In this later Newman correspondence, as Miss Mozley the Editor of it remarks, ‘R. H. Froude appears more as critic than originator or author. His more intimate friends required his criticism, and rested on his judgment. In his own person, this faculty acted mainly as a check. He often speaks of trial and failure in his own attempts to bring out what was working in his mind; as, for instance: “I have tried to write a criticism on the Apollo [Belvedere], but cannot bring out my meaning, which is abstruse and metaphysico-poetical. I always get bombastic, and am forced to scratch out.” His critical faculty was too masterful to be practised upon himself, but when exercised for the benefit of friends to whom he looked up, he could give free license to a pungent pen, and yet leave the modern reader to understand how anxious those friends might well be to secure his comments, as long as they were attainable. Keble, in his own simple way, sends his papers to his old pupil to be overlooked by him; and Mr. Newman was more at ease with Froude’s _imprimatur_. Thus, he sends him draughts of papers; for example, “No. 2, Keble’s, No. 1, mine”; with the order: “criticise the whole very accurately in matter and style, and send it back by return of post.” Of course the state of Froude’s health made criticism more possible than authorship, but, also, different intellectual powers and functions are called into play.’[194] It is certainly noticeable enough, in all the intercourse of these years, between Keble, Newman and Froude, how the ordinary business of the University is completely ignored. It is like necromancy to remember that men were really still hastily reading the _Ethics_ by the fire, and emptying bottles, and, with their pipes, racing off to Shotover, through the white salve-like mud, for a constitutional. ‘The _Tracts_,’ says Mr. Mark Pattison sadly, ‘desolated Oxford life, and suspended, for an indefinite period, all science and humane letters, and the first strivings for intellectual freedom which had moved in the bosom of Oriel.’ Such æsthetic havoc was never caused in a city, unless under Savonarola, when all the wonted social graces went to the dust-bin, and works of art made acceptable fagots, and Christ was hailed, without legal precedent, King of Florence. On November 18, 1834, Newman resumes, in reference to complaints from Hurrell, ‘suffering under intolerable delays incident to distant correspondence in those days’: