the best spirits of Oxford with him to Rome. This was
the man to whom some of the best spirits at Oxford confessed all they
had to confess, and that could have been very little, and of whom
they spoke with a subdued whisper as the apostle who would restore all
faith, and bring back the Anglican sheep to the Roman fold.

I saw and heard all that was going on, the hopes deferred, the secret
visits to Littlemore, the rumours and more than rumours of Newman's
defection. Such was the devotion of some of these disciples that they
expected day by day a great catastrophe or a great victory, for after
the publication of so many letters written at the time by Wiseman,
Manning, De Lisle, and others, there can be little doubt that a great
conversion or perversion of England to the Romish Church was fully
expected. De Lisle writes: "England is now in full career of a great
Religious Revolution, this time back to Catholicism and to the Roman
See as its true centre ... the best friends of Rome in the Anglican
Church are obliged still to be guarded." Such words admit of one
meaning only, and if Newman had been followed by a large number of his
Oxford friends, the results for England might really have been most
terrible. But here, no doubt, the English national feeling came in.
What England had suffered under Roman ecclesiastical rule had not yet
been entirely forgotten, and the idea that a foreign potentate and a
foreign priesthood should interfere with the highest interests of the
nation, was fortunately as distasteful as ever, not only to a large
party of the clergy, but to a still larger party of the laity also.
It seemed to me very curious that so many of Newman's followers did
not see the unpatriotic character of their agitation. Either
subjection to Rome or civil war at home was the inevitable outcome of
what they discussed very innocently at the Observatory, and little as
I understood their schemes for the future, I often felt surprised at
what sounded to me like very unpatriotic utterances.

Another thing that struck me as utterly un-English and has often been
dwelt on by the historians of this movement, was the curiously secret
character of the agitation. What has an Englishman to fear when he
openly protests against what he disapproves of in Church or State? But
Newman's friends at Oxford behaved really, as has been often said,
like so many naughty schoolboys, or like conspirators, yet they were
neither. A very similar char