‘As I came to know him in a more manly way, as a brother Fellow, friend, and collaborateur, the character of “ecclesiastical agitator” was of course added to this. In this capacity his great pleasure was taking bulls by their horns. Like the “gueux” of the Low Countries, he would have met half-way any opprobrious nickname, and I believe coined the epithet “Apostolical” for his party because it was connected with everything in Spain which was most obnoxious to the British public. I remember one day his grievously shocking Palmer of Worcester, a man of an opposite texture, when a council in J. H. N.’s rooms had been called to consider some memorial or other to which Palmer wanted to collect the signatures of many, and particularly of dignified persons, but in which Froude wished to express the determined opinions of a few. Froude stretched out his long length on Newman’s sofa, broke in upon one of Palmer’s judicious harangues about Bishops and Archdeacons and such like, with the ejaculation: “I don’t see why we should disguise from ourselves that our object is to dictate to the clergy of this country; and I, for one, do not want anyone else to get on the box!” He thought that true Churchmen must be few before they were many: that the sin of the clergy in all ages was that they tried to make out that Christians were many when they were only few, and sacrificed to this object the force derivable from downright and unmistakable enforcement of truth in speech or action.
‘As simplicity in thought, word, and deed formed no small part of his ideal, his tastes in architecture, painting, sculpture, rhetoric, or poetry were severe. He had no patience with what was artistically dissolute, luscious, or decorated more than in proportion to its animating idea, wishy-washy, or sentimental. The ornamental parts of his own rooms (in which I lived in his absence) were a slab of marble to wash upon, a print of Rubens’s “Deposition,” and a head (life-size) of the Apollo Belvedere. And I remember still the tall scorn, with something of surprise, with which, on entering my undergraduate room, he looked down on some Venuses, Cupids, and Hebes, which, freshman-like, I had bought from an Italian.