23 AUGUST 1890, Page 1

Tuesday, the day of Cardinal Newman's funeral, was as melancholy

as the occasion,—a day of wet and gloom. Yet in the neighbourhood of the Edgbaston Oratory, the crowd must have contained some twenty thousand people. The Mass itself in the Cathedral of the Oratory was as simple as one attended by seventeen Roman Catholic Bishops, not a few of the Catholic nobility, and a considerable number of eminent Oxonians, could be. The Cardinal's hat and the scarlet biretta, which lay upon the pall, were the only signs of the eccle- siastical rank of the man for whom all were mourning, while the arms and motto of Cardinal Newman,—three hearts, with ' the words, Cor ad cor loquitur,—expressed the drift and

meaning of the great preacher's career much better than any pageantry. Bishop Clifford, of Clifton, who preached the funeral sermon in a voice trembling throughout with emotion, avoided anything in the least savouring of rhetoric or display. He had the good taste and good judgment to quote Dr. New- man's cordial tribute to the English people during their Catholic period, in the sermon called "Christ upon the Waters," preached on the installation of Bishop Ullathorne in the See of Birmingham, on October 27th, 1850. Under the influence of the Catholic Church, said Dr. Newman, the English people "did indeed become a peculiar, special people, with a character and genius of its own; I will say a bold thing,—in its staidness, sagacity, and simplicity, more like the mind that rules through all time the princely line of Roman pontiffs, than perhaps any other Christian people whom the world has seen." He quoted also the lines, written in 1853, enjoining Newman's friends not to spend their "faithful breath in grieving o'er the spot or hour of all-enshrouding death." One of his earliest poems, "Weep not for me," written in 1829, breathes the same sentiment. But, as usual in such cases, the Bishop quoted Newman's injunction to those who had no choice bat to ignore it. The final burial at Rednal was the most modest and simple of ceremonies.