corrected some of the chords. The Father Superior noticed this, and asked him why he had made the changes. The organist proceeded to advert to some consecutive fifths in the harmony. But, urged the Father, Beethoven and others make use of them. "Ah," came the answer, "it's all very well for those great men to do as they like, but that don't make it right for ordinary folk to do as they like." Dr. Newman therefore learned that musically he was only an ordinary folk, and he would have been the first to laugh down the notion that he was anything else; for a modest estimate of himself in many things was a very marked characteristic with him, and made him call his beautiful verse "ephemeral effusions" to Badeley, and write in May, 1835, apropos of a suggested uniform edition of his revised Latin plays, "I have not that confidence in my own performance to think I can compete with a classical Jesuit" (i.e. Father Jouvency). In 1828 he had contemplated writing an article on music for the London Review, along with one on poetry. The latter, in the event, alone saw the day; the former "seems to have remained an idea only."[40] He is apologetic in the Idea of a University, when about to descant so eloquently upon music: "If I may speak," he says, "of matters which seem to lie beyond my own province;"[41] but in very early Oratory days at Edgbaston, he essayed some lectures on music to some of the community in the practice-room. And at the opening of the new organ there in August, 1877, he "preached a most beautiful discourse [taken down at the time], upon the event of the day; and on music, first as a great natural gift, then as an instrument in the hands of the Church; its special prominence in the history of St. Philip and the Oratory; the part played by music in the history of God's dealings with man from first to last, from the thunders of Mount Sinai to the trumpets of the Judgment; the mysterious and intimate connection with the unseen world established by music, as it were the unknown language of another state. Its quasi-sacramental efficacy, e.g., in driving away the evil spirit in Saul and in bringing upon Eliseus the spirit of prophecy; the grand pre-eminence of the organ in that it gave the nearest representation of the voice of God, while the sound of strings might be taken as more fitted to express the varying emotions of man's state here on earth."[42]

At Oxford, in his time, he said, there were none of the facilities for music that now form part of the institutions of the place; there was little to encourage individual musical talent. At St. Clement's we only learn, "I had a dispute with my singers in May, which ended in their leaving the church, and we now sing en masse,"[43] and in June still, "My singers are quite mute."[44] At St. Mary's, Mr. Bennett, who was killed on his way to Worcester Festival by the upsetting of a coach,[45] and after him Mr. Elvey, elder brother of Sir George Elvey, sometime organist at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, were Mr. Newman's organists. "I shall never forget," writes a hearer, "the charm it was to hear Elvey play the organ for the hymn at Newman's afternoon parochial service at St. Mary's on a Sunday. The method was to play the tune completely through on the organ before the voices took it up, and the way he did it was simply perfect."

Still the Anglican service, taken as a whole, was scarcely then calculated to stir artistic fervour, and this listener, so delighted with Elvey at St. Mary's, went home to his village parish church only to hear the hymn murdered, or if it were Advent, Christmas, or Easter, a tradesman shout from the gallery, "We will now sing to the praise and glory of God a hanthem!" when a motet would be sacrificed to incompetency with every circumstance of barbarity attending the execution. Mr. Newman in language of appalling force, written a year after his conversion, has described the Anglican service as "a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; prayers clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away; Scripture lessons turned into chapters; heaviness, feebleness, unwieldiness, where the Catholic rites had had the lightness and airiness of a spirit; vestments chucked off, lights quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship annihilated; a dreariness which could be felt, and which seemed the token of an incipient Socinianism, forcing itself upon the eye, the ear, the nostrils of the worshipper; a smell of dust and damp, not of incense; a sound of ministers preaching Catholic prayers, and parish clerks droning out Catholic canticles; the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the tombs (as they were) of what had been and was not; and for orthodoxy, a frigid, unelastic, inconsistent, dull, helpless dogmatic, which could give no just account of itself, yet was intolerant of all teaching which contained a doctrine more or a doctrine less, and resented every attempt to give it a meaning."[46] The Catholic Church's ritual he found very different.

"What are her ordinances and practices," he asks, "but the regulated expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and thus a 'cleansing' as Aristotle would word it, of the sick soul? She is the poet of her children; full of music to soothe the sad, and control the wayward—wonderful in story for the imagination of the romantic; rich in symbol and imagery, so that gentle and delicate feelings, which will not bear words, may in silence intimate their presence, or commune with themselves. Her very being is poetry; every psalm, every petition, every collect, every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the thurible, is a fulfillment of some dream of childhood, or aspiration of youth. Such poets as are born under her shadow, she takes into her service, she sets them to write hymns, or to compose chants, or to embellish shrines, or to determine ceremonies, or to marshal processions; nay, she can even make schoolmen of them, as she made St. Thomas, till logic becomes poetical."[47]

And, of course, as the Catholic poet that he now was, he duly set about to "write