New undertakings followed, no more successful than the abortive university scheme.  There was to be a new translation of the Bible, and a new Catholic magazine called the Rambler.  The former enterprise was already well advanced when the general indifference of the Catholic public caused it to be abandoned.  The Rambler, the contributors to which used a freedom of discussion unpalatable to Roman ecclesiastics, struggled on amid a storm of criticism till 1859, when Newman, who was then himself editor, resigned, and one more humiliating failure was registered.  The management of the magazine passed into other hands.  The Oratory School at Birmingham, a much less contentious undertaking, was successfully launched in the same year.

In 1860 came the emancipation of the States of the Church by Cavour and Victor Emmanuel.  Newman referred to the Piedmontese as ’sacrilegious robbers,’ but his advocacy of the temporal power was not strong enough to please the Vatican, while the strength of Manning’s language left nothing to be desired.  Newman became more unpopular than ever.  His reputation suffered by his former connection with the Rambler and his supposed connection with the Home and Foreign Review, which Acton intended to represent the views of progressive Catholics, till it also was snuffed out by the hierarchy.  The five years from 1859 to 1864 are considered by Mr. Ward to have been the saddest in Newman’s life.  He felt, truly enough, that the dominant party had no sympathy with his aims, and that he was treated as ’some wild incomprehensible beast, a spectacle for Dr. Wiseman to exhibit to strangers, as himself being the hunter who captured it.’  ‘All through my life I have been plucked,’ he writes to an old Oxford friend.  There was even in his mind at this time a wistful yearning after the friends and the Church that he had left—­a feeling, doubtless transient, but significant, which his biographer has allowed to show itself in a few pages of his book.  After reminding himself, in his diary, of the warning against those who, after putting their hand to the plough, ‘look back,’ he proceeds to look back, because he cannot help it.

’I live more and more in the past, and in hopes that the past may revive in the future....  I think, as death comes on, his cold breath is felt on soul as on body, and that, viewed naturally, my soul is half dead now, whereas then [in his Protestant days] it was in the freshness and fervour of youth....  I say the same of my state of mind from 1834 to 1845, when I became a Catholic.  It is a time past and gone—­it relates to a work done and over.  “Quis mihi tribuat, ut sim iuxta menses pristinos, secundum dies, quibus Deus custodiebat me?  Quando splendebat lucerna eius super caput meum, et ad lumen eius ambulabam in tenebris?” ...  I have no friend at Rome; I have laboured in England, to be misrepresented, backbitten and scorned.  I have laboured in Ireland, with a door ever