modern Tridentinism, and had left his mother Church in the vain hope that he should find a more congenial sphere for his antiquarian tastes, among the English Papists. But he found the past even more absolutely ignored at Oscott than at Oxford. Anglicans are glad to retain all that may be safely retained of their own antiquity: but Romanists are Italian throughout, and any thing that is national, is schismatical. They know nothing of Augustine and little of Anselm; they date from Trent, and to that all must conform. Old liturgies, old customs, old principles, as he in vain tried to recommend them, they laughed at as utterly obsolete: and he in turn scoffed at their Romanesque, and their Oratorianism, as infinitely less Catholic than the Anglican Gothic, and the Anglican Prayer-Book. Poor fellow! he has since died in a mad-house—a noble genius, but the victim of theory, and of unreal conceptions as to the diseases and the cure of the times. If I was disappointed at Oscott, much more at St. Chad’s, their new cathedral in Birmingham. So much was said about this attempt, that I had supposed it a _chef d’œuvre_ of the architect, and a complete trap for _dilettanti_ Anglicans. It is the reverse of all this, being so poor, and even niggard in its entire conception and execution, that I am sure it must be a spoiled Pugin, if his at all. It is of brick, and of small dimensions, and not cleanly. Its crypts are instructive as to the way in which the crypts of the old cathedrals were formerly used, being fitted up for masses for the dead, but not much adorned. They are damp, dark, and somewhat offensive, as they are used for burial. Strolling out to Edgbaston, I saw the rising walls of Newman’s Oratory. This, too, is strictly conformed to his new Italian idea of religion, which scrupulously eschews the old English architecture, associated as that is with Magna Charta and the Constitutions of Clarendon, and with three hundred years of absolute independence. This is in strict agreement with his _development_ theory. The Romanism of the _present_ is the rule, and that is Italian: the past was immature and undigested, and hence savored, more or less, of nationality. How vastly more severed, then, from the historical antecedents of his country is the British papist, than the genuine Anglican!