been so long repressed.  The effect of these outbursts was irresistible, and carried his hearers beyond themselves at once.  Even when his efforts of self-restraint were more successful, those very efforts gave a life and colour to his style which riveted the attention of all within the reach of his voice.  Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his History of Our Own Times, says of him:  “In all the arts that make a great preacher or orator, Cardinal Newman was deficient.  His manner was constrained and ungraceful, and even awkward; his voice was thin and weak, his bearing was not at first impressive in any way—­a gaunt emaciated figure, a sharp eagle face, and a cold meditative eye, rather repelled than attracted those who saw him for the first time.”  I do not think Mr. McCarthy’s phrases very happily chosen to convey his meaning.  Surely a gaunt emaciated frame and a sharp eagle face are the very characteristics which we should picture to ourselves as belonging to Peter the Hermit, or Scott’s Ephraim Macbriar in Old Mortality.  However unimpressive the look of an eagle may be in Mr. McCarthy’s opinion, I do not agree with him about Dr. Newman.

When I knew him at Oxford, these somewhat disparaging remarks would not have been applicable.  His manner, it is true, may have been self-repressed, constrained it was not.  His bearing was neither awkward nor ungraceful; it was simply quiet and calm, because under strict control; but beneath that calmness, intense feeling, I think, was obvious to those who had any instinct of sympathy with him.  But if Mr. McCarthy’s acquaintance with him only began when he took office in an Irish Catholic university, I can quite understand that (flexibility not being one of his special gifts) he may have failed now and again to bring himself into perfect harmony with an Irish audience.  He was probably too much of a typical Englishman for his place; nevertheless Mr. McCarthy, though he does not seem to have admired him in the pulpit, is fully sensible of his intellectual powers and general eminence.

Dr. Pusey, who used every now and then to take Newman’s duties at St. Mary’s, was to me a much less interesting person. [A learned man, no doubt, but dull and tedious as a preacher.] Certainly, in spite of the name Puseyism having been given to the Oxford attempt at a new Catholic departure, he was not the Columbus of that voyage of discovery undertaken to find a safer haven for the Church of England.  I may, however, be more or less unjust to him, as I owe him a sort of grudge.  His discourses were not only less attractive than those of Dr. Newman, but always much longer, and the result of this was that the learned Canon of Christ Church generally made me late for dinner at my College, a calamity never inflicted on his All Souls’ hearers by the terser and swifter fellow of Oriel whom he was replacing.

[49] Apologia, p 136.

[50] It swelled in the second edition to 400 pages [in spite of the fact that in that edition the historical range of the treatise was greatly reduced].