Cardinal Newman
First sentence
THE old-fashioned, official biography, which used to consist in the conscientious assemblage and laborious narration of every fact and incident, relevant or irrelevant, that marked the subject's pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, and the presentation of the amorphous mass in two, and if possible there, portentous volumes as forbidding and almost as heavy as the sepulchral marble, has at length died out, smothered, we may presume, by its own abundance...
Description
"The whole of this little essay was written in type, and most of it corrected for the press, before Cardinal Newman's death. I thought it better, considering the smallness of the space available for the treatment of so great a subject, to devote the main part of the book to the study of Dr. Newman's life before leaving the Anglican Church,- in other words, to the course of thought which led him to the Church of Rome,- and to compress the latter part of his career into a single long chapter. This seemed to me the best way of making a book of interest to the great majority of English readers. R.H.H."--