He is the vision of a pilgrim entering from the Middle Ages, barely laying down his staff and wallet before turning roadwards again, yet managing to blurt out, irrespective of the tavern conversation, fragments of his own correlated thought, immemorial things which he, at least, seems never to have forgotten. He is no opportunist, and chooses neither the audience nor the hour. ‘What to assume and what to prove,’ as he says, do not sort themselves in his mind. He is only oracular. He instructs Newman, in relation to no particular topic whatever, but on a mere salutary general principle: ‘Do keep writing to Keble, and stirring his rage. He is my fire, but I may be his poker.’ His influence over Keble’s fearless intelligence, felt from the first, was ultimately very great. His influence over Newman will hardly bear analysis, for Newman and he were one: the gnomon and the disk of a dial, or the arrow and the bow of some busy archer. We have all seen just such influence as Froude, invalided, had upon the Movement, privately exercised by Ministers of State, or by wives with a ripe understanding of their husbands’ practical concerns. It is the uncatalogued and intangible power, almost a plaything to its possessor, least known among the powers which move human society; and, therefore, perhaps it is the grimmest reality of all. On September 9, Newman burst forth with the famous first sentence of his famous first Tract: ‘I am but one of yourselves, a Presbyter.’ Hurrell wrote no comment on the move; he was intimately aware of it from the beginning, and the earliest and hungriest reader. By the 16th, he is deep in study; there is a new historical theory to start, opening with an ironic reference to Mr. Keble’s ‘friends’: