Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
‘M. Bunsen has pronounced upon our views, gathered from the _Arians_
(!), with singular vehemence. He says that if we succeed, we shall be
introducing Popery without authority, Protestantism without liberty,
Catholicism without universality, and Evangelism without spirituality.
In the greater part of which censure you doubtless agree!’
The all-but-dying invalid finished the long, able, dispassionate
review, entitled ‘Mr. Blanco White: Heresy and Orthodoxy,’ for the
printers. It appeared in time, in _The British Critic_ for January,
1836. It ends: ‘We must now, however, leave our argument imperfect,
hoping very shortly to recur to it.’ This is the colophon from Hurrell
Froude. It is diligent and collected, and keeps the colours boldly
flying after a fashion wholly characteristic. The manuscripts went in
sections to Newman.
‘In the last five days I have written forty of the enclosed
sixty-three pages. If the humour lasts, I may do the rest in a jiffy.
I have spent a week with Dr. Yonge…. [He] was not satisfied with the
effect of steel, and changed it for I know not what, three days ago;
since when I am decidedly stronger. But the Bishop of Llandaff[249]
has warned us against confounding succession with causation. If Rogers
will bring my Breviary, I shall be obliged. I shall be delighted if
Mozley comes with him. They will meet Wilson, though but for a day.’
The Breviary is the celebrated identical book, first studied under
Blanco White’s direction, the history of which is briefly given in the
_Apologia_, and which is, to Dr. Abbott, so important an agent in
determining Newman’s after-career. It may be assumed that Mr. Rogers
forgot to take it, that Christmastide, to Dartington, as it was on the
shelves of Hurrell’s rooms at Oriel when he died, and when Archdeacon
Froude asked Newman to choose a keepsake there. It is still at the
Oratory in Edgbaston.
A long letter to Newman from the Rev. R. F. Wilson, on Dec. 19,
contained, incidentally, no very cheery news of their friend,
succumbing to consumption of the throat.
‘It was a great pleasure to me to meet poor Froude, though he looks
sadly, and without any abatement of those symptoms which must make his
friends most anxious about him, appears weaker [by] a great deal than
when he was in Oxford. To me, he was a more interesting person than
ever, because I find that his peculiar way of thinking, and manner of
expressing himself, which I thought might only belong to him in health
and strength, continue just the same. I saw also Rogers there, for a
day.’
Froude himself ‘continues just the same,’ on paper. He was busily
hoisting sail in the offing, and quite calm about it. ‘I don’t know
that it does one any harm,’ he had written eighteen months before, ‘to
have the impression brought seriously before one that one is not to
see out the changes which seem to be at hand.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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