Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
In 1836, the ‘vanishing of such a spirit without sign’ was not to be
endured. It was the most natural thing in the world that all he had
written should be gathered together, that such a lover of books (as
Leigh Hunt says somewhere, in one of his happy literary retrospects),
should himself become a book. Hurrell became a singular book, as it
happened, made up, paradoxically, of matter never prepared by himself
for publication; and he and it were put forth as a party manifesto. It
may not be uninteresting to review the origin and character of _The
Remains of the late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of
Oriel College, Oxford_, printed by the Rivingtons in 1838 and 1839,
and consisting of four volumes octavo. The Editors, whose names do not
appear upon the title-page, were the Rev. John Keble and the Rev. John
Henry Newman. The latter is generally supposed to have done most of
the work; there are published letters of Keble’s to Sir John
Coleridge, and of Newman’s to Mr. Frederic Rogers, which go to show
that the idea of bringing out the _Remains_, and the initiatory
labour, including the first Preface, were Newman’s. But according to
Coleridge’s _Memoir_, Mr. Keble, as collaborator, wrote by far the
greater part of both Prefaces. For the very beautiful second one he
was certainly responsible.[266]
Of Part I. of these _Remains_, Vol. i. is devoted to a Private
Journal; Memoranda personal and philosophical; Letters to Friends; one
Latin and five English poems; seven pages of remembered miscellaneous
sayings; and a diary as Appendix. The companion volume is devoted to
Sermons complete and fragmentary; three Essays on subjects connected
with arts and sciences, and three on subjects purely ecclesiastical.
Part II., Vol. i., has five papers and some fragments, none of which
are on secular themes; and the final volume is given up to the History
of the Contest between Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and
Henry II., drawn from original documents and State Papers, left
unfinished by Hurrell Froude, and carried on and edited by the Rev.
James Bowling Mozley.
The collecting of ‘dearest Froude’s papers’ had begun before April,
1836; they were looked over at Hursley in July; by September, Newman,
otherwise busy as he was, writes that he is getting on with the
transcriptions, and that James Mozley has been hard at work during the
whole Vacation on S. Thomas of Canterbury. Archdeacon Froude sends up
his auxiliary supplies in October, from Dartington Parsonage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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