Says Mr. Thomas Mozley,[63] referring to this time, and to tastes shared in common among Oriel men: ‘I think we all of us found it easier to admire and even to criticise, than to design. Keble, Froude, and Ogilvie undertook a memorial of William Churton, to be placed in S. Mary’s. It was to be simple, modest, and unobtrusive, like the subject. Whether the result carried out this idea, I leave others to say,’ If we are to judge from a letter of Hurrell’s addressed to Keble, the first design emanated from Newman, though drawn by himself. ‘I don’t make much progress in my design for C[hurton’s] monument,’ he writes on May 23, 1829. ‘O[gilvie] decides on its being Gothic; and if this is the case, it will never do to let it take its chance in the hands of a statuary.[64] Yet the responsibility of doing it one’s self makes me so fastidious that I cannot settle on anything,’ He had thought of falling back upon ‘the sort of niches which are used to hold statues of saints, or [stoups for] holy water: somehow it does not seem quite congruous to make one of these merely to frame an inscription.’ However, he draws a narrow pointed arch over a tall pedestal supporting a plain cross, on the suggestion of Newman, adding that he likes it especially, though it may be a bit eccentric.[65] ‘It is to stand in the wall over one of the doorways, between the blank window on the south side, and the window in which the gallery terminates. This is meant to be represented standing under an arch cut out in the wall.’ There were not many Englishmen attempting Early English decoration in 1829. The memorial to William Ralph Churton, Fellow of Oriel, aged twenty-seven, _phthisi eheu præreptus_, is to be found in S. Mary’s Church, though not in the position allotted it in this letter; and the big ugly white sarcophagus with fussy details in high relief on a grey ground is certainly no design of Hurrell Froude’s. Froude’s intimate correspondence with Newman began in 1828, their friendship having been forming since 1826. To all to whom the latter spoke or wrote with affection, as Miss Mozley reminds us, he was ever open and confiding. ‘But there is distinction in his confidences. Thus to his mother he writes what it would not occur to him to say to anyone else: experiences, sensations, and odd encounters; dreams, fancies, and passing speculations: while to Hurrell Froude, on another field altogether, there is the same absolute trust, and unlocking of the heart.’[66] Sometimes, in the early letters, the correspondent at Dartington feels impelled to continue his autobiography, in default of anything better to deal with. ‘When I come to consider my resources,’ he says in his smiling mock-grandiose way, ‘I feel that they will not prove commensurate with my malignity, and that I shall not be able even to bore you with success.’ To the Rev. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, Aug. 12, 1829.