In the year following his conversion to Catholicism, John Henry Newman reviewed a new volume of religious poetry by John Keble, his friend, former colleague and leader of the Oxford Movement. The essay is a bristly aff air, its literary criticism punctuated by extended passages of self-justification and sharp protestations against those ‘who have spoken or written harshly of recent converts to the Catholic Church’ and who merit ‘more lenient measure’ on the ‘Great Day’ of Judgement than they have seen fit to dole out themselves. In this hypersensitive mood, Newman welcomes the volume's denominational discretion. Unlike Keble's previous collections of religious poems, Lyra Innocentium maintains ‘an emphatic silence on the subject of other Churches’; no Catholic could ‘find fault’ with its depictions of an essential Christianity (422).

Nonetheless, Newman is not above engaging in a bit of denominational one-up-manship. Of course, he praises his old friend's literary contribution to the transformation of the Anglican Church: ‘[h]e did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do: he made it poetical’ (442). Yet he suggests that this is a poor substitute for the truth and beauty of Catholicism itself: