going
to convert the chapel into a chantry, and has bought land about it for a
cemetery, which is to be decorated with mediaeval monuments in sculpture
and painting copied from the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, of
which he has a portfolio full of drawings. "It will be quite sweet," he
says, "to hear the vesper-bell tolling over the sullen moor every
evening." Then there is White, a weak young aesthete who shocks the
company by declaring: "We have no life or poetry in the Church of
England; the Catholic Church alone is beautiful. You would see what I
mean if you went into a foreign cathedral, or even into one of the
Catholic churches in our large towns. The celebrant, deacon and
sub-deacon, acolytes with lights, the incense and the chanting all
combine to one end, one act of worship." White is much exercised by the
question whether a sacristan should wear the short or the long cotta.
But he finally marries and settles down into a fat preferment.

Newman's sensitiveness to the beauty of Catholic religion is acute. "Her
very being is poetry," he writes. But equally acute is his sense of the
danger under which religion lies from the ministration of the arts, lest
they cease to be handmaids, and "give the law to Religion." Hence he
praises, from an ecclesiastical point of view, the service of the arts in
their rudimental state--the rude Gothic sculpture, the simple Gregorian
chant.[9] A similar indifference to the merely aesthetic aspects of
Catholicism is recorded of many of Newman's associates; of Hurrell
Froude, _e.g._, and of Ward. When Pugin came to Oxford in 1840 to
superintend some building at Balliol, he saw folio copies of St.
Buenaventura and Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae" lying on Ward's table, and
exclaimed, "What an extraordinary thing that so glorious a man as Ward
should be living in a room without mullions to the windows!" This being
reported to Ward, he asked, "What are mullions? I never heard of them."
Ward cared nothing about rood-screens and lancet windows; Newman and
Faber preferred the Palladian architecture to the Gothic.[10] Pugin, on
the other hand, who had been actually converted to the Roman Church
through his enthusiasm for pointed architecture; and who, when asked to
dinner, stipulated for Gothic puddings, for which he enclosed designs,
was greatly distressed at the carelessness about such matters which he
found at Oxford. A certain Dr. Cox was going to pray for the conversion