Something may be added concerning the illustrations. William Brockedon, before he was famous, once started to paint a life-size head in oil of Hurrell, then aged about eleven. It was left unfinished, and is now in the possession of the young sitter’s namesake and nephew, R. H. Froude, Esq., of Bernstein, Newton Abbot, by whose kindness a half-tone ‘restoration’ of it serves as frontispiece to this book. Outside a casual pencil sketch, it is the only portrait at present known of Hurrell Froude; nor has it ever before been reproduced, save once as a small scratchy characterless detail of a Keble College panorama. The painting was unfortunately abandoned while in its half-chaotic condition: eyebrows and ears are but barely indicated; the entire background, the collar, a portion of the hair growing so wilfully on the large shapely head, remarkable then and always for its even convexity, are a mere disordered wash; and it was difficult to follow, and to fix by process after process, a vision of the beautiful boy, with his melancholy and his racial fire. No idealisation, as need hardly be said, has been attempted. Patience and sincerity, brought to a rather discouraging task, have succeeded, in some measure, in recapturing an imperfect image, and in having it recognised (so far as a man can be recognised in a child), with gratified pleasure, by the one or two known to the Editor who are the enviable rememberers of Hurrell Froude. The reduction of the original head to an almost miniature size justified itself at once in the disappearance of many blemishes. The print from which the block was made is an outcome of the photographic skill and artistic feeling, now historic in England and beyond it, of Mr. Frederick Hollyer. The ‘casual pencil sketch’ just mentioned figures also in this book, and has in even higher degree the preciousness of a unique thing: for the reproduction is made directly from an unaltered original in a portfolio of 1832. Students of that period in England will recall Miss Maria Giberne, the ‘Queen of Tractaria,’ the animated, romantic, and loyal friend of the Newmans, who followed her art with long devotion, and became, later, Sister Maria Pia in the Visitation Convent at Autun, where she died at a great age. Of her, in her early prime, one who knew her well wrote: ‘[Maria Giberne] was always a most excellent talker and narrator, but her great power lay in the portraits she did in chalks. At a very short sitting, and even from memory, she would draw a portrait which was at least perfectly and undeniably true. I have heard her drawings criticised, and her drapery called conventional, but her faces, to my apprehension, were proof against all criticism. Perhaps they are better in outline than when filled up and tinted…. Her interest in the whole [Tractarian] circle was insatiable, and there was hardly anything she would not do and dare for a sight of one she had not yet seen.’[4]