"What prompted you to publish the essay of Cardinal Newman?" a curious correspondent asked last month, inquiring about one of my older web pages "Definition of a Gentleman".

My answer: ca. 1996 I chanced upon Newman's "Definition" in a multi-volume children's collection of readings titled Journeys Through Bookland by Charles H. Sylvester. The content of Bookland is now available electronically, at least in part. We have an inexpensive physical copy, many decades old, acquired used. Sylvester's selections and commentary are enlightening for readers of any age; he assumes that his audience wants to learn to think.

I enjoyed Cardinal Newman's prose style, and I saluted the gentle sentiments he espoused; they seemed to echo Marcus Aurelius's Stoic philosophy. So I retyped "Definition of a Gentleman" and uploaded it — both to make it easy for like-minded people to discover it as I did, and to help me find it again whenever I wanted to reread it or share it with a friend.

Come to think of it, that explains most of what gets posted here!

(cf. [1] and CultureMemoryProgress (28 Sep 2000), Cardinal Newman (4 Oct 2001), ...)

TopicJournalizing - TopicPersonalHistory - TopicLiterature - 2006-08-06

(correlates: CultureMemoryProgress, TwentyPercentLonger, DeptOfRedundancyDept, ...)