Sunday, February 21, 2016

The Dog and the Tortoise

In honor of the 215th birthday of John Henry Newman we offer this newspaper clipping recently found preserved in a biography of the Cardinal. We will let our readers surmise the occasion which prompted an (as yet) unidentified American newspaper to publish this article around February 22, 1896. It might have been meant to coincide with Newman's birthday as well as with the publication of a work (possibly the Life of Manning) by Arthur Wollaston Hutton (1848-1912), the sometime librarian, sometime Anglican, sometime Catholic and sometime agnostic whose recollections of the relationship between Manning and Newman are discussed here. Ecclesiastical zoologists might wish to consider which of these English cardinals was the dog and which the tortoise.




For readers uninterested in the internal politics of the 19th- century English Catholic Church, the verso of this clipping
may prove more stimulating. It contains the listing of steamer arrivals and departures for East Coast ports, circa 22 February.  Anyone who can identify the newspaper from which this clipping was taken will be rewarded with our fulsome thanks and public acclaim in this blog.