Phillis Spedding did not long survive her return to England. She died at Dartington three days after the date of Hurrell’s letter, on June 14, 1835, in her twenty-sixth year. Her one little child, Edward Spedding, then aged eighteen months, grew up only to attain his majority, and to be buried in January, 1855, at Bassenthwaite, not with his mother. Thomas Story Spedding, living on at the manor which he had so romantically inherited, married again. Meanwhile, in Littlemore, Mrs. Newman was about to lay the corner-stone of her son’s Early English chapel, with the plans of which the architectural zeal of Mr. Thomas Mozley, the Vicar’s future brother-in-law, had much to do. The rumour that Hurrell Froude had designed it got some currency; and there is a mirth-provoking growl on the subject in the pages of that watchful worthy, the Rev. Peter Maurice of Yarnton, Chaplain of New College.[238] Upon the return of Newman and Froude from Rome in 1833, he says, ‘we soon found that the malaria of the Pontine marshes, the nondescript fogs of the fatherland of all heresy, began to develop their miasmata in a new diagnosis…. That edifice [Littlemore Church] was constructed from outlines and plans sketched out for the architect by an amateur friend of [Newman’s] own: the Rev. R. H. Froude. It was in a particular style of Church architecture which they were plotting to introduce. It was, in fact, the very first Church in modern times[239] that was ever consecrated with a stone altar, a stone cross, and credentia.’ Hurrell, however, at this very time, 1835, was busying himself with artistic needs nearer home. After his death, Archdeacon Froude wrote to Newman in one of his letters, which affectionately begged for a visit: ‘I hear you have a splendid Altar-table at Littlemore. That which dear Hurrell designed, and had executed for my chancel, is now in its proper place.’ This was in December, 1836. Hurrell’s Altar, practically modelled on the High Altar of Cologne Cathedral, has always been preserved as his gift at Dartington, and constantly used; it has undergone no alteration except that it had to be raised for convenience, after Archdeacon Froude’s death, as he was short, and both his successors have been very tall men. It was brought from the old Church to the new. Hurrell also changed the place of the chancel-screen in the Church now destroyed, moving it eastward, from the entrance to the choir, to enclose the rail at the Altar-foot, so that none but communicants passed beyond it: an irregular proceeding for an ecclesiologist. But it seems clear that he meant by the action to emphasise the sacredness of the Altar itself.