been supposed to exist for the law. The mere prevention of crime or doing justice between the members of the community is treated by the government as an entirely secondary consideration to the maintenance of a system in accordance with English ideas, not with any principles of abstract right. At the present moment the army, which is supposed to uphold the law, furnishes a larger class of criminals than any other; and yet in the eyes of the judges and officials of Ireland, the military is a model body, whose respect for law is in striking contrast to the lawlessness of the people. It is not necessary to say more. The facts will tell whether the Irish people or their law-makers are deserving of the character of lawlessness so freely attributed of late to Ireland.

MR. MOZLEY'S REMINISCENCES OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.

PE

ERHAPS the importance of Mr. Mozley's Reminiscences will be more highly appreciated as time goes on. It has many facts. It is a contribution, and a most precious one, towards a complete biography of Newman. It is a partial and entertaining history of the great Oxford movement; it is suggestive and instructive on many points outside the circle of Oriel, Christ Church, and St. Mary's. It keeps alive the memory of not a few who would otherwise be forgotten, yet deserve on some accounts to be remembered. It is the writing of one of the most brilliant periodical writers of his time; and it is still more remarkable in this respect that, though the book is far more Roman than Anglican, the author remains a clergyman of the Church of England, and publishes at almost the very close of his career a defence of the peculiarities of the Catholic system as opposed to Protestantism, that is equally subtle, ingenious, and persuasive.

The interest which I feel as an individual in these fascinating volumes is increased by the fact of my having had some acquaintance with the author many years ago. In 1847 I was staying on a visit to Mr. Ward, the Vicar of Great Bedwyn, who was a friend of Mozley's, and, like him, an enthusiastic student of church architecture. Much is said about this very worthy man in chapter xcix. of the Reminiscences. Being in a deplorable state of health, and having occasion to see the Bishop of Salisbury on business, Mr.

Ward sent me all the way to Salisbury in his own carriage. But the journey was long, and he arranged that I should break it and rest the horses by stopping for an hour or so at Cholderton Rectory, Wilts, where Mr. and Mrs. Mozley (Newman's sister) received me with much kindness and hospitality. Four years later, when I happened to be in Bruges, I met Mr. and Mrs. Mozley again, breakfasted with them at the Hotel de Flandre, and accompanied them and their little daughter to the famous shrine of the relic of the Most Holy Blood. Little did I suppose, as I walked by the side of this unassuming clergyman of the Church of England, that he had thought as deeply as some even of our best men on the points at issue between the Churches, that his intellect and conscience approved the Roman solution of very difficult problems, and that I had myself but a child's knowledge of them in comparison with his. It must be granted, then, in the first place, that the Reminiscences of the Oxford Movement are a most valuable contribution towards a complete biography of Cardinal Newman. We have already been fortunate in such contributions from the hands of distinguished friends and acquaintances, but this comes to us from a man connected by marriage, who must have learned and observed more than the rest. History and biography have hitherto been miserably unsatisfactory, but we are gradually advancing towards a high appreciation of exact truth. Mozley came into residence at Oriel College in 1825, when he was nineteen years of age. In the following year he became one of Newman's pupils in the college, and, during two years and a half, saw very much more of his tutor than pupils usually saw even in those days when tuition meant something. When absent from Oxford he corresponded with Newman, and, at his encouragement and urgency, stood for a fellowship at Oriel, and was successful at Easter, 1829. From that time until Christmas, 1831, he resided, not only in term time, but also a good deal in the vacations, on intimate terms with Newman's mother and sisters; and with his circle of friends, whether at Oxford or in the country, he was in constant communication with Newman, till, in September, 1836, he became his brother-in-law, and accepted the living of Cholderton, in Salisbury Plain. Most of his clerical neighbors, he tells us, warmly sympathized with Newman, even if they did not all of them altogether agree with him. "It was a great thing to hear of anybody standing up for truth and for the Church." Knowing, as we do, how observant Mozley has been through life of the dealings of Providence with him in minute events,' we cannot feel surprised at his believing that his near relations with the chief of the Oxford movement were providential, and that his being permitted to write

1 See Reminiscences, vol. ii., p. 425.

and publish these Reminiscences is so likewise; and I cannot trace in this connection the slightest symptom of unwarrantable egotism. The Oxford movement was at its height when Mozley began to write in the British Critic, which took the place of the Tracts for the Times. After being a contributor for two years he became its editor in place of Newman, and continued to be so till it ceased to exist, in October, 1843. The movement had come fairly into collision with the several parties it was meant to oppose. The “Evangelical" party denounced it as an emanation from the Evil one; the Churchmen of the old school were frightened by its excesses, and poured upon it torrents of bitterness through sermons, articles, pamphlets, episcopal charges, and suspension of Dr. Pusey. But the severest blow the movement had to sustain was being slowly prepared by the increasing tendency of the foremost combatants to throw down their arms, and range themselves on the side of Rome. Newman appears as the centre of a group of those who went over to Rome with him; and those who, having fought with him as Anglicans, remained behind. Of all of them together Mozley writes: "I may honestly say that, with the exception of Keble, I do not think one of them would be a living name a century hence but for his share in the light of Newman's genius and goodness. Yet even as the planets of such a system they are worthy of a better record than I am about to offer."

It was by the good providence of God that Newman did not follow law or music as a profession. He might have excelled in either, and have made himself a name. His parents intended him. for the law, and we learn from Mr. Mozley that he actually kept some terms at Lincoln's Inn. The lessons of his pious mother influenced all his thoughts and ways. Her modified Calvinism took fast hold of his mind, and was riveted by the teaching of Dr. Watts, Baxter, Scott, Romaine, Newton, and Milner,-writers in whom, with all their Puritanical aberrations, was mingled a lively sense of the preciousness of the Great Sacrifice of the Cross, which is the soul and centre of Catholic ritual and dogma. "It would hardly be too much to say that he knew the Bible by heart;" and as time went on, and he came to instruct others, he had an “immense and almost minutely reverential knowledge of Scripture.

. In his later years he has described, in very touching language, the impossibility of shaking off or even modifying this sweetest of his early professions." It was a most superficial view of Scripture which led men to the conclusion that it was Protestant. Deeper study has convinced many, of whom Newman was the most remarkable, that it is the most Catholic book in the world. It was that book, more than all others, that brought him to the feet of the Vicar of Christ and successor of St. Peter.

Mozley's reminiscences of Newman's early years are interesting

beyond measure, and happily supplement the too scanty records to be found in the Apologia. He tells us, for example, that "John H. Newman used to be sensible of having lost something by not being a public school man. He regarded with admiration, and a generous kind of envy, the facile and elegant construing which a man of very ordinary talents could bring with him from the sixth form of any public school. 'You don't know how much you owe to Russell' (the head master of Charterhouse), he would say to me, though I was never one of those facile construers. In the biography referred to John H. Newman has not done justice to his early adventures and sallies into the domains of thought, politics, fancy, and taste. He very early mastered music as a science, and attained such a proficiency on the violin that, had he not become a Doctor of the Church, he would have been a Paganini. At the age of twelve he composed an opera. He wrote in albums, improvised masques and idyls; and only they who see no poetry in 'Lead, kindly light,' or in the 'Dream of Gerontius,' will deny that this divine gift entered into his birthright."

Though Newman had not the advantage of what is called a public school, he was sent at a very early age to Dr. Nicholas's at Ealing, said to be the best preparatory school in the country. There were three hundred boys there, and he rose, almost at a bound, to be at the head of the school. Thence he went straight to Trinity College, Oxford, and passed his examination for his degree at the earliest possible time, Michaelmas, 1820. He had then not quite completed his nineteenth year. His friends had expected that he would obtain high honors, but this expectation was not realized. The degree, of course, was obtained, and when the class lists came out his name was found under the line, which was as low as it could be. He cast no blame on the examiners, but always maintained that his reading had been too discursive. Perhaps this comparative failure only served to stimulate a laudable ambition, particularly as that was now associated with the desire of assisting his family in their declining fortunes.

There are some of Mr. Mozley's critics who think that his style is not sufficiently grave for the subjects which he treats; that he is by no means always accurate; that he frequently speaks of the leaders of the Oxford movement in a jaunty way, and that he reveals things now and then which are likely to prove displeasing to survivors or to some of the relations and friends of those who are no more. But when were volumes of Reminiscences ever written of which these things have not been said? And where are the Reminiscences of any account that would not be spoilt if they were much weeded and pruned? It is their merit to be free and easy, eschewing above all things that portraiture for a pur

pose which makes biography in general so untrustworthy. Cardinal Newman himself has set an example of writing occasionally in a humorous strain on subjects of the deepest moment; witness "Loss and Gain," and many parts of his Lectures on the Present Condition of Catholics in England. Humor and sarcasm are great gifts, and a prophet of the Lord used them once on a memorable and solemn occasion.1

After some interesting particulars respecting the Newman family, who hovered in several spots in the neighborhood of Oxford during a number of years, the writer of the Reminiscences continues: "To no period of Newman's life do his younger friends turn with more curiosity than to his position in the Oriel common room for the first two or three years (after his being elected to a Fellowship in 1823). The truth is, it was very easy for a man to have no position at all there, especially just at that time. Newman, a shy man, with heart and mind in a continual ferment of emotion and speculation, yearning for sympathy and truth, was not likely to feel entirely at home with some, whom it would be needless to name or to describe. From the first he loved and admired the man with whom eventually he lived most in collision, Edward Hawkins. He would also have been ready to love and admire Whately to the end, but for the inexorable condition of friendship imposed by Whately-absolute and implicit agreement in thought, word, and deed. This agreement, from the first, Newman could not accord. His divergence was in fact radical. He used to say that Whately's Logic was a most interesting book, but that there was one thing not to be found in it, and that was logic. The truth is, every man in these days is his own logician. However, they lived for some time in close intimacy, and it is painful to remember that a time came when they were in the same city (Dublin) for seven years, passing one another in the streets, without even recognition." Cardinal Newman has left his own account of Dr. Whately and their intimacy at Oxford. He left it, he says, in 1831; "after that, as far as I can remember, I never saw him but twice-when he visited the University; once in the street, once in a room. From the time that he left, I have always felt a real affection for what I must call his memory; for thenceforward he made himself dead to me. My reason told me that it was impossible that we could have got on together longer; yet I loved him too much to bid him farewell without pain."2 Separations like these are among the most painful events in life, and leave a smart behind them more acute than that caused by any other mode of bereavement.

Admiring Cardinal Newman, as we do, as a grand exponent of 1 III Kings xviii. 27. 2 Apologia (1864), p. 69.