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Extract of a Letter of Francis William Newman to John Henry Tucker.

 

October 1890

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        I am about to send to my publishers my painful contribution to the life of the late Cardinal, my brother. I am conscientiously bound to write it, because in his fifty years' absence from the sight of the public a new generation has grown up ignorant of the facts, and the attempt is already begun to puff them off for their beauty of style. . . .  My age being eighty-five, I know the truths, and must tell them. I shall be howled at as unbrotherly. My immediate business now is to write to numbers of correspondents of whom you are one, whom I have necessarily neglected while engaged in the most anxious work I have ever undertaken. . . .