“I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have ever
  written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides
  innumerable corrections and interlinear additions.”

His definition of style is “a thinking out into language,” not an ornamental “addition from without.”  He employs his characteristic irony in ridiculing those who think that “one man could do the thought and another the style":—­

“We read in Persian travels of the way in which young gentlemen go to work in the East, when they would engage in correspondence with those who inspire them with hope or fear.  They cannot write one sentence themselves; so they betake themselves to the professional letter writer...  The man of thought comes to the man of words; and the man of words duly instructed in the thought, dips the pen of desire into the ink of devotedness, and proceeds to spread it over the page of desolation.  Then the nightingale of affection is heard to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety plays around the brow of expectation.  This is what the Easterns are said to consider fine writing; and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to whom I have been referring."[8]

It was a pleasure to him to “think out” expressions like the following:—­

  “Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.”

  “Calculation never made a hero.”

  “Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have
  changed often.”

(2) Like Macaulay, Newman excelled in the use of the concrete.  In his Historical Sketches, he imagines the agent of a London company sent to inspect Attica:—­

“He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than at first survey might have been expected, sufficient certainly for sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long since worked out; figs fair; oil first rate; olives in profusion...  He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere freshened up the pale olive till the olive forgot its monotony, and its cheek glowed like the arbutus or the beech of the Umbrian hills.”

A general statement about superseding “the operation of the laws of the universe in a multitude of ways” does not satisfy him.  He specifies in those ways when he records his belief that saints have “raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured incurable diseases.”

(3) He modestly called himself a rhetorician, but he possessed also the qualities of an acute thinker.  He displayed unusual sagacity in detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion.  He could arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as to make one clear impression.  Such power made him one of the great Victorian masters of argumentative prose.