he was open to higher influences
than those of logic, and in Keble he saw what subdued and won him to
boundless veneration and affection. Keble won the love of the whole
little society; but in Froude he had gained a disciple who was to be the
mouthpiece and champion of his ideas, and who was to react on himself
and carry him forward to larger enterprises and bolder resolutions than
by himself he would have thought of. Froude took in from Keble all he
had to communicate--principles, convictions, moral rules and standards
of life, hopes, fears, antipathies. And his keenly-tempered intellect,
and his determination and high courage, gave a point and an impulse of
their own to Keble's views and purposes. As things came to look darker,
and dangers seemed more serious to the Church, its faith or its rights,
the interchange of thought between master and disciple, in talk and in
letter, pointed more and more to the coming necessity of action; and
Froude at least had no objections to the business of an agitator. But
all this was very gradual; things did not yet go beyond discussion;
ideas, views, arguments were examined and compared; and Froude, with all
his dash, felt as Keble felt, that he had much to learn about himself,
as well as about books and things. In his respect for antiquity, in his
dislike of the novelties which were invading Church rules and
sentiments, as well as its creeds, in his jealousy of the State, as well
as in his seriousness of self-discipline, he accepted Keble's guidance
and influence more and more; and from Keble he had more than one lesson
of self-distrust, more than one warning against the temptations of
intellect. "Froude told me many years after," writes one of his friends,
"that Keble once, before parting with him, seemed to have something on
his mind which he wished to say, but shrank from saying, while waiting,
I think, for a coach. At last he said, just before parting, 'Froude, you
thought Law's _Serious Call_ was a clever book; it seemed to me as if
you had said the Day of Judgment will be a pretty sight.' This speech,
Froude told me, had a great effect on his after life."[14]

At Easter 1826 Froude was elected Fellow of Oriel. He came back to
Oxford, charged with Keble's thoughts and feelings, and from his more
eager and impatient temper, more on the look-out for ways of giving them
effect. The next year he became tutor, and he held the tutorship till
1830. But he found at Oriel a colleague, a