supplied the answers himself readily enough. All Oxford, all
England, should know the truth. The time was out of joint, and he
was only too delighted to have been born to set it right.

But, after all, something more was needed than even the
excitement of Froude combined with the conviction of Keble to
ruffle seriously the vast calm waters of Christian thought; and
it so happened that that thing was not wanting: it was the genius
of John Henry Newman. If Newman had never lived, or if his
father, when the gig came round on the fatal morning, still
undecided between the two Universities, had chanced to turn the
horse's head in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that
the Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little flame
unobserved in the Common Room of Oriel? And how different, too,
would have been the fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the
Romantic Revival, a creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer
whose secret spirit dwelt apart in delectable mountains, an
artist whose subtle senses caught, like a shower in the sunshine,
the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial world. In other times,
under other skies, his days would have been more fortunate. He
might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to mix the
lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in
the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or his hands might have
fashioned those ethereal faces that smile in the niches of
Chartres. Even in his own age he might, at Cambridge, whose
cloisters have ever been consecrated to poetry and common sense,
have followed quietly in Gray's footsteps and brought into flower
those seeds of inspiration which now lie embedded amid the faded
devotion of the Lyra Apostolica.