‘Schoolboys’ friendships are often intense and romantic. Those of Newman and his circle were passionately deep and warm, more like those of boys, in some respects, than of men; perhaps still more like those of women who live aloof from the world in the seclusion of mutual intimacy: intimacy suffused with the fascinating but hectic brightness of a sort of celibate consecration to each other, apart from any thought of stronger or more authoritative human ties that might some time interfere with their sacrament of friendship. This _morbidezza_ of moral complexion and temperament, this more or less unnatural and unhealthy intensity of friendship, was a marked feature in Newman’s relations with those around him. There is no doubt a touching side to this feature in the Tractarian Society of Oxford. Dean Church speaks of “the affection which was characteristic of those days.” … Of the mutually feminine attachment which bound Newman and Froude together, there is no need to say more…. The _Apologia_ sets it forth all the more fully because Froude was no longer living…. Newman’s was a characteristically feminine nature: it was feminine in the quickness and subtlety of his instincts, in affection and the caprices of affection, in diplomatic tact and adroitness, and in a gift of statement and grace of phrase which find their analogies in the conversation, in the public addresses, and not seldom in the written style, of gifted women…. Hurrell Froude, his chosen and most congenial friend, was more feminine still than Newman, feminine in his faults as well as in his gifts and his defects. For sympathy and mutual intelligence the two were wonderfully well assorted…. It was a saying of Charles Kingsley … that all the Tractarian leaders were wanting in virility: _i.e._, not so much effeminate as naturally more woman-like than masculine.’ From ‘HISTORICAL NOTES ON THE TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT, A.D. 1833-1845,’ by FREDERICK OAKELEY, M.A., Oxon., Priest of the Archdiocese of Westminster. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1865. [By the kind permission of Sir Charles W. A. Oakeley, Bart., and of Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co.]