own letters, has confirmed the accuracy of his narrative, and has made any further description of that strange episode in English University life superfluous.  With the ‘Apologia’ and Dean Church’s ‘Oxford Movement’ before him, the reader needs no more.  Mr. Wilfrid Ward has therefore been well advised to adhere loyally to the Cardinal’s wishes, by confining himself to the last half of Newman’s life, after a brief summary of his childhood, youth, and middle age till 1845.  Nevertheless, it is misleading to give the title ‘The Life of Cardinal Newman’ to a work which is only, as it were, the second volume of a biography.  There are very few men, however long-lived, who have not done much of their best work before the age of forty-five, and Newman was certainly not one of the exceptions.  From every point of view, except that of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical historian, Newman’s Anglican career was far more interesting and important than his residence at Birmingham.  He will live in history, not as the recluse of Edgbaston, nor as the wearer of the Cardinal’s hat which fell to his lot, almost too late to save the credit of the Vatican, when he had passed the normal limit of human life, but as the real founder and leader of nineteenth century Anglo-Catholicism, the movement which he created and then tried in vain to destroy.  The projects and failures and successes of his later life seem very pale and almost petty when compared with the activities of the years while he was making a chapter of English history.  His greatest book, though it was written many years after his secession, is the record of a drama which ended in the interview with Father Dominic the Passionist.  It is ’The History of my Religious Opinions’; and after 1845 his religious opinions had, as he says himself, no further history.  The incomparable style which will give him a permanent place among the masters of English prose was the product of his life at Oxford, where he lived in a society of highly cultivated men, whose writings show many of the same excellences as his own.  Newman’s English is only the Oriel manner at its best.  Such an instrument could hardly have been forged at the Birmingham Oratory, where his associates, who had followed him from Littlemore, were of such an inferior type that Mark Pattison, who knew them, was surprised that he could be satisfied with their company.  His best sermons and his best poetry belong to his Anglican period.  ‘The Dream of Gerontius,’ with all its tender grace, is far less virile than ‘Lead, kindly Light,’ and other short poems of his youth.  Moreover, his record as a Roman ecclesiastic is one of almost unrelieved failure.  If he had died eighteen years after his secession, when he already looked upon himself as an old man whose course was nearly run, he would have been regarded as one who had sacrificed a great career in the Church of England for neglect and obscurity.  From the first he was distrusted by the ’Old Catholics’ (the old Roman Catholic families in England), and suspected