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 Belvidere.  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.

He was not very easy even under conventional vulgarity, still less under the vulgarity of egotism; but, being essentially a partisan, he could put up with both in a man who was really in earnest and on the right side.  Nothing, however, I think, would have induced him to tolerate false sentiment, and he would, I think, if he had lived, have exerted himself very trenchantly to prevent his cause being adulterated by it.

He was, I should say, sometimes misled by a theory that genius cut through a subject by logic or intuition, without looking to the right or left, while common sense was always testing every step by consideration of surroundings (I have not got his terse mode of statement), and that genius was right, or at least had only to be corrected here and there by common sense.  This, I take it, would hardly have answered if his trenchancy had not been in practice corrected by J.H.N.’s wider political circumspection.

He submitted, I suppose, to J.H.N.’s axiom, that if the movement was to do anything it must become “respectable”; but it was against his nature.

He would (as we see in the Remains) have wished Ken to have the “courage of his convictions” by excommunicating the Jurors in William III.’s time, and setting up a little Catholic Church, like the Jansenists in Holland.  He was not (as has been observed) a theologian, but he was as jealous for orthodoxy as if he were.  He spoke slightingly of Heber as having ignorantly or carelessly communicated with (?) Monophysites.  But he probably knew no more about that and other heresies than a man of active and penetrating mind would derive from text-books.  And I think it likely enough—­not that his reverence for the Eucharist, but—­that his special attention to the details of Eucharistic doctrine was due to the consideration that it was the foundation of ecclesiastical discipline and authority—­matters on which his mind fastened itself with enthusiasm.

FOOTNOTES: 

[18] I ought to say that I was not personally acquainted with Mr. Froude.  I have subjoined to this chapter some recollections of him by Lord Blachford, who was his pupil and an intimate friend.