Living not apart like Keble, but in the same college, and meeting every day, Froude and Newman could not but be either strongly and permanently repelled, or strongly attracted.  They were attracted; attracted with a force which at last united them in the deepest and most unreserved friendship.  Of the steps of this great change in the mind and fortunes of each of them we have no record:  intimacies of this kind grow in college out of unnoticed and unremembered talks, agreeing or differing, out of unconscious disclosures of temper and purpose, out of walks and rides and quiet breakfasts and common-room arguments, out of admirations and dislikes, out of letters and criticisms and questions; and nobody can tell afterwards how they have come about.  The change was gradual and deliberate.  Froude’s friends in Gloucestershire, the Keble family, had their misgivings about Newman’s supposed liberalism; they did not much want to have to do with him.  His subtle and speculative temper did not always square with Froude’s theology.  “N. is a fellow that I like more, the more I think of him,” Froude wrote in 1828; “only I would give a few odd pence if he were not a heretic."[15] But Froude, who saw him every day, and was soon associated with him in the tutorship, found a spirit more akin to his own in depth and freedom and daring, than he had yet encountered.  And Froude found Newman just in that maturing state of religious opinion in which a powerful mind like Froude’s would be likely to act decisively.  Each acted on the other.  Froude represented Keble’s ideas, Keble’s enthusiasm.  Newman gave shape, foundation, consistency, elevation to the Anglican theology, when he accepted it, which Froude had learned from Keble.  “I knew him first,” we read in the Apologia, “in 1826, and was in the closest and most affectionate friendship with him from about 1829 till his death in 1836."[16] But this was not all.  Through Froude, Newman came to know and to be intimate with Keble; and a sort of camaraderie arose, of very independent and outspoken people, who acknowledged Keble as their master and counsellor.

“The true and primary author of it” (the Tractarian movement), we read in the Apologia, “as is usual with great motive powers, was out of sight....  Need I say that I am speaking of John Keble?” The statement is strictly true.  Froude never would have been the man he was but for his daily and hourly intercourse with Keble; and Froude brought to bear upon Newman’s mind, at a critical period of its development, Keble’s ideas and feelings about religion and the Church, Keble’s reality of thought and purpose, Keble’s transparent and saintly simplicity.  And Froude, as we know from a well-known saying of his,[17] brought Keble and Newman to understand one another, when the elder man was shy and suspicious of the younger, and the younger, though full of veneration for the elder, was hardly yet in full sympathy with what was most characteristic