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lives, more apparently beneficent lives,the lives of soldiers, martyrs, missionaries, all lived nobly in the sight of God, but none of them at once so detached from the common human interests, and yet so natural, genial, and human as Newman's." In these few and inadequate quotations I have tried to enter that spiritual region where he was so truly at home and, indicating wherein his vision was clearest, account in some measure for that "perfect spiritual sympathy" which, along with "intellectual distrust," he has so strangely inspired in the minds of his contemporaries. To turn now more specifically to the qualities of his style, I am inclined, after considerable thought, to put first and highest that "incommunicable simplicity" to which, in his earnestly portrayed ideal, he attributed such a charm. His words go straight to their mark, doing their work without trick or mannerism, and are chosen with such transparent fitness that we have to stop and think whether they make a style at all. Yet they are not always short and easy words. Short or long, the word fits the case; it seems to have grown there, a natural product. With this quality inhere also the qualities of purity and delicacy of diction, the words being fitted to a chastened and meditative conception of things. Not without a certain restraint, too, as if the writer were keeping a tight rein on his emotions, and as if in all that he wrote, as when he wrote his Apologia, the words "secretum meum mihi" were ringing in his ears. Yet nothing of this is loud and obtrusive; we take the thought, unimpeded by any crude mechanism of expression, and accord unconscious praise by forgetting the perfection of the art that conceals itself. If any one thinks such simplicity an easy or trivial achievement, let him try it. A student of the late Francis Wayland once said in his class-room, Why, I don't see anything so wonderful in the Proverbs of Solomon; any one could make such things as those." "Make some," was the doctor's laconic reply; but the enlarged edition of the Book of Proverbs has not yet appeared.

What other qualities I have to note in Cardinal Newman's style can be gathered together, I think, under the general term flexibility. Nothing is more exquisitely pervasive, more characteristic of all his work than this. To all the bendings and

curves of the thought, to all the requirements of the emotion, vigorous or lofty or sharp or subtle, his words respond with marvellous precision. Here, too, the man is proclaimed in his ideal. "Whatever be his subject," he says of the great author, "high or low, he treats it suitably and for its own sake." Let me quote a few more words, at once example and description of his conception.

He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose; he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in its parts,

and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution.

This is it to realize by a subtle sympathy just what the subject needs, and then out of his store of skill, and knowledge, and poetic creativeness to marry idea and word in an indissoluble union. When the requirement is trenchant, forthright, piercing strength, of word and phrase, Newman does not fall below his task. Witness, for example, the following reply to Kingsley, from the preface to the Apologia:

I am at war with him; but there is such a thing as legitimate warfare: war has its laws; there are things which may fairly be done, and things which may not be done. I say it with shame and with stern sorrow; - he has attempted a great transgression; he has attempted (as I may call it) to poison the wells. Now these insinuations and questions shall be answered in their proper places; here I will but say that I scorn and detest lying, and quibbling, and double-tongued practice, and slyness, and cunning, and smoothness, and cant, and pretence, quite as much as any Protestants hate them: and I pray to be kept from the snare of them. But all this is just now by the by; my present subject is my accuser; what I insist upon here is this unmanly attempt of his, in his concluding pages, to cut the ground from under my feet; to poison by anticipation the public mind against me, John Henry Newman, and to infuse into the imaginations of my readers, suspicion and mistrust of everything that I may say in reply to him. This I call poisoning

the wells.

To the same flexible sympathy with his subject I may refer that delicate, kindly, elusive humor, which plays over the surface of much of his writing. Is it not a

kind of sense of humor, or at least of delicate human feeling, that leads him in Callista, which is a tale of the third century, to make his characters talk in natural, every-day language, so different from the 66 forsooth and "By Hercules" style which rants about sesterces and old Falernian? Unobtrusive, however, it all is, even in those passages that permit a lighter treatment, betraying only by the occasional turn of a phrase that the author was smiling inside as he penned the words. Take, for instance, the following, from Callista:

The dinner had not been altogether suitable to modern ideas of good living. The grapes from Tacape, and the dates from the Lake Tritonis, the white and black figs, the nectarines and peaches,

and the watermelons, address themselves to the imagination of an Englishman, as well as of an African of the third century. So also might the liquor derived from the sap or honey of the Getulian palm, and the sweet wine, called melilotus, made from the poetical fruit found upon the coast of the Syrtis. He would have been struck, too, with the sweetness of the mutton; but he would have asked what the sheep's tails were before he tasted them, and found how like marrow the firm substance ate of which they consisted. He would have felt he ought to admire the roes of mullets, pressed and dried, from Mauritania; but he would have thought twice before he tried the lion cutlets, though they had the flavor of veal, and the additional goût of being imperial property, and poached from a preserve. But when he saw the indigenous dish, the very haggis and cock-a-leekie of Africa, in the shape of― (alas! alas! it must be said, with whatever apology for its introduction) in shape, then, of a delicate puppy, served up with tomatoes, with its head between its forepaws, we consider he would have risen from the unholy table, and thought he had fallen upon the hospitality of some sorceress of the neighboring

forest. However, to that festive board our Briton was not invited, for he had some previous engagement that evening, either of painting himself with woad, or of hiding himself to the chin in the fens; so that nothing occurred to disturb the harmony of the party, and the good humor and easy conversation which was the effect of such excellent cheer.

One more aspect of this flexible adaptation of word to subject and emotion I must not leave altogether unmentioned. "When his heart is touched it thrills along his verse." Principal Shairp has named Cardinal Newman as one of the great prose-poets of the century. Many magnificent passages in his sermons and other writings, to say nothing of the general richness of conception and chaste imaginativeness of his prose, forbid us to deny him

that title. The whole strange course of his life is a poem, far more truly than a cold consistent logical system; none but an eminently poetical and eminently unworldly mind would have followed that "kindly light" until it rested over the silent oratory at Edgbaston. His consummate skill and taste in language are conceded; and none would recognize more heartily than those who knew him best the intensity of conviction and emotion, the large glowing views of all things pure and beautiful, and the tender heart "fruitful and friendly for all human kind," which are potent to make that skill blossom into poetic expression. One passage I must quote in illustration; it shall be the last of my citations. It is the much-loved passage in his sermon on the Parting of Friends, preached when he took leave of the English Church : —

And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to act; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourselves, or what you did not know; has read to you your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very reading; has made you feel that there was a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed; if what he has said or done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well inclined towards him; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may know God's will, and at all times he may be ready to fulfil it.

It seems to me that, whether we consider the delicate rhythm and flow of the clauses, or the exquisite fitness of the words, or the chaste elevation of conception and emotion, the very spirit of poetry breathes through this yearning utterance.

Such, then, I conceive to be, in its two most evident and comprehensive features, the literary style of Cardinal Newman. A style eminently simple, doing its work, whatever it is, without fuss and parade, and with fitting parsimony or fulness, plainness or richness, in its use of material; a style wonderfully flexible, responding pliantly to every mood of thought, every breath of emotion, whether the informing spirit be indignant strength, or genial humor, or melting tenderness, or creating imagination. And the style is

the man.

Here I must take leave of the subject,

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The Clock Tower.

WHERE ENGLAND LEGISLATES.

By Ashton R. Willard.

NEVER return in fancy to the great houses which Sir Charles Barry built for the English Parliament without finding a new pleasure in the reminiscence, strange and unsatisfactory in some ways as is this great monument of his genius. Barry himself is an interesting man for one thing, among others, because he is said to have given popularity to that style in building which invaded America and other countries in artistic dependence upon England, in the middle of this century, which was quite extensively used for city halls and court-houses, and of which the Boston Public Library building is an illustration. His Parliament buildings are not of this character. They are as far removed from it, in fact, as is possible. This government palace at Westminster, built between 1840 and 1860, purports to be a revival of the Gothic as it flourished in the reign of the Tudors. Imagine the English mind as still in its early fascination over the rediscovery of medieval architecture, and then imagine the joy with which, when it was first advanced, they would have hailed and did hail the prospect of a construction which should take the art of the later Gothic builders where they left it and carry it far beyond their most elaborate achievement.

It is a large pile of buildings and one of the most extensive parliament houses in the world, longer by nearly onethird than our own Capitol at Washington, which stretches out to something like a seventh of a mile in length. But the Parliament buildings include a greater variety of accommodations, among other things the residence of the speaker and various other officials, while our own Capitol is purely an assemblage of legislative and judicial working-rooms. The speaker's residence has windows upon the clock-tower end of the river-front, the front which rises in such a stately manner from the terrace. All this part of the building can be seen to great advantage if one will expend "tuppence" upon the little passenger steamers which touch at Westminster Bridge pier and again at Lambeth pier, a short distance farther up stream, where one may wait for a return boat. The whole great front can be inspected at exactly the proper distance and with nothing to interrupt the view. There is obvious symmetry here, the central mass rising higher than the adjoining portions of wall, which on either hand connect it with the symmetrically disposed pavilions with their twin towers. There is nothing antagonistic to the principles of Gothic architecture in this, for the Gothic builders, when their art was a living art, conceived their monumental buildings in symmetry, as well as the classic architects,

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lies between the Parliament buildings and the Abbey, is the huge Victoria Tower, through which the Queen enters when she comes to open or close Parliament, if the opening or closing is to be executed with all the state of which that ceremonial is capable. It is also close by the Victoria Tower that the American public enters; and the American public once within the portal passes over much the same route on its way to the House of Lords, over which the Queen herself passes. There is the preliminary visit to the Robing Room, with its carvings and its frescoes. There is the Royal Gallery, not a gallery at all in the sense in which childhood pictures the word, but a room nearly as large as the House of Lords itself, and intervening between it and the Robing Room, a sort of place which is beautiful for no other purpose apparently than to be looked at. It is a strange experience to see a figure of Cromwell in this hall of the royalty which he overthrew. Why it was ever allowed a place there it is

morialized upon the walls, but in a more becoming way, as it is one of the moments of glorification over his overthrow that the artist has selected. Wellington and Blücher are meeting after the battle of Waterloo. This is in a great fresco by Maclise, "fresco " not merely in the sense of being a painting upon wall surface, but fresco in the stricter and more ancient sense of being color applied to plaster when it is fresh; for the Italian word means this. The art is one which languished after the days of the great renaissance painters. It lacks the brilliancy of a painting in oil, but if skilfully applied has greater permanence, and was revived in England especially for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament.

More interesting in some ways are the decorations of the Princes' Chamber, the next room in the line of the royal progress, and the only one which intervenes before the Chamber of Peers. There is a rare fascination about that half-way stage be

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