Lord Malmesbury, whose Reminiscences and whose sagacious worldly judgments we
have criticised in another column, has had almost more success than his rather confused memories of his youth deserved in eliciting a letter, first from Lord Blachford, and then from Cardinal Newman himself, in correction of the hazy impressions recorded by Lord Malmesbury concerning Mr. Newman's Oriel tutorship. Lord Blachford has shown that Lord Malmesbury confounded Mr. Newman with Mr. James,—in other words, a wise disciplinarian with one who was much more disciplined by his pupils than were his pupils by him,—while the Cardinal, in his letter to Tuesday's Daily News, has shown that he had a great, and, on the whole, a successful, fight to restore discipline at Oriel ; that his chief difficulty lay with the aristocratic youths who thought them- selves too great to be either humble or obedient ; and that he was not supported in his reforms, as he ought to have been, by the highest authorities of the College. Lord Malmesbury is shrewd enough in judging men of the world. But shrewdness of that kind is often perfectly consistent with remarkable obtuseness to the evidence of high genius and of still higher spiritual ardour. In the case of Mr. Newman, he evidently had but dim eyes and deal ears.
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