n the least allow moral
prepossessions to twist his poetic theory, which may be generally
described as the Aristotelian teaching on the subject, supplied and
assisted by the aid of a wide study of the literatures not open to
Aristotle. There can be no doubt that if Keble's mind had not been more
and more absorbed by religious subjects he would have been one of the
very greatest of English critics of literature; and he is not far from
being a great one as it is. He did not publish many sermons, though one
of his, the Assize Sermon at Oxford in 1833, is considered to have
started the Movement; and opinions as to his pulpit powers have varied.
But it is certainly not too much to say that it was impossible for Keble
not to make everything that he wrote, whether in verse or prose,
literature of the most perfect academic kind, informed by the spirit of
scholarship and strengthened by individual talent.

John Henry Newman was the eldest son of a man of business of some means
(who came of a family of Cambridgeshire yeomen) and of a lady of
Huguenot descent. He was born in London on 21st February 1801, was
educated privately at Ealing, imbibed strong evangelical principles, and
went up to Oxford (Trinity College) so early that he went in for
"Greats" (in which he only obtained a third class) before he was
nineteen. He continued, however, to reside at Trinity, where he held a
scholarship, and more than made up for his mishap in the schools by
winning an Oriel fellowship in 1823. In three successive years he took
orders and a curacy in the first, the Vice-Principalship of St. Alban's
Hall under Whately in the second, and an Oriel tutorship in the third;
while in 1827 he succeeded Hawkins, who became Provost, in the Vicarage
of St. Mary's, the most important post of the kind--to a man who chose
to make it important--in Oxford.

Newman did so choose, and his sermons--not those to the University,
though these also are notable, but those nominally "Parochial," really
addressed to the undergraduates who soon flocked to hear him--were the
foundation and mainstay of his influence, constitute the largest single
division of his printed work, and perhaps present that work in the best
and fairest light. His history for the next sixteen years cannot be
attempted here; it is the history of the famous thing called the Oxford
Movement, which changed the intellectual as well as the ecclesiastical
face of England, on which libraries have been wri