‘In hurrying on the birth of the new issue, both at Oriel and beyond it, the influence of Richard Hurrell Froude was very great. We have seen that he was elected a Fellow of Oriel in 1826. He was an Oriel man throughout, and had taken a double second in 1824. He was the eldest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes, and the eldest of three eminent brothers, all Oriel men: William, the engineer, born in 1810, and James Anthony, the historian, born in 1818. Hurrell was born in 1803. Always delicate, he fell into consumption early in the Thirties, and died in 1836. But though his career was short and enfeebled, and though there is little of him in print but what the affectionate appreciation of his friends put there, it is certain that Hurrell Froude had in his College an influence both intense and peculiar, which radiated widely, and was answerable for some of the most marked phenomena of Tractarianism. Froude was perhaps the most convinced, the most outspoken, the most throughgoing Mediævalist among the young men who thought the Church of England in an unsatisfactory condition; and he had the incommunicable and inexplicable gift of great personal influence, which, in his case, took the most irresistible of all its forms: that of impressing others with his equal pre-eminence in intellect and character. While the other Tractarian propagandists of the immediate future were recoiling in fear and anxiety from the advance of the Liberal and Erastian tide, Froude was ardently counselling reaction, loudly and scornfully proclaiming the loveliness and rightness of at least a large number of Roman opinions and practices, and laying a zealous axe at the root of the Protestantism of the Church of England. * * * * * ‘In fact, one can plainly see that the religious revival which was coming to the English Church was the real cause of the tutorial quarrel at Oriel in 1830. The Tutors had the new wine of it in their veins; they were the subjects of an enthusiasm which they were impelled to communicate, and which was intolerant of restraint; whilst the Provost [Hawkins] was, and was to remain, outside the range of the new ideas. In such a situation compromise was impracticable…. This change had certain important and well-marked results on the College. In the first place, it riveted the authority of Provost Hawkins, and made him for the rest of his life the dominant force in Oriel. In the second place, as the deprived Tutors remained Fellows and attached members of the College, it did nothing to reduce the spread of their influence in Common Room, and indirectly, in College generally, but rather tended to increase it, by opposition. Lastly, and most important of all, it dealt a blow to the intellectual prestige of the College, from which it never recovered during Hawkins’s long reign.’