f the place, the
leaders of the Oxford Movement, were frank reactionaries, who hated
the very name of reform. Even a reduction in the monstrous number of
Irish Bishoprics pertaining to the establishment was indignantly
denounced as sacrilege, and was the immediate cause of Keble's
sermon on National Apostasy to which the famous "movement" has been
traced. John Henry Newman was at that time residing in Oriel, not as
a tutor, but as Vicar of St. Mary's. He was kind to Froude for
Hurrell's sake, and introduced him to the reading set. The
fascination of his character acted at once as a spell. Froude
attended his sermons, and was fascinated still more. For a time,
however, the effect was merely aesthetic. The young man enjoyed the
voice, the eloquence, the thinking power of the preacher as he might
have enjoyed a sonata of Beethoven's. But his acquaintance with the
reading men was not kept up, and he led an idle, luxurious life.
Nobody then dreamt of an Oxford Commission, and the Colleges, like
the University, were left to themselves. They were not economically
managed, and the expenses of the undergraduates were heavy. Their
battels were high, and no check was put upon the bills which they
chose to run up with tradesmen. Froude spent his father's: money,
and enjoyed himself. The dissipation was not flagrant. He was never
a sensualist, nor a Sybarite. Even then he had a frugal mind, and
knew well the value of money. "I remember," he says in The Oxford
Counter Reformation, an autobiographical essay--"I remember
calculating that I could have lived at a boarding-house on contract,
with every luxury which I had in college, at a reduction of fifty
per cent."* He was not given to coarse indulgence, and idleness was
probably his worst sin at Oxford. But his innocence of evil was not
ignorance; and though he never led a fast life himself, he knew
perfectly well how those lived who did.

--
* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 180.
--

An intellect like Froude's seldom slumbers long. He had to attend
lectures, and his old love of Homer revived. Plato opened a new
world, a word which never grows old, and becomes fresher the more it
is explored. Herodotus proved more charming than The Arabian Nights.
Thucydides showed how much wisdom may be contained in the form of
history. Froude preferred Greek to Latin, and sat up at night to
read the Philoctetes, the only work of literature that ever moved
him to tears. Aeschylus