in speech; intolerant of all that seemed to threaten wholesome teaching and the interests of the Church; and equally straightforward, equally simple, in manners and life.  Under him Isaac Williams began his career as a clergyman; he spent two years of solitary and monotonous life in a small cure, seeking comfort from solitude in poetical composition ("It was very calm and subduing,” he writes); and then he was recalled to Oxford as Fellow and Tutor of his college, to meet a new and stronger influence, which it was part of the work and trial of the rest of his life both to assimilate and to resist.

For, with Newman, with whom he now came into contact, he did both.  There opened to him from intercourse with Newman a new world of thought; and yet while feeling and answering to its charm, he never was quite at ease with him.  But Williams and Froude had always been great friends since the reading party of 1823, in spite of Froude’s audacities.  Froude was now residing in Oxford, and had become Newman’s most intimate friend, and he brought Newman and Williams together.  “Living at that time,” he says, “so much with Froude, I was now in consequence for the first time brought into intercourse with Newman.  We almost daily walked and often dined together.”  Newman and Froude had ceased to be tutors; their thoughts were turned to theology and the condition of the Church.  Newman had definitely broken with the Evangelicals, to whom he had been supposed to belong, and Whately’s influence over him was waning, and with Froude he looked up to Keble as the pattern of religious wisdom.  He had accepted the position of a Churchman as it was understood by Keble and Froude; and thus there was nothing to hinder Williams’s full sympathy with him.  But from the first there seems to have been an almost impalpable bar between them, which is the more remarkable because Williams appears to have seen with equanimity Froude’s apparently more violent and dangerous outbreaks of paradox and antipathy.  Possibly, after the catastrophe, he may, in looking back, have exaggerated his early alarms.  But from the first he says he saw in Newman what he had learned to look upon as the gravest of dangers—­the preponderance of intellect among the elements of character and as the guide of life.  “I was greatly delighted and charmed with Newman, who was extremely kind to me, but did not altogether trust his opinions; and though Froude was in the habit of stating things in an extreme and paradoxical manner, yet one always felt conscious of a ground of entire confidence and agreement; but it was not so with Newman, even though one appeared more in unison with his more moderate views.”