‘_Marseilles, April 22._――This France is certainly a most delicious place: we landed in Hyères Bay, owing to a storm from the north-west, and found everything so warm and green that I could quite enter into John of Salisbury’s[129] feelings. The people, too, [are] so extremely civil that I cannot help hoping there may yet be the seven thousand in Israel, and that sometime or other we may be able to talk of _la belle France_ with some kind of pleasure. I feel like a great fool here, from not being able to talk French. In Italy half the population kept me in countenance, but here it is a constant humiliation. And what is worst, I can’t hope to make progress; for having learned the little I know by writing and not [by] speaking, I annex wrong-shaped words to all the sounds. It is like talking Latin[130] to a foreigner.’ Again, on May 23, to William Froude, is expressed further commendation of the French people, founded on the keenest instinctive understanding of them: an understanding even more unusual then than now. Newman, until later, was certainly far from sharing it, or wishing to learn to share it. The ordinary attitude of the contemporary Oxford mind was frankly, though playfully expressed, by the young W. R. Churton, some years before. He gallantly addresses France: ‘What have I seen in thee that should make me long to see thee again? Have I seen a gentleman from Calais to Beauvoisin? Have I seen one gleam of poetry in the country or its inhabitants?’[131] Hurrell Froude was ‘un-English’ enough to be arrested, but not repelled, while on the Continent, by the spectacle of extra-English human nature. We have heard him longing, at Zante, to ‘live among them a bit, and get into their notions.’ This beautiful and uncommon openness of mind stamps him an ideal traveller, despite his lack of opportunity; at no single point of a hurried route, beset with difficulties, could he look far below the surface of things. But it is strikingly inaccurate to say of him, as Mr. Mozley does, that he lacked not only opportunity, but curiosity, ‘to see the interior of either the political or the religious systems they came upon.’[132]