Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
‘… Thinking that you may wish to know something of my concerns, and
wishing to know something of yours, … I send you the following. As to
myself, about which valuable thing I am most concerned, you must know
that I have at last found a κρησφύγετον in barley-sugar; only to think
that my stars should let me off so easily! Sucking has had a most
wonderful effect on me, and has removed nearly all that F[airford][89]
had left of tendency to irritation; I might say all, if I could suck
continually, but just now these east winds take advantage of casual
intervals, and remind me that I am not perfectly at liberty. However,
I have left off my handkerchief, and never feel the want of it; also,
I am up at half-past six every morning; and taking an enlarged view of
myself, I think my condition to be approved of.’
Up to July 31, Froude remained in Oxford, being and doing with all his
usual zest, writing his papers on architecture, proving a very
well-head of vitality to his friends, and ‘living his life.’ Could it
have been indeed as early as this that he cut across the preliminaries
described by Lord Blachford,[90] and paralysed an intended appeal to
Bishops and Deans by announcing that he, for one, meant to ‘get on the
box’ in person? This is thought to be the moment of Miss Giberne’s
inspiration. It would seem as if the date should be a year later. In
July of 1832 the Tutorial question was over; and there was no other
_agendum_ in debate between Froude and Newman. However that may be,
there in the handsome lady’s sketch-book is Hurrell, smoothly, almost
infantinely, mischievous, with one obedient Mozley to listen and abet;
there is Newman, at an angle of the ottoman, distinctly not surveying
with fond adoring gaze and yearning heart his friend (as he says he
does, in a poem, part of which, at least, was written that very week),
but back to back with him, sulking furiously, and putting on a silent
stare which sufficiently expresses human disapproval: that little
sudden void stare, entirely characteristic, as of one who is forced to
survey, for the time being, an endless vista of Siberian snows.
It was a boding time; the cholera was raging all about; Newman himself
was tired and dejected from overwork, and none too hopeful concerning
Hurrell’s health or the impending prospect of separation. Long after,
annotating his own correspondence at Edgbaston, he tells us something
special about the lines just referred to, in what may be called, from
a merely literary point of view, one of the most successful, though
one of the least known, of his shorter lyrics. Hurrell’s share in it
is no more, so to speak, than a tiny marginal portrait of him, tender,
in passing, as the work of some old Flemish illuminator. Newman
ascribes the origin of the last lines to this July. ‘With reference to
the memory of that parting, when I shook hands with him, and looked
into his face with great affection, I afterwards wrote the stanza:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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