the supreme importance of not eating too much. He kept a diary, in which he recorded his delinquencies, and they were many. "I cannot say much for myself to-day," he writes on September 29th, 1826 (he was twenty-three years old). "I did not read the Psalms and Second Lesson after breakfast, which I had neglected to do before, though I had plenty of time on my hands. Would have liked to be thought adventurous for a scramble I had at the Devil's Bridge. Looked with greediness to see if there was a goose on the table for dinner; and though what I ate was of the plainest sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was muzzy and sleepy after dinner." "I allowed myself to be disgusted with ——'s pomposity," he writes a little later; "also smiled at an allusion in the Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not from pride or vanity, but mistrust; it certainly was unintentional." And again, "As to my meals, I can say that I was always careful to see that no one else would take a thing before I served myself; and I believe as to the kind of my food, a bit of cold endings of a dab at breakfast, and a scrap of mackerel at dinner, are the only things that diverged from the strict rule of simplicity." "I am obliged to confess," he notes, "that in my intercourse with the Supreme Being, I am become more and more sluggish." And then he exclaims: "Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and knoweth my thoughts … O that my ways were made so direct that I might keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy Commandments when Thou hast set my heart at liberty."
Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they would have been different if he had had a little less of what Newman describes as his "high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity"; but it is useless to speculate. Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a profound effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends, and Froude, eagerly
