| SIR WALTER SCOTT AND JOHN HENRY
NEWMAN Remarks by Patrick Killough to the 2007 Convention of the Venerable John Henry Newman Association Pittsburgh Holiday Inn Friday August 10 8:30 - 9:20 a. m. ENDNOTES (1) INTRODUCTION. On praying for dying Scott, Newman to James Robert Hope 10/29/1852, Ornsby, 2007, p. 104 On tears for and Catholicity of Scott: Newman to J. Keble 12 Sept 1842 Ker, 1990, p. 252. . Newman recalled his first experience with Scott as having been around age eight -- in 1809, therefore, during his second year at Ealing School. It is more likely that he had first heard Scott three or four years earlier. For "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" appeared in 1805, the year before John Henry's father sent him a letter which he knew his son was able to read. If Newman, however, was as old as eight, I suspect that he was also given the text to read for himself. He would in any event have heard his mother and her sister-in-law read and relish such lines as those about the ruined Cistercian abbey near Abbotsford which Father Newman would visit with the Hope-Scotts in bitterly cold January 1853: "If
thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray." (Canto II, 1) From his mother and Aunt Betsy young John Henry also heard the medieval hymn that precedes the conclusion of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel": "DIES IRAE, DIES ILLA,
(Canto VI, xxx)SOLVET SAECLUM IN FAVILLA" On July 13, 1852 at St. Mary's, Oscott during the first Provincial Synod of Westminster, Newman preached 'The Second Spring,' celebrating the re-establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England. See also on-line http://www.newmanreader.org/biography/ward/volume1/chapter10.html http://www.patrickkillough.com/courses/sirws_jhn_01.html |