that Keble will refuse the Divinity Professorship at Oxford if it be proffered him, and flies to Froude as to one who can help to prevent that calamity. ‘I dread lest he should decline it. I write to you, that if you agree with me, you may write to him at once. For myself, I should go by your judgement, if such a thing occurred to me…. _Carissime_, I think I may say with a clear conscience I have no desire for it, and, had I my choice, would decide that the offer should not be made to me. I am too indolent, and like my own way too well, to wish it. I should be entangled in routine business, which I abhor. I should be obliged to economise,[260] and play the humbug, in a way I should detest, and I have no love for the nuisance of house and furniture, adding up bills, settling accounts, hiring servants, and getting up the price of butcher’s meat. I have the unpopularity, the fame, of being a party man, [with] the care of Tracts and the engagements of agitation. I am more useful as I am; but Keble is a light too spiritual and subtle to be seen unless put upon a candlestick.’ There is a most affectionate ending to his letter sent to the post on Candlemas Day. ‘Θάρσει, φίλον ἦτορ You could not but get weaker this weather, so confined.’ Meanwhile Hurrell had written ‘the last letter he wrote to me, perhaps the last letter he wrote at all.’ It is dated Jan. 27, 1836; the flow of it, the wonted pace, is gallant as usual, though it held both serious criticism and sad news. ‘You may perhaps have seen in the papers,’ he says to Newman, that my grandmother died, the 14th of this month. She retained her faculties to the last, and seems to have undergone the minimum of suffering which death requires. She was within a month or two of eighty-nine.’ This was his father’s mother, Phillis Hurrell. ‘It is very encouraging about the Oxford Tracts, but I wish I could prevail on you, when the second edition comes out, to cancel or materially alter several. The other day accidentally put in my way the Tract on “The Apostolical Succession in the English Church”; and it really does seem so very unfair, that I wonder you could, even in the extremity of οἰκονομία and φενακισμὸς have consented to be a party to it.[261] The Patriarchate of Constantinople, as everyone knows, was not one “from the first,” but neighbouring Churches voluntarily submitted to it, in the first instance, and then by virtue of their oaths remained its ecclesiastical subjects; and the same argument by which you justify England and Ireland would justify all those Churches in setting up any day for themselves. The obvious meaning of the canon [of Ephesus] is that Patriarchs might not _begin_ to exercise authority in Churches _hitherto_ independent, without their consent.