amenable to Catholic influence.  Manning and Talbot seem to have given the project its coup de grace at Rome, and Newman sold the land which he had bought.  He was bitterly disappointed; but the growth of public esteem had given him self-confidence, and he did not again fall into despondency, though he had a strange presentiment of approaching death, which prompted his last famous poem, ‘The Dream of Gerontius.’  A second attempt to go to Oxford was thwarted by enemies at Home and in England in 1866-7.  The extreme party, with Manning, now Archbishop, at their head, seemed to be victorious all along the line.  They were able to proceed to their supreme triumph in the Vatican Council which issued the dogma of Papal Infallibility.  Newman, while others were intriguing and haranguing, was quietly engaged in preparing his subtlest and (on one side) his most characteristic work, ‘The Grammar of Assent,’ an attempt at a Catholic apologetic on a ‘personalist,’ as opposed to an ‘intellectualist’ basis.  He declined to take an active part in the theological conferences about infallibility, being by this time well aware how little weight such arguments as he could bring were likely to have at Rome.  He was disgusted at the insolent aggressiveness of the Ultramontanes, but he had no wish to combat it.  The situation was hopeless, and he knew it.  The death of several friends increased the sense of isolation, and during the years 1875 to 1879 his silence and depression were very noticeable to those who lived with him.  His dearest friend, Ambrose St. John, was one of several who died about this time.  But Trinity College, Oxford, made him an honorary fellow in 1877, an honour which seemed to prognosticate the far higher distinction which was soon to be conferred upon him.

The death of Pius IX in 1878 brought to an end the long reign of obscurantism at the Vatican, and with the election of Leo XIII Newman emerged from the cloud under which he had remained for more than a generation.  The new Pope lost no time in making him a Cardinal, though even now the prize seemed to be on the point of slipping through his fingers.  He valued the honour immensely as setting the official seal of approbation on his life’s work, and the last ten years of his life were quietly happy.  He was able to mingle actively in affairs of public interest, and to write long letters, till near the end.  He died on August 11, 1890, in his ninetieth year, and was buried, by his own request, in the same grave with his friend Ambrose St. John.

Why is it that this sad, isolated, broken life, in which the young man renounces the creed of the boy, and the elder man pours scorn upon the loyalties of his prime; which found its last haven in a society which wished to make a tool of him but distrusted him too much for even this pitiful service, has still an absorbing interest for our generation?  For it is not only in England that Newman’s fame lives and grows.  In France there is a cult of Newman, which has produced biographies by Bremond and Faure, as well as a history of the Catholic Revival in England by Thureau-Dangin.  In England, besides Dean Church’s ‘Oxford Movement,’ we have biographies by R.H.  Hutton and W. Barry, and appreciations or depreciations by E. Abbott, Leslie Stephen, Froude, Mark Pattison, and several others.