e
they were supposed to represent in a marked way the spirit and character
of the movement, or to have exercised influence upon it. They ought not
to be overlooked in an account of it. One of them has been already
mentioned, Mr. Hurrell Froude. Two others were Mr. Isaac Williams and
Mr. Charles Marriott. They were all three of them men whom those who
knew them could never forget--could never cease to admire and love.
Hurrell Froude soon passed away before the brunt of the fighting came.
His name is associated with Mr. Newman and Mr. Keble, but it is little
more than a name to those who now talk of the origin of the movement.
Yet all who remember him agree in assigning to him an importance as
great as that of any, in that little knot of men whose thoughts and
whose courage gave birth to it.
Richard Hurrell Froude was born in 1803, and was thus two years younger
than Mr. Newman, who was born in 1801. He went to Eton, and in 1821 to
Oriel, where he was a pupil of Mr. Keble, and where he was elected
Fellow, along with Robert Wilberforce, at Easter 1826. He was College
Tutor from 1827 to 1830, having Mr. Newman and R. Wilberforce for
colleagues. His health failed in 1831 and led to much absence in warm
climates. He went with Mr. Newman to the south of Europe in 1832-33, and
was with him at Rome. The next two winters, with the intervening year,
he spent in the West Indies. Early in 1836 he died at Dartington--his
birthplace. He was at the Hadleigh meeting, in July 1833, when the
foundations of the movement were laid; he went abroad that winter, and
was not much in England afterwards. It was through correspondence that
he kept up his intercourse with his friends.
Thus he was early cut off from direct and personal action on the course
which things took. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that his
influence on the line taken and on the minds of others was
inconsiderable. It would be more true to say that with one exception no
one was more responsible for the impulse which led to the movement; no
one had more to do with shaping its distinct aims and its moral spirit
and character in its first stage; no one was more daring and more clear,
as far as he saw, in what he was prepared for. There was no one to whom
his friends so much looked up with admiration and enthusiasm. There was
no "wasted shade"[19] in Hurrell Froude's disabled, prematurely
shortened life.
Like Henry Martyn he was made by strong and even merciles
|