The Project Gutenberg EBook of Apologia pro Vita Sua, by John Henry Newman

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Title: Apologia pro Vita Sua

Author: John Henry Newman

Release Date: October 31, 2006 [EBook #19690]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA ***

Produced by Andrew Sly

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

By John Henry (Cardinal) Newman

London: Published
by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
And in New York
by E.P. Dutton & Co.

Introduction

_"No autobiography in the English language has been more read; to
the nineteenth century it bears a relation not less characteristic
than Boswell's 'Johnson' to the eighteenth."_

Rev. Wm. Barry, D.D.

Newman was already a recognised spiritual leader of over thirty
year's standing, but not yet a Cardinal, when in 1864 he wrote the
_Apologia_. He was London born, and he had, as many Londoners have
had, a foreign strain in him. His father came of Dutch stock; his
mother was a Fourdrinier, daughter of an old French Huguenot family
settled in this country. The date of his birth, 21st of February
1801, relates him to many famous contemporaries, from Heine to Renan,
from Carlyle to Pusey. Sent to school at Ealing--an imaginative
seven-year-old schoolboy, he was described even then as being fond of
books and seriously minded. It is certain he was deeply read in the
English Bible, thanks to his mother's care, before he began Latin and
Greek. Another lifelong influence--as we may be prepared to find by a
signal reference in the following autobiography, was Sir Walter
Scott; and in a later page he speaks of reading in bed _Waverley_ and
_Guy Mannering_ when they first came out--"in the early summer
mornings," and of his delight in hearing _The Lay of the Last
Minstrel_ read aloud. Like Ruskin, another nineteenth-century master
of English prose, he was finely affected by these two powerful
inductors. They worked alike upon his piety and his imagination which
was its true servant, and they helped to foster his seemingly
instinctive style and his feeling for the English tongue.

In 1816 he went to Oxford--to Trinity College--and two years later
gained a scholarship there.