at the Observatory.  Various friends came to see the last of me—­Mr. Copeland, Mr. Church, Mr. Buckle, Mr. Pattison, and Mr. Lewis.  Dr. Pusey, too, came up to take leave of me; and I called on Dr. Ogle, one of my very oldest friends, for he was my private tutor when I was an undergraduate.  In him I took leave of my first College, Trinity, which was so dear to me, and which held on its foundation so many who have been kind to me, both when I was a boy and all through my Oxford life.  Trinity had never been unkind to me.  There used to be much snapdragon growing on the walls opposite my freshman’s rooms there, and I had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence, even unto death, in my University.

  On the morning of the 23rd I left the Observatory.  I have never seen
  Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway.

What an exceeding sadness is gathered up in these words!  And yet the impress of this time left upon some of Dr. Newman’s writings seems, like the ruin which records what was the violence of the throes of the long-passed earthquake, even still more indicative of the terrible character of the struggle through which at this time he passed.  We have seen how keenly he felt the suspicious intrusions upon his privacy which haunted his last years in the Church of England.  But in “Loss and Gain” there is a yet more expressive exhibition of the extremity of that suffering.  He denies as “utterly untrue” the common belief that he “introduced friends or partisans into the tale”; and of course he is to be implicitly believed.  And yet ONE there is whom no one who reads the pages can for a moment doubt is there, and that is Dr. Newman himself.  The weary, unresting, hunted condition of the leading figure in the tale, with all its accompaniment of keen, flashing wit, always seemed to us the history of those days when a well-meant but impertinent series of religious intrusions was well-nigh driving the wise man mad.

We have followed out these steps thus in detail, not only because of their intense interest as an autobiography, but also because the narrative itself seems to throw the strongest possible light on the mainly-important question how far this defection of one of her greatest sons does really tend to weaken the argumentative position of the English Church in her strife with Rome.  What has been said already will suffice to prove that in our opinion no such consequence can justly follow from it.  We acknowledge freely the greatness of the individual loss.  But the causes of that defection are, we think, clearly shown to have been the peculiarities of the individual, not the weakness of the side which he abandoned.  His steps mark no path to any other.  He sprang clear over the guarding walls of the sheepfold, and opened no way through them for other wanderers.  Men may have left the Church of England because their leader left it; but they could not leave it as he