changes they remained
at bottom true to their paternal training. John Keble added to it great
attainments and brilliant gifts of imagination and poetry; but he never
lost the plain, downright, almost awkward ways of conversation and
manner of his simple home--ways which might have seemed abrupt and rough
but for the singular sweetness and charm of his nature. To those who
looked on the outside he was always the homely, rigidly orthodox country
clergyman. On Isaac Williams, with his ethical standard, John Keble also
impressed his ideas of religious truth; he made him an old-fashioned
High Churchman, suspicious of excitement and "effect," suspicious of the
loud-talking religious world, suspicious of its novelties and
shallowness, and clinging with his whole soul to ancient ways and sound
Church of England doctrine reflected in the Prayer Book. And from John
Keble's influence he passed under the influence of Thomas Keble, the
Vicar of Bisley, a man of sterner type than his brother, with strong
and definite opinions on all subjects; curt and keen in speech;
intolerant of all that seemed to threaten wholesome teaching and the
interests of the Church; and equally straightforward, equally simple, in
manners and life. Under him Isaac Williams began his career as a
clergyman; he spent two years of solitary and monotonous life in a small
cure, seeking comfort from solitude in poetical composition ("It was
very calm and subduing," he writes); and then he was recalled to Oxford
as Fellow and Tutor of his college, to meet a new and stronger
influence, which it was part of the work and trial of the rest of his
life both to assimilate and to resist.

For, with Newman, with whom he now came into contact, he did both. There
opened to him from intercourse with Newman a new world of thought; and
yet while feeling and answering to its charm, he never was quite at ease
with him. But Williams and Froude had always been great friends since
the reading party of 1823, in spite of Froude's audacities. Froude was
now residing in Oxford, and had become Newman's most intimate friend,
and he brought Newman and Williams together. "Living at that time," he
says, "so much with Froude, I was now in consequence for the first time
brought into intercourse with Newman. We almost daily walked and often
dined together." Newman and Froude had ceased to be tutors; their
thoughts were turned to theology and the condition of the Church. Newman
had definitely bro