‘Wilson, Ryder, Wilberforce, Harding, spent several days here, with a quantity of other contemporaries, and Hurrell Froude arrived just in time from Barbados to cut into the middle of it. It quite surprises me how little people change! All these gentry, married and single, were so exactly what they always had been, that I could hardly believe I was not a freshman again. The only painful thing was that I fear Barbados has not done much for Froude. I was quite shocked to see him, but I suppose I had been too sanguine; his wretched thinness struck me more than it had ever done. They say, however, that no one ever gains flesh in the West Indies, but that it tells when they come back: I most earnestly trust it may be so. He talks of spending the winter at Rome again, going straight there, and coming straight back. He certainly cannot spend it in England. I cannot describe the kind of sickness I felt in looking at him when just the first meeting was over. I suppose it is a hopeful sign that his spirits are just as high as they always were; at least, were so when he first came here: for I am afraid we must look for a change in that, as Newman tells me he has heard to-day that his sister who was so ill is given over. I have not seen him since his hearing the news. However, I am getting mopish.’[233] William Froude was still in Oxford also, having moved into Hurrell’s vacant rooms. Says the Rev. Thomas Mozley, in his most entertaining book:[234] ‘William Froude gave his heart in with his brother’s work at Oriel, though his turn even then was for science…. He was the chemist, as well as the mechanist of the College. His rooms on the floor over Newman’s were easily distinguishable … by the stains of sulphuric acid (I think) extending from the window-sills to the ground. The Provost must sometimes have had to explain this appearance to his inquiring guests, as they could not but observe it from his drawing-room window.’ With Hurrell and William, during these May days, was Anthony Froude, a boy of seventeen, coming up to Oriel with his private Tutor (with whom he was reading in the neighbourhood) in order to see his eldest brother. ‘When I went into residence at Oxford my brother was no longer alive. He had been abroad almost entirely for three or four years before his death; and although the atmosphere at home was full of the new opinions, and I heard startling things from time to time on Transubstantiation and suchlike, he had little to do with my direct education. I had read at my own discretion in my father’s library.’[235] Anthony matriculated during the early December of this very year, two months before Hurrell died. Perhaps not many College rooms have known three such notable successive occupiers of one family, each of strong idiosyncrasy, and alike in nothing whatever but in personal charm.