Page:Cousins's Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature.djvu/298

 286 Dictionary of English Literature

cipal, in his Logic. In 1830 he definitely broke with the evangeli calism in which he had been brought up; and in 1832, accompanied by H. Froude, went to the South of Europe, and visited Rome. During this lengthened tour he wrote most of his short poems, including "Lead Kindly Light," which ! were pub. 1834 as Lyra Apostolica. On his return he joined with Pusey, Keble, and others in initiating the Tractarian movement, and contributed some of the more important tracts, including the fateful No. xc., the publication oi which brought about a crisis in the movement which, after two years of hesitation and mental and spiritual conflict, led to the resignation by N. of his benefice. In 1842 he retired to Littlemore, and after a period of prayer, fasting, and seclusion, was in 1845 received intc the Roman Catholic Church. In the following year he went tc Rome, where he was ordained priest and made D.D., and returning to England he established the oratory in Birmingham in 1847, an ^ that in London in 1850. A controversy with C. Kingsley, who had written that N. " did not consider truth a necessary virtue," led tc the publication of his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the most remarkable books of religious autobiography ever written. N.'s later years were passed at the oratory at Birmingham. In 1879 he was summoned to Rome and cr. Cardinal of St. George in Velabro. Besides the works above mentioned he wrote, among others, fhe Avians of the Fourth Century (1833), Twelve Lectures (1850), Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics (1851), Idea of a University, Roman ism and Popular Protestantism, Disquisition on the Canon of Scripture, and his poem, The Dream of Gerontius. Possessed of one of the mosl keen and subtle intellects of his age, N. was also master of a style of marvellous beauty and power. To many minds, however, his subtlety not seldom appeared to pass into sophistry; and his atti tude to schools of thought widely differing from his own was some times harsh and unsympathetic. On the other hand he was able tc exercise a remarkable influence over men ecclesiastically, and in some respects religiously, most strongly opposed to him. His sermons place him in the first rank of English preachers.

Lives or books about him by R. H. Hutton, E. A. Abbott. Works (36 vols., 1868-81), Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), etc.

NEWTON, SIR ISAAC (1642-1727). Natural philosopher,

b. at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, the s. of a small landed proprietor; and ed. at the Grammar School of Grantham and at Trinity Coll., Camb. By propounding the binomial theorem, the differential cal culus, and the integral calculus, he began in 1665 the wonderful series of discoveries in pure mathematics, optics, and physics; which place him in the first rank of the philosophers of all time; He was elected Lucasian Prof, of Mathematics at Camb. in 1669, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672, over which body h< presided for 25 years from 1703. In the same year his ne\ theory of light was pub. in a paper before the society. Hu epoch-making discovery of the law of universal gravitation was not promulgated until 1687, though the first glimpse of it had come to him so early as 1665. The discovery of fluxions, which he claimed, was contested by Leibnitz, and led to a long and bitter controversy between the two philosophers. He twice sat in Parliament for his