It must have been building during the last year of Hurrell’s life, and no doubt with his ‘very managing sort of mind’ he worked into it some of his rather primitive Gothic theories. There still is the home which Mary Spedding’s love built, where age and poverty have privacy and peace, and roses at every window, and thankful sweet remembrance of human kindness, as in the ancient time. Away from home, and without his mother, Hurrell fell silent enough; and his sadness would have hurt and corroded him, had it not been for the exquisite friendship which sprang up between him and his tutor at Oriel. That tutor was John Keble. It is pleasant to think of these two, with their spiritual foreheads and strong chins, in that fashionable Georgian College full of decanters and gold tufts, and ‘rows in quad.’ No one in all England whom Hurrell Froude in his youth was likely to know could have so fostered in him, even by his unconscious presence, whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. According to Mr. J. A. Froude’s _Short Studies_ account, there was no very high level of supernatural religion at Dartington Parsonage. ‘My father,’ he says, ‘was a High Churchman of the old school. The Church itself he regarded as part of the Constitution, and the Prayer-Book as an Act of Parliament which only folly or disloyalty could quarrel with.’ This theory perfectly harmonised with the wonted order and general practice fixed for a century before. The Royal Arms, flanked by the lamentable monuments of all the local gentry, dominated the chancel; the Squire’s pew had its fat cushions, and a stove in the middle, and was walled away from any view of the ignored Communion-table chastely covered with green baize; plebeian hats were piled in the Font, and there was a ‘national custom of bending forward in Church,’ as an almost too fond concession to Christian etiquette. Truthful observers have given us the whole catalogue in print; and it has been corroborated on every side within living memory. The finer spirits who did not turn infidel must have felt all this ugliness to be dreary and hideous enough, though perhaps necessary to feed the sacred spite against the Middle Ages, so Popishly ‘dark’ with candles and incense-coals, pageants and bright Alleluias, brought into the service of God. But to no one in the Church of England before the Oxford Movement, did it seem an abnormal state of things. Nor was it so, dogma being dead. When poor Hurrell’s decided opinions had formed, he must have felt himself in some domestic difficulty. Ritual was nothing to him except as the language of belief: scant where that is feeble, full where that is steadfast and profound; how it can be anything else to man is not quite apparent to an inquiring mind. As he never lived to work out his beliefs very far, he had no drastic changes to suggest in the local ordinances, but he must have dedicated some uphill work to the excellent parent whom he truly reverenced, and