o 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, and 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 any
one 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 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 ad