Newman's prose is worthy of close study for the following reasons:—
(1) His style is a clear, transparent medium for the presentation of thought. He molded his sentences with the care of an artist. He said:—
"I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have 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:—