"I look to you to apologize for me to Sir S. G, for offering to him a book written by me... one which my pen has defaced....
"F. W. Newman. "Weston-s.-M., _19th April_, 1887."
"Brown's Hotel, "Dover Street, W., "_21st April_, 1887.
"Accept my best thanks for Professor Newman's writings on the _Christian Commonwealth_ and the _New Crusade_. I really feel ashamed to deprive you of the latter, and Professor Newman of the former, but it would be most ungracious of me to refuse to accept them.
"Pray assure him that the value of the copy of the _Christian Commonwealth_ is to be much enhanced by the fact that it bears his autograph notes, and that I feel deeply honoured by the terms in which he has been good enough to express himself in his note to you, which I have read with great interest and which I enclose. I shall always regret that I had not the honour and pleasure of meeting him at Weston, but my time was too short....
Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Pennington were great friends of Newman's, and he often stayed with them from time to time. By the kindness of Mrs. Pennington I am able to quote from some letters written by him in 1881-90, and one much earlier, in 1875, in which he laments the death of Mrs. Blackburn. Mrs. Blackburn was a sister of Mr. Pennington's, and one of the most munificent of contributors to the United Kingdom Alliance in its early days, who (I am told by Mrs. Pennington) often denied herself many luxuries in order to be able to make her contributions larger. She describes her as one of the best women she had ever known.
Newman, in his letter to Mr. Pennington in 1875, says of Mrs. Blackburn:--
"I have known her ever since Michaelmas 1869, when the revelation was first made to us of the Contagious Diseases Act; and at the Congress of Social Science at Bristol she was pleased to receive my hospitality. My esteem for her was great and ever increasing...."
He goes on to say that his dread of cold and chills makes him fear a long journey, "though it is mortifying to me not to meet you and Mrs. Pennington, and many other earnest friends of this very important cause."
In 1881 Gladstone was Prime Minister, and stayed in office for five years. For almost the whole of this time the country was hardly ever at peace. The Transvaal rebellion was started in 1880 and later our own troops were defeated by the insurrectionists; whereupon the Government promptly surrendered the Transvaal.