Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
repugnant to the feeling and ideas of almost all her members to a
man,――was certainly not a person to be tender in requiring compliance
with received views from another, or quick to call impudence in
another what in himself was the necessary adjunct of philosophy.’
From ‘MEMOIR OF JOSHUA WATSON,’ EDITED BY EDW. CHURTON, Archdeacon
of Cleveland. 2 vols. Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1861.
[By the kind permission of Messrs. J. Parker & Co.]
‘… The first clear indication of this new principle [a theory of
Catholic union, to which all other considerations were to bow] was
seen in the publication of the _Remains of R. H. Froude_, a young man
of great promise, Fellow of Oriel College, who died at the early age
of thirty-two, and of whose stray papers, letters, and remnants of
conversation, a full collection was published by J. H. Newman, then a
Fellow of the same College, now for some years past a member of the
Society of the Oratory in the Church of Rome. The first two volumes of
these _Remains_ were published early in 1838. The work never obtained
a wide circulation; but enough was done to give deep offence to many
minds, and to unsettle the principles of many more.
‘Those who know Richard Froude best knew that he was in the habit of
expressing himself, both by writing and in conversation, in strong,
pungent sentences, such as are not altogether uncommon with young men
of brilliant minds and vivacious temperament, and are often used by
them as much with the design of provoking answer and contradiction, as
that of conveying the speaker’s real sentiments. But when the Editor,
in his Preface to an unlimited and indiscriminate accumulation of such
winged words, claimed for them the consideration due to the deliberate
opinions of a matured reason, it was a mode of treatment which stamped
them with an importance not properly their own, and justified the
censure of those who without concerning themselves much for the
reputation of the dead, or making allowance for what was with too
little decorum brought before the public, saw the publication
announcing itself as an expansion of the principles of the _Tracts_.
And this claim was made, although poor Froude again and again declared
himself, in the pages of these volumes, as one whose mind was in a
state of progress and puzzle, sympathising at one time with Roman, at
another with Puritan, till, in a lengthened illness, and absence in
foreign lands, it fed upon its own solitary musings, with that morbid
dissatisfaction at all things which sometimes accompanies the decay of
vital power. However, the appearance of such an unreserved exposition
of distracted fancies was a great discouragement to the hopes which
had for a while found their centre at Oxford; and the disease of
Richard Froude’s mind seemed to have communicated itself to his more
distinguished Editor.’
From ‘WILLIAM GEORGE WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT,’ BY WILFRID WARD.
London: Macmillan & Co., 1889.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account