Basil, that blew the trumpet in Constantinople?’ When Newman sadly transferred himself to Oscott, in the February of 1846, he would have remembered, after his remembering habit, how strangely, yet naturally, in the Providence of God, he was keeping the tenth anniversary of the loss of his dearest friend, no part of whose office could be filled even by an Ambrose St. John, ‘whom God gave me when He took all else away.’ ‘Hurrell Froude lives,’ says Principal Fairbairn epigrammatically, ‘in Newman.’ It would be an interesting task for a biographer to examine and define the measure of response with which ‘the Vicar,’ in his historic seclusion, worked into one scheme his ideas, and the ideas bequeathed to him by the least ‘flinching’ Anglican in the world. Froude had managed to give Newman, (and with no more ceremonial pomp than one infant employs in tossing sea-shells to another,) the norm of every single one of his great theories. This short span beside that old age, this quick, forward-reaching, never-ripened thought beside the ‘long gestation’ of the sublime soul whom we know better, may not unfitly be compared to a keynote struck in a grace-note before the full major chord. The chord owes nothing of its position, or its compotent harmony, to the mere sweet hint which announces it and is instantaneously whelmed in it, but it certainly does owe to it almost all of what may be called its idiomatic beauty. To no educated ear is the chord with that apposition, and the chord without it, conceivably the same. It is his glory that Froude cannot be severed, early or late, from the superior genius once so ‘fain to be his heir.’ As he stands fast with what Mr. Wilfrid Ward has named ‘that great crisis of spiritual animation, unparalleled in our age and country,’ which has transformed the Church of England, and with his Achates, as that Achates was up to 1845, so he walks on with the white-haired Cardinal of all men’s honour, through whom a torrent of new life streamed, and streams, into the English-speaking children of the Apostolic See, but who ‘――came to Oxford and his friends no more.’ Newman’s unnecessary readiness to acknowledge any moral debt, was surely no small part of his delightful greatness. Never was it better justified than in his lifelong sense of obligation to the clear brain and pure devout heart of a young man of no celebrity, whose full significance is not past, but to come. To a Catholic, Froude has something yet finer than his ‘totality and universality of character.’ He has the grace of God. He stands in a mysterious place, ‘Beautiful evermore, and with the rays Of dawn on his white shield of expectation,’