It is a thousand pities that we can never have on our shelves the Froude of historical verity, to counterbalance the Froude of historical romance. Hurrell, so far as he got, was certainly all for ‘the ideas underlying history, and their organic connection,’ and was but poorly adapted for ‘the insertion of his own ideas into history … the professing to find in history what he had in reality put there.’[82] Is it not clear that such a fault may spring not from perverseness, but from the too pictorial eye? This the elder brother lacked, as likewise the other disadvantage of a magical prose style. That perturbing possession, the luckiest asset of the essayist, seems to delight in playing tricks on historians, for in the past, at least, the dullest have been the safest. As one who understood the dangers of style, Hurrell chides Newman for the hair-splitting preliminary method to which he was treating _The Arians_. ‘If you go on fiddling with your Introduction, you will most certainly get into a scrape at last!’ And then: ‘I have for the last five days been reading Marsh’s _Michaelis_, which I took up by accident, and have been much interested by it. I see that old Wilberforce[83] owes to it much of the profundity which I have before now been floored and overawed by. It has put many things into my head that I never thought of before.’ The first unmistakable symptoms of Hurrell’s chronic illness had developed by the January of 1832. ‘I don’t think he takes care of himself,’ Keble says anxiously, in a letter to Newman, shortly after his election to the Professorship of Poetry. And Hurrell himself had confessed to Newman, as it were, ‘how ill all’s here about my heart: but ’tis no matter.’ Hence the reply from Oxford, on the 13th.