nature of her husband's influence. She had been before her marriage occupied almost exclusively with the social duties and enjoyments of a country home; and, as her earlier letters show, without those formed and intense convictions which controlled the later years of her life. Her tastes corresponded to her education and position, and she had carried many of them with her when she first came to Christ Church. Her letters show how all other interests gradually gave way to religious ones. Oxford interested her at first mainly through its social aspects; and it was inevitable that she should see a good deal of its society. As time went on, other occupations and duties withdrew her gradually, and before her death almost completely, from those early interests. She spent a great deal of time in educating her children. She was a regular visitor of the poor in St. Aldate's and St. Ebbe's parishes. She assisted the Rev. W. K. Hamilton, Vicar of St. Peter's-inthe-East, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, in setting on foot a penitentiary and in other good works. She became a regular attendant at the daily services of the cathedral. She set aside a portion of time each day to private prayer and intercession, and to spiritual reading. She spent long hours of work at manuscripts for her husband in the Bodleian Library. She even began, with her husband's full sanction, a Commentary on St. Matthew's Gospel. She always had possessed literary tastes; as she grew out of girlhood into womanhood her tastes steadily developed, and the heroic literature of the ocean gradually made way for Byron, then Walter Scott, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing. She kept fairly abreast of the better books that appeared each year. She was a Latin, as well as a German and Italian scholar; and could enjoy Tacitus in his own unrivalled Latin. Thus she was enabled to be of great service to her husband in the works which he had most at heart. She seems to have collated the Tauchnitz text of St. Augustine's Confessions with the Benedictine, for the Bibliotheca Patrum; and she it was who chiefly enabled her husband to contribute to Prof. Carl Witte those collations of the Dante MSS. in

Mrs. Pusey's Religious and Literary Work. 85 the Bodleian which enrich his great edition of the poet1. Writing to Tholuck on March 6, 1837, Pusey says:

'At last my wife and I have collated all the MSS. I fear that the papers are confused at first sight; for I did not look at the directions until lately, thinking that I had understood from you what was to be done. They are, however, accurately done, and must have been collated a second time for the sake of the orthography.'

Tholuck was very grateful :

'The collation for Dante,' he writes, April 4, 1837, 'has made me quite sad. You and your delicate wife ought not to do this. It is an act of loving self-denial, but the subject is not worth the sacrifice. Is not your dear wife's health and your own time given you for much more important tasks? Certainly in such a case it would have been quite as Christian to have said that as no one could be found to undertake the work, it must remain undone. How grateful Witte is he will have told you in writing.'

Mrs. Pusey was also working at one time on the Latin text of St. Cyprian. But this was only a part of her literary work. One day she writes from Oxford to Pusey, who was in London :

---

'The darkness here about four was really oppressive, and the snow heavy. I could not see to read the print of the small St. Augustine by the fireside I collated about two folio pages, and was then obliged to put it by, feeling my head uncomfortable. I met with three various readings. I then tried to do the Jeremy Taylor, but that was too much for my head. The Greek Testament I have not opened to-day.'

The next day she writes:

'I had a restless night, but got up at nine, and before ten was seated before St. Augustine, and worked at it till five this afternoon, without any intentional interruptions; but first the children came, then Henry Bunsen, then Mr. Mozley and his brother, then the Miss Biscoes, then Frederick, then Mr. Ashworth, and lastly the Provost and Mrs. Hawkins. By-the-by, the very last was Dr. Wootten.'

She had a dread of parading her literary accomplishments. Dr. Spry,' writes Pusey to his wife, 'asked me whether "the young man" had done anything about the MSS. I said, "the person who was to, &c., had not been well, but will, I have no doubt, soon." She was a great ''Div. Commedia ricoretta da Carlo 'Frai viventi devo moltissimo ai Witte.' Berlino, 1862, pref. lxxiv. Sign. riv. Dott. Pusey di Oxford.'

reader, too, on her own account. In 1828 and 1829 her religious reading was represented by Pascal's 'Thoughts,' Shuttleworth's 'Paraphrase,' Jeremy Taylor, Le Bas' Sermons, Wilberforce's Practical Christianity,' Milman's 'History of the Jews,' Short's Sermons. She was always interested in reading the books of any of her husband's friends. On the day after Dr. and Mrs. Whately called, she set herself to study his 'Elements of Logic'; and, in the same way, intimacy with the Rev. J. H. Newman led her to read through, again and again, the earlier volumes of the 'Parochial Sermons,'-the work which unquestionably more than any other shaped the closing years of her life. The subjoined letter shows the thoroughness and honesty with which she approached religious books on religious subjects. She is writing from Ryde; and is referring to her husband's tract on Baptism:

DEAREST EDWARD,

Sunday evening, Nov. 1, 1835.

After breakfast this morning I began Part II; since afternoon church I have read to page 80 or thereabouts. Some things I am not clear about, others (one or two) I do not quite understand; with the whole I feel unsettled and perplexed, but all that shall stand over till we meet. There are some things that come to one at once as truth, as soon as they are proposed, and those are the things that one really believes unhesitatingly. Other things (and your tract is one of them), in greater or lesser degrees, stir up against themselves in one's mind doubts and difficulties and perplexities. Mr. Newman's (I beg pardon, John's, I might almost say St. John) sermons are full of truths of the first sort, and perhaps that is one reason why I so like them; you will say that your tract contains new views, and that the sermons do not, but, to me, they also certainly did at their first perusal. Two more observations on the tract. Ist. What you say on the insufficiency of the common ideas of repentance is very nice and very, of course, homestriking; but I recollect at Cheltenham you solved my doubts on that subject by saying that a repentance, followed by a leaving off the sin repented of, or a doing of that, the omission of which was faulty, was a true repentance. I half think there ought to be something more than this, because one should hardly be satisfied with amendment, without grief and sorrow for having offended us, from our children; moreover, the words 'ye that do truly and earnestly repent' always cause in me great misgivings as to my own repentance. I see one piece of confusion I have made in the above lines, but still there is

Mrs. Pusey's Health.

87

some uncertainty left. Secondly, Would the early Apostolic Church, according to the tract theory, have considered all who had not been excommunicated as not having fallen from grace? (Please to answer this definitely.) Then, again, our confessions [in the Prayer-book] hardly seem to suit both classes, those who enjoy baptismal purity and those who have lost it, and yet they must have been intended for both classes. Oh, that you were close at hand, for me to talk to you!

Pusey replied at length, and concluded with the following

passage:

'I see many reasons, which you do not, why John's [Newman's] statement of truth should be attractive, mine repulsive: he has held a steady course, I have not. I studied evidences, when I should have been studying the Bible; I was dazzled with the then rare acquaintance with German theology, and over-excited by it; I thought to do great things, and concealed self under the mask of activity; I read, he thought also and contemplated; I was busy, he tranquil; I self-indulgent, he selfdenying; I exalted myself, he humbled himself. This will pain you, if you knew it not before, but do not contradict it to me; only pray for me, dearest, that this and everything else of sin may be forgiven me.'

During the early part of their married life Pusey's own health was a subject of anxiety to his wife; but after 1835 he became stronger, while Mrs. Pusey sank slowly into the condition of an invalid. From that year she had a cough which never deserted her; and her life, speaking physically, was a constant struggle against the disease which in the course of five years brought her to the grave. It was her illness which obliged her to be away from Oxford again and again during Term time, when Pusey was obliged to reside. In November, 1835, she was at Ryde. In May, 1837, she went on a long visit to the Channel Islands. In April, 1838, she went to Clifton; in May to Weymouth. It is to her letters, written during these absences, that we owe most of what we know about her; and in them may be traced the progress of that weakness and suffering by which she was disciplined before leaving this world. Pusey followed her with the watchful and incessant anxiety which belonged to his natural character.

It was at the end of 1837 that her state of health first became grave. She had rallied in Guernsey; and she

spent the winter of 1837-1838 in Oxford. A new and heavy trouble was now awaiting her. Early in 1838 their son Philip began to show signs of some serious ill-health, the symptoms of which became rapidly more alarming.

'Poor little Philip,' wrote Pusey to Rev. B. Harrison, 'has been more seriously ill than I apprehended. Dr. Wootten has been here every day for the last fortnight. Philip is very tranquil, patient, and subdued. Dr. W. has ordered him meat to-day, which looks as if he were afraid that his fever would reduce him too low, his pulse being about 100. ... His subduedness at times looks to me a sort of preparation for passing into heaven.'

A fortnight later Pusey writes to Newman that

'Dr. Wootten seems to think that Philip may very well get through the cold weather, and talks of his running about when the warm weather comes. So there is nothing immediate. He even says that the disease may be stopped, though, beginning so early, there seems little hope that he will grow up to fulfil his wish of preaching in your pulpit.'

Another fortnight passed, and Pusey writes to Dr. Hook:

'You will be kindly grieved to hear that Maria has a good deal of affliction now, some of which is peculiarly her own. She has a sister and a niece dying; a brother in imminent danger; and our son, though his recovery is not hopeless, has his chest affected, and we are not to look for any change for months, still less probably any hope that he will ever live, or have strength, if he do recover, to serve in the sacred ministry of the Church of God.'

At the beginning of April, 1838, Mrs. Pusey was in London her husband insisted on her consulting a London physician. But anxieties, the strain of which she was ill able to withstand, did not diminish.

Philip,' wrote her husband, 'is not worse, but he is not better. . . . God's will be done! And may He help and strengthen you, dearest, and turn your present affliction into future joy. "Heaviness lodgeth (with us) for the night, and in THE MORNING is JOY."

'I have told you all I know: perhaps what Dr. W. said would not have changed your thoughts: I have been looking forward to years in which Philip might mature for eternity. I do not know anything to the contrary now: but, when Dr. W. left him last night, he said in