And again, a little later, winding up an intimate letter in Latin to Keble, there is more of this pleasant heroine-worship, coupled with some feeling analysis and amusing self-portrayal. Hurrell’s repugnance to things German were a foregone conclusion, had he never expressed it.
‘… I could not find the places you referred me to in Miss Smith, but am happy to find that we sympathise in the extent of our admiration, if not in the sources; though indeed, I am willing to believe, both. But as for old Klopstock, I cannot read about him and his wives;[37] and am rather horrified at Miss S[mith’s] having taken so much trouble about him, or any other sentimental old German. What makes me admire Miss S[mith] so excessively, is more than I can give any intelligible account of: she either does not admire, or is not acquainted with my favourite books; and those that she fancies she admires (for I am sure she does it only in ignorance) are my inveterate enemies. Neither could I fix upon any passages in her own writings which would seem to justify me if I quoted them. But somehow I seem perfectly certain I know her intimately, and that I can trace the feelings in which all she says and does originates; and all this is so consistent, as far as it goes, with what I have imaged to myself as the archetype of human perfection, that I have invested her, in my imagination, with all its attributes….
‘Lloyd’s[38] immense catalogue of books, that he recommends as necessary, has frightened me beyond measure: but I am getting to be of your opinion, that to be fully occupied is almost necessary, in order to get through life with tolerable ease and comfort….’
Says the Editor of the Newman _Correspondence_, in entering upon the annals of the year 1826: ‘The Oriel election and Fellowship was this year a momentous one to Mr. Newman, as bringing him into intimacy with the friend whose influence he ever felt powerful beyond all others to which he had been subject.’ Newman writes of the election to his mother on March 31, 1826, in terms of convinced enthusiasm which are not unlike Crabb Robinson’s after encountering for the first time the youthful William Hazlitt. ‘By-the-bye, I have not told you the name of the other successful candidate:[39] Froude of Oriel. We were in grave deliberation till near two this morning, and then went to bed. Froude is one of the acutest and clearest and deepest men in the memory of man. I hope our election will be _in honorem Dei et sponsæ suæ ecclesiæ salutem_, as Edward II. has it in our Statutes.’ The Oriel electors had their own standards, and gloried in them. Fellowships depended hardly at all on the technical and the prescribed; indications of the scope and accuracy of acquired knowledge passed for next to nothing; but what did count, in Oriel’s golden days, was a man’s whole momentum and equilibrium, his relationship to the intellectual life, his mastery over his own faculties: ‘not what he had read, but what he was like.’ Originality, distinction, was the cachet, and Oriel College was the first in Oxford to throw open her unhampered Fellowships to the entire University. Like Whately, Thomas Mozley, and Newman himself, Froude who stood only moderately high in the books of the University examiners, had been preferred before candidates who were double-firsts. He took, as was but natural, an even more rapturous pleasure in the event than Newman had done. He wrote to Keble, when he was steadying himself under the impact of a lasting good fortune: