ever
written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides
innumerable corrections and interlinear additions."

His definition of style is "a thinking out into language," not an
ornamental "addition from without." He employs his characteristic
irony in ridiculing those who think that "_one_ man could do the
thought and _another_ the style":--

"We read in Persian travels of the way in which young gentlemen
go to work in the East, when they would engage in correspondence
with those who inspire them with hope or fear. They cannot write one
sentence themselves; so they betake themselves to the professional
letter writer... The man of thought comes to the man of words; and
the man of words duly instructed in the thought, dips the pen of
desire into the ink of devotedness, and proceeds to spread it over
the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard
to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety
plays around the brow of expectation. This is what the Easterns are
said to consider fine writing;
and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to whom I
have been referring."[8]

It was a pleasure to him to "think out" expressions like the
following:--

"Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt."

"Calculation never made a hero."

"Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have
changed often."

(2) Like Macaulay, Newman excelled in the use of the concrete. In his
_Historical Sketches_, he imagines the agent of a London company sent
to inspect Attica:--

"He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were
limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than
at first survey might have been expected, sufficient certainly for
sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long
since worked out; figs fair; oil first rate; olives in profusion...
He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere
freshened up the pale olive till the olive forgot its monotony, and
its cheek glowed like the arbutus or the beech of the Umbrian
hills."

A general statement about superseding "the operation of the laws of
the universe in a multitude of ways" does not satisfy him. He
specifies in those ways when he records his belief that saints have
"raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied
grain and bread, cured incurable diseases."