SOURCE: “The Writer,” in The Achievement of John Henry Newman, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990, pp. 152-83.

In the following essay, Ker surveys Newman's satirical writings and his skills as a rhetorician.

Apart from a verse romance which he and a friend published as undergraduates, Newman's first publication was an article he contributed to an encyclopedia in 1824. It was a lengthy essay on Cicero, whom he called “the greatest master of composition that the world has seen.”¹ Years later he was to acknowledge Cicero's important influence on his own writing: “As to patterns for imitation, the only master of style I have ever had (which is strange considering the differences of the languages) is Cicero. I think I owe a great deal to him, and as far as I know to no one else.”² But Cicero seems not only to have influenced his prose style. According to his...