aspect is, indicatively, the most terrible force in the world. It is certain that the Tractarians lacked the girth, the gait, the entire and triumphant visibility of John Bull going out with his gun. They lived with abstract ideas, and came to look like them. ‘Mr. Froude, if anyone,’ wrote Newman anonymously in _The British Critic_ of April, 1839, ‘gained his views from his own mind.’ But indeed, as is implied, none of us ever gain our views from our own minds: views coming with an underived spontaneous air are born of a man’s superior attentiveness to the working Mind of things. Hurrell, pacing Trinity Gardens, his hand on Williams’ shoulder, with the off-hand edict: ‘Isaac, we must make a Row in the world!’ recalls to us another agitator of whimsical disinterestedness, Camille Desmoulins. Or he is speaking a too free translation of the message of high and urgent poetry which La Pucelle once poured into the ears of Durand Laxart at Domremy. (It is always of French genius that his genius reminds us.) In all the polemics of the day his voice is the Æolian one, fitful and laconic, unexpected and alarming, yet oddly sweet. He is very busy chastising and correcting himself; but that other strife going on is far more interesting: he is a soldier of fortune, he must fight, he must interfere. When the outriders of the whole sea of returning Catholicism charge at first singly and silently, then with uproar, along the levels of the sleeping Protestant kingdom, the Hurrell Froude who loved duty and hard work, and abhorred display and conspicuosity, rises, despite himself, a little dominant, a little spectacular. He is inevitably marked, to ear and eye, as the legendary ninth wave, the foamiest green breaker of the line, ever re-forming and breaking, so long as he is visible, brighter, taller, and farther in-shore than the rest. With the year 1833 he comes into public play, and vanishes almost as soon. To J. F. CHRISTIE, Esq., July 23, 1833.