It is nevertheless true that this self-centred spirit was, at least in early life, impressionable and open to the influence of others.  His friendship with Hurrell Froude and Keble affected his opinions considerably:  and still more potent was the pervading intangible influence of Oxford—­the academic atmosphere.  It cannot indeed be said that the University was at this time in a healthy condition.  Mark Pattison has described with caustic contempt the intellectual lethargy of the place, and the miserable quality of the lectures.  Oxford was still de facto a close clerical corporation, and in most colleges ‘clubbable men’ rather than scholars were chosen for the fellowships.  Oriel won its unique position by breaking through this tradition, and also by making originality rather than success in the university examinations the main qualification for election.  But even at Oriel, and among the ablest men, there was great ignorance of much that was being thought and written elsewhere.  Knowledge of German was rare.  Even the classics were not read in a humanistic spirit.  ’Of the world of wisdom and sentiment—­of poetry and philosophy, of social and political experience, contained in the Latin and Greek classics, and of the true relation of the degenerate and semi-barbarous Christian writers of the fourth century to that world—­Oxford, in 1830, had never dreamt.[83] Theological prejudice in fact distorted the whole outlook of the resident fellows, and confounded all estimation of relative values.  Newman never, all through his life, took a step towards overcoming this early prejudice.  He imagined a golden age of the Church, or several golden ages, and found them in ‘the first three centuries,’ in the time of Alfred the Great or of Edward the Confessor, or in the seventeenth century.  He was only sure that the sixteenth century was made of much baser metal.  This unhistorical idealisation of the past, even of a barbarous past, was very characteristic of Newman and his friends.  They bequeathed to the Anglican Church the strange legend of an age of pure doctrine and heroic practice, to which it should be our aim to ‘return.’  The real strength of this legend lies in the fact that it has no historical foundation.  The ideal which is presented as a return or a revival is nothing of the kind, but a creation of our own time, projected by the imagination into the past, from which it comes back with a halo of authority.  Newman had his full share of these illusions.  In his youth and prime he was more of an Englishman than an Anglican.  He despised foreigners, unless they were Catholic saints, could not bear the sight of the tricolor, and hated all the ’ideas of the Revolution.’  His dictum, ’Luther is dead, but Hildebrand and Loyola are alive,’ throws a flood of light upon the contents of his mind, as does the truly British prejudice which caused him to be horrified at the sight of ships coaling at Malta ‘on a holy day.’  His range of ideas was so much restricted that Bremond, a sincere admirer, says that his imagination lived on ‘une poignee de souvenirs d’enfant.’  How tragic was the fate which caught this loyal Englishman and more than loyal Oxonian in the meshes of a cosmopolitan institution in which England counted for little and Oxford for nothing at all!