To Newman, on Sept. 27, 1829, he writes more of St. Kevin’s dismal and delightful habitation, and ends with the praises of his mother’s county. ‘I got to Cumberland about ten days since, and I can safely assert that it exceeds anything that imagination can conjure up. I don’t mean that the extensive views of lake and mountain are so especially splendid, for, when the scene is on so large a scale, the trees and rocks become deplorably insignificant, woods seem little better than furze brakes; but, in rambling along the brooks and waterfalls, one comes to such excessively romantic corners, that they have quite put me out of love with Devonshire. The only thing which I desiderate is a Church steeple here and there in the valleys; for the worst of it is, that very few of the Parish Churches here are in exterior little better than a decent barn. What a horrid-looking scribble this is! and I know it is full of false spellings of all sorts, which will in many places make it unintelligible.’ To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Feb. 5, 1830. ‘My Lectures this Term are less fatiguing than they have ever been yet, and there are fewer men that one cannot take an interest in. I have a set of very nice men in Pindar, which I am glad to be forced to get up: it certainly is one of the most splendid organs of Tory feeling that I have come in contact with! Don’t you think he had the republican artificial style in his head when he talked about κόρακες ὣς ἄκραντα γαρύετον Διὸς πρὸς ὄρνιχα θεῖον?’ All was grist which came to this preoccupied critic’s mill. He had an unaffected fondness for the classics. His theory about the poet whom he loved and understood best, and whom he is always quoting, is that he was a shy pastoral lyrist driven by officious friends into the epic field. Says Newman in a passing note of interest: ‘It was [Froude’s] notion that Horace and others used to (what is now called) patronise Virgil, as a man who really had a great deal in him; but who, the pity was, would not conform himself to the habits of society, and so lost opportunities of influence. So they set him upon the _Æneid_, to make something of him.’[72] On Easter Monday, 1830, the Rev. R. H. Froude preached in the pulpit of S. Mary-the-Virgin, before the University, his sermon on Knowledge. His quiet sober sermons, of which no fewer than twenty appear complete in the _Remains_, are to a reader searching, pitiless, unforgetable. The undergraduate, however, must have ‘disvenerated’ them.