‘… Fundamentally agreeing with Froude, from the first, in the principles of religious fear, obedience, and self-distrust, Newman differed from him only in the expression and application of them; and on these points Froude’s mind was settled while Newman’s was still in flux. No wonder that, by degrees, Newman lost confidence in any utterance of his own unless Froude first stamped it with his approval. Did not Froude always take the lead, experimenting, as it were, on himself? And had not Newman repeatedly to confess that Froude was right, and he himself wrong? One reason for this was, that Froude, being of an æsthetic bent, instinctively turned from the Primitive Church, which was, to him, an affair of books, and of which he knew very little, to the Mediæval Church, with which he was in complete harmony, or to the Anglican Nonjurors, about whom he had some sympathetic knowledge. This gave to his notions a naturalness and a practicableness in which Newman’s were deficient. For this, and for other reasons, Froude seemed to be a seer in regions where Newman was only a groper; and so, in time, the latter came naturally not only to depend on the former, but also to avow his dependence so far as to declare his unwillingness to commit himself to anything definite till the man who could see had given it his imprimatur. Still, the brighter and more pleasing side of Froude’s character must not allow us to forget that his search after holiness implied not only something bordering on abjectness towards God, but also strife on earth, and the appearance of ill-will towards a great multitude of men. These qualities explain in part the secret of his power over Newman, who would not have allowed himself to be influenced by any but a detached soul holding aloof from all the world, and especially, perhaps, from the rabble, that “knoweth not the law.” But Froude was by far the more combative of the two, and appears to have acted on Newman, as on Keble, in the way of an inciting cause, or, to use his own metaphor, a “poker.”