"From time to time I have the feeling that certain instincts [urges? involuntary impulses?] are being annihilated within me, which have hitherto seem… - Ida Friederike Görres

Actually we were brought up to ingratitude - a relentless training through which we were taught to find nothing whatever good in ourselves, whether natural or spiritual..Conquering pride and conceit, they called it, practising humility, self-praise is no praise - all very well...Was pride really crushed by all this snubbing and humiliation? Was it not rather repressed...Worse still, we learnt this way to cultivate the devil's mirror eye of Hans Andersen's Snow Queen , over-vigilant, super-critical sight, sharpened to discover the worm in every bud, even the tiniest plant-louse! For if one practises this sort of discipline on oneself, day and night, it is asking too much - at any rate of a young girl - to judge one's neighbour by another yard-stick. All the time one's lynx-eyed consciousness remained on the alert, quick to pounce on everything negative - in you and in myself...Hans Andersen well knew how near this attitude is to blasphemy.

Francis de Sales defines jealousy as the expression of a violent but impure love. Does he know how it can be purified, I wonder? Or must it die slowly- in its own festering sore, as it were - burning, oozing out, the way a wound cleanses itself before it heals?

Reading lots of Dickens. Barnaby Rudge: the last Catholic pogrom - No Popery, the Gordon Riots in London - 1780, twenty years before Newman was born. He must have known people who had set fire to the houses, or taken in victims and refugees. Lord George Gordon who led the mob (obviously a religious maniac) died as late as 1793. Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby - this too, is part of Newman's background, this gallery of living gargoyles, ghouls and monsters. Might account, perhaps, even for some of Newman's pessimism about the world and human nature, which some attribute merely to his own melancholy disposition? That nineteenth century!!