Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
Froude’s other contributions to the _Tracts_ were No. 9, On Shortening
the Church Services; No. 59, Church and State (incorporated in the
_Remains_ as the concluding section of State Interference in Matters
Spiritual); and No. 63, on The Antiquity of Existing Liturgies. The
last-named was intended to display the novel features of the Communion
Service in the Book of Common Prayer, as contrasted with those Uses
having inter-resemblance and an unbroken Apostolic derivation. It is
shown that every Ordo except the English contains a memento of the
dead; a sacrificial oblation; and a prayer ‘that God may make the
bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ.’ The method adopted by
Froude in printing the Forms of Consecration is that of the parallel
column: an early instance of the employment of that practical and
sometimes deadly modern device. He calls the Tract, elsewhere, ‘my
analysis of Palmer,’ and it was certainly fitted to concentrate fresh
attention on Mr. Palmer’s _Origines Liturgicæ_, as well as on the norm
of the matter it deals with.
Hurrell’s hands were full of writing in 1833; and being so busied with
larger matters, he ceased to compose and preach sermons. Two very fine
sombre ones, on S. John Baptist, and Riches a Temptation, date from
June of this year; but they were his last. His true work lay in a less
trodden field. The strong essays signed ‘F.’ in _The British Magazine_
are in a happier vein than any of the sermons, and far more
spontaneously worded. Like Dr. Johnson, Hurrell had a writing
language, and a talking language which made faces at it. The only
papers of his which approach in animation the unconventional
utterances of his living voice and of all his letters, are just those
upon historic-ecclesiastical, not secular subjects. There he sends up
rockets too, though with a certain resigned decorum, and would have
filled the sky had he not been curbed, as time went on, both by Rose
and by Newman.
He came up to Oriel on October 5. Newman, now in the thick of affairs,
and overjoyed to have him close at hand, writes privately to Keble,
whom it ‘grieved to the heart’: ‘I fear that Calvert,[157] whom you
may recollect here, and a physician now, has pronounced about Froude
(not _to_ him) a judgment so unfavourable that I cannot bear to dwell
upon it, or to tell it. Pray exert your influence to get him sent to
the West Indies. I know he has a great prejudice against it; but,
still, what other place is hopeful? They say Madeira is not. He might
take a cargo of books with him. _N.B._――Could you not manage to send
Isaac Williams too?’ On Oct. 26, Hurrell left Oxford for home, Keble
going with him as far as Bath. He sailed away on his second long
voyage a month later. During the interval, he takes up his tireless
pen.
To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Oct. 29, 1833.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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