‘Christie tells me you have had a letter from poor Blanco White, pleased rather than otherwise with [my] review,[262] and mistaking it for yours, and sending you a copy of the book. Poor fellow: I should much like to know in what tone he wrote; it must have been a painful thing answering him…. I don’t gain flesh, in spite of all the milk. Indeed, I suspect that in the last six weeks I have lost a good deal, but the symptoms remain the same.’ It is in this letter that Froude arranges for the continued dedication of the accumulated dues from his own Fellowship to the propagation of the Cause dear to his heart. ‘So spend away, my boy,’ he calls cheerfully to Newman, ‘and make a great fuss, as if your money flowed in from a variety of sources!’ It was his valediction. Archdeacon Froude, early in February, leaves a blank on the last page of his communication to Newman, ‘for your regular correspondent to fill.’ Then comes the ominous postscript: ‘Hurrell wishes me to say that he has nothing particular to say just now, but that you shall hear from him in three or four days. He has received your two letters. And now (as he will not ask to see what I may write), I will tell you in a few words that my fears for him have increased considerably within the last week. There can be now no doubt that he has been losing ground, that he is much thinner than when Mr. Rogers left us, and as evidently weaker…. He is generally cheerful, sleeps well, and takes a sufficient quantity of food.’ Newman’s thirty-fifth birthday came on February 21, and upon that day, absorbed as he now became in fighting Hampdenism, he penned a loving letter of ‘long, long thoughts’ to his favourite sister Jemima, betrothed to John Mozley. ‘Thank my Mother and Harriet for their congratulations upon this day. They will be deserved, if God gives me grace to fulfil the purposes for which He has led me on hitherto in a wonderful way. I think I am conscious to myself that, whatever are my faults, I wish to live and die to His glory; to surrender wholly to Him as His instrument, to whatever work, and at whatever personal sacrifice, (though I cannot duly realise my own words when I say so). He is teaching me, it would seem, to depend on Him only; for, as perhaps Rogers told you, I am soon to lose dear Froude: which, looking forward to the next twenty-five years of my life, and its probable occupations, is the greatest loss I could have. I shall be truly widowed; yet I hope to bear it lightly.’