Hurrell Froude in the development of his peerless ease and naturalness. To go further, it may truly be said that one caught up the living accent of the other. As a good latter instance, take Newman’s famous passage in the _Apologia_ about ‘seeing a ghost’ when the point raised in an article on the Donatists first arrested him in 1839. The echo is yet clearer in a contemporary letter. ‘It gave me the stomach-ache,’ he says. Such sportive phraseology sounds the majestic capacity of educated human expression. But sportive phraseology had its disadvantages, when it was sent forth broadcast to ‘dictate to the clergy of this country,’ or contribute towards ‘the picture of a mind’ known by the picturers to be chastened and grave. The innumerable chapters of the _Remains_ which were sober as a monochrome were quite overborne, in popular estimation, even where that estimation inclined to friendliness, by some few prancing words or lines. The amice and cope of the stately Muse of Theology symbolised nothing to the carpers who believed that they had once caught a handmaid of hers in the neat no-drapery of the _corps de ballet_. Indisposed to look below the surface of Froude’s puzzling temperament, they found only effrontery in his clear, terse, vivacious call, and only dulness in his underlying mood, master of statement and definition, and of armoured synthesis. It was not altogether their fault: because his slang, it may as well be admitted, constitutes a defect of character. It was a conscious revolt against all that goes to make up ‘donnishness,’ and in so far an element of strength as well as of comedy; but it was also the makeshift of a man who contemned himself almost to the point of eccentricity, and who often could not bear without a mocking grimace, the serious utterance of his most serious thought. Keble was full of fun, but Keble had no Hurrellisms, no ‘little language.’ With the other, it is the note of a certain spiritual unrest; an impiety against his own nature which all sensitive human nature resents in some degree: the jest, indeed, of a philosopher who never lost courage, but who never found joy. Self-valuation and its calmly pompous accents are understood, and even commended, all over the intellectual world. But this bitter mood, as of a Cabinet Council plus the Court fool, is too strange and new. There are those now, as there were then, whom it shocks and deters.