chalantly turns the wheel of time back almost three centuries! The next arrival he records is Eunapius and again the wheel spins, this time three and a half centuries forward into the Christian era. There is never a word to suggest that these students represent a wide span of years, six or seven centuries long, nor a single hint to show that conditions varied from Cicero's day to Aurelius', or from Aurelius' to Gregory's, or that the world had undergone a series of changes in all these turbulent centuries when history was being made and the map of Europe changed. To the uninitiate reader this is only a single period in which Zeno and Gregory might be contemporaries.

But let us go a little further in this same chapter. Newman pictures the advent of a "freshman like Eunapius," and he tells us the things this freshman saw. Now Eunapius actually lived; he had been born in 347 A. D. and he had sat as Newman says "at the feet of Proæresius." But let us waive that and remember only that we are invited to take a walk with Eunapius. What is our freshman doing? He goes to the Agora, says Newman, and there he will hear Lysias pleading, or Demosthenes haranguing. (Alas! Demosthenes was but three years old when Lysias died!) Our freshman continues his stroll and arrives at the Ceramicus where perhaps he will hear Pericles pronouncing his famous funeral oration. (A hundred years must have elapsed in the course of that walk from the Agora!) And now Eunapius saunters on again and suddenly in the groves of Academe he is in the presence of Plato (though Plato was not born when Pericles died!) Our freshman resumes his stroll and catches sight of Epicurus reclining in his garden, Zeno looking like a divinity in his porch, and Aristotle lecturing in his Lyceum. For a single moment time has ceased to torment our freshman (and us) with its dizzying whirligigs, for Epicurus and Zeno

were contemporaries and only two generations younger than Aristotle!

But perhaps we should not ask too much of Newman, for he, like Macaulay and Carlyle, was biographer first and historian afterwards. All three gave much, despite obvious limitations, to the literature of their century, and when all is said the contribution of each to history has a distinctive value of its own. Carlyle's belongs to its drama; Macaulay's to its pageantry; Newman's to its philosophy,

VI

NEWMAN AS CONTROVERSIALIST

CONTROVERSY, as a rule, is the last resort of men of letters; their type of mind, their interests, and their energies turn to pursuits which are far removed from the din of battle, and the clash of combat is no music to their ears. Frequently, however, men of letters are drawn into controversy through no wish of their own and it is then that unsuspected qualities both of mind and heart come to the surface and the pen vindicates itself as more fatal than the sword. Men as supersensitive and vitriolic as Pope have proved immensely effective in controversy, their temperaments making it possible for them in the heat of rage to slay with murderous weapons dipped in poison, at once swift and deadly. The great Dryden, who was sunny and goodnatured, did not shrink from picking up the gage of battle on occasion and proved in Macflecknoe that a man with smiling lips might deliver blows which even the sturdiest opponent could not withstand. The irritable Hazlitt and the hot-blooded Byron when embroiled in controversy rained down their blows in a very fury from the consciousness that their own vulnerability could be defended only by the swiftest and most deadly offense.

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Newman was different from all these. As supersensitive as Pope, though from his type of mind rather than

from any physical disability, he did not seek the limelight nor did he know the joy of battle for battle's sake. True it is that time and again he was drawn into controversy, but with one exception it was always in a cause remote from his personal interests.

It was against his inclination that he delivered his lectures on The Difficulties of Anglicans, but the feeling in higher quarters that this was a duty which he owed to those who had followed him to the very threshold of the Church of Rome only to hold back at the last, won his reluctant consent. His lectures on The Present Position of Catholics were a self-imposed but none the less urgent duty, for they sought to draw the fangs of the hostility which reared a hundred heads when the charge of "Papal Aggression" had followed the reëstablishment of Catholic dioceses in England. The Letter to the Duke of Norfolk was evoked by Gladstone's heavy-armed attack upon the Doctrine of Infallibility, and his scarcely veiled sneer at its defenders, among whom the most conspicuous was the erstwhile friend of his bosom, the Archbishop of Westminster. The reply to Canon Kingsley was not only a defence of himself from the charge of "lying on system," but of the body of Catholic priesthood as well, of whose turpitude he had been gratuitously selected as a shining example.

In every instance he was fighting for truth as he saw it and to its defence he devoted all the powers of his mind, all the knowledge gained from long years of study, and every endowment of which, as a man of letters, he was richly possessed. Without the trumpetcalls of Duty his amazing gifts as a controversialist might have lain dormant, though we should still have known that he had almost irresistible powers of persuasion; that his psychological insight was unequalled in his century and approached only by that of Brown

ing; that he could be ironic on occasion; that he was not without a sense of humor; that he was scholarly, acute, forceful; and that as a master of style he was equalled by only one other Englishman of his time. But controversy played its part in the development of his literary genius. He was called upon to give battle to an active and powerful opposition which was securely intrenched, supported by popular belief, confident of its cause, averse from all parleying. To win he was compelled to summon up every reserve at his command, to make concessions, to flatter, to banter, at times to deride, to plead, to challenge, to be suave, humorous, ironic, indignant, as the needs of the moment might require, and everlastingly to be vigilant and adroit and resourceful and cool. And withal he had to conduct himself as one knowing no fear, who believed in the justice of his cause and sought to have it known in truth as he knew it and as it was. He could not remain a recluse, and do all this. He could not rest content with the artifices of rhetoric or appeals to the reason of only a handful of thinkers and scholars. He must grapple with the many, with their prejudices, their suspicions, their shortcomings of education and, oftentimes, of intelligence. He was willing to prove what he deemed the high truths by which men live, and the effort brought into play the cumulative gifts of his many-sided mind, stimulated to every resource by which exposition is made lucid, the mind persuaded, the heart stirred. Perhaps it was one of the many ironies of Newman's life, that, though he grew steadily more averse with the passing years to entering a controversy, his powers increased and, once engaged, proved that no D'Artagnan of literature had ever had a defter wrist or a more skillful rapier.

Had Newman been born under the stars of an Addison, or a Dryden, or a Pope, he might have become one