the renunciation of logical consistency. Hence the aloofness of Newman from the practical course of English politics, ecclesiastical or constitutional. There is something foreign about his whole tone of thinking, which has found a natural and logical outcome in his death as a cardinal of the Roman Church. The same attitude of mind accounts for his deficiency in the essentially English feeling of humour, which is intimately connected with the spirit of compromise. Irony he possessed in all its efficacy, but the attempts at humour in his so-called novels, Loss and Gain and Callista, are strained in the extreme.
How comes it, then, that Newman, of all men in the world, with his hatred of compromise and thirst after logicality, should have ever thought to find rest in a via media, a compromise among compromises? There comes in another quality of his mind, which is equally un-English outside the particular profession for which it is appropriate. In reckoning up the formative influences on his character, something should be said of the legal tone which was given to it in early years by the fact that he was intended for the Bar. There is a curious touch of the man of the world in much that was done and said by the author of the Dream of Gerontius. In much
