always something of a terror to him, and yet in another mood it
ministered to his self-absorption. He had not the stern sense of
being absolutely in the right, which is the characteristic of the
true leaders of men, but he had a deep sense of his own importance,
combined with a perfectly real sense of weakness and humility,
which even disguised, I would think, his own egotism from himself.

Again his extraordinary forensic power, his verbal logic, his
exquisite lucidity of statement, all these concealed from him, as
they have concealed from others, his lack of mental independence.
He had an astonishing power of submitting to his imagination, a
power of believing the impossible, because the exercise of faith
seemed to him so beautiful a virtue. It is not a case of a noble
mind overthrown, but of the victory of a certain kind of poetical
feeling over all rational inquiry.

To revert to Newman's literary genius, he seems to me to be one of
the few masters of English prose. I used to think, in old
University days, that Newman's style was best tested by the fact
that if one had a piece of his writing to turn into Latin prose,
the more one studied it, turned it over, and penetrated it, the
more masterly did it become; because it was not so much the
expression of a thought as the thought itself taking shape in a
perfectly pure medium of language. Bunyan had the same gift; of
later authors Ruskin had it very strongly, and Matthew Arnold in a
lesser degree. There is another species of beautiful prose, the
prose of Jeremy Taylor, of Pater, even of Stevenson; but this is a
slow and elaborate construction, pinched and pulled this way and
that; and it is like some gorgeous picture, of stately persons in
seemly and resplendent dress, with magnificently wrought