Partly for this reason, partly from a certain vivacity of temper, he certainly showed himself, in spite of his popular qualities, less equal than many others of his brethren to the task of appeasing and assuaging religious strife.  The difficulties in Manchester were not greater than in other dioceses; there was not anything peculiar in them; there was nothing but what a patient and generous arbiter, with due knowledge of the subject, might have kept from breaking out into perilous scandals.  Unhappily he failed; and though he believed that he had only done his duty, his failure was a source of deep distress to himself and to others.  But now that he has passed away, it is but bare justice to say that no one worked up more conscientiously to his own standard.  He gave himself, when he was consecrated, ten or twelve years of work, and then he hoped for retirement.  He has had fifteen, and has fallen at his post.  And to the last, the qualities which gave his character such a charm in his earlier time had not disappeared.  There seemed to be always something of the boy about him, in his simplicity, his confiding candour and frankness with his friends, his warm-hearted and kindly welcome, his mixture of humility with a sense of power.  Those who can remember him in his younger days still see, in spite of all the storms and troubles of his later ones, the image of the undergraduate and the young bachelor, who years ago made a start of such brilliant promise, and who has fulfilled so much of it, if not all.  These things at any rate lasted to the end—­his high and exacting sense of public duty, and his unchanging affection for his old friends.

XXVI

NEWMAN’S “APOLOGIA"[30]

  [30]
  Apologia pro Vita Sua.  By John Henry Newman, D.D. Guardian, 22nd
  June 1864.

We have not noticed before Dr. Newman’s Apologia, which has been coming out lately in weekly numbers, because we wished, when we spoke of it, to speak of it as a whole.  The special circumstances out of which it arose may have prescribed the mode of publication.  It may have been thought more suitable, in point of form, to answer a pamphlet by a series of pamphlets rather than at once by a set octavo of several hundred pages.  But the real subject which Dr. Newman has been led to handle is one which will continue to be of the deepest interest long after the controversy which suggested it is forgotten.  The real subject is the part played in the great Church movement by him who was the leading mind in it; and it was unsatisfactory to speak of this till all was said, and we could look on the whole course described.  Such a subject might have well excused a deliberate and leisurely volume to itself; perhaps in this way we should have gained, in the laying out and concentration of the narrative, and in what helps to bring it as a whole before our thoughts.  But a man’s account