Caswall, Edward

CASWALL, EDWARD. - English Oratorian poet, b. at Yately (Hampshire) to a Protestant minister on 15 July 1814, d. at Birmingham on 2 Jan. 1878. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1832, received Anglican Orders in 1838-39, and became perpetual curate of a parish in Wiltshire (1840). Newman's writings led him to Catholicism. In 1846 he renounced his benefice; he was received into the Church by Card. C. J. Acton in Rome in Jan. 1847, together with his wife, who died in 1849. In 1850 he entered the Birmingham Oratory.

Already known before as a writer (Sermons on the Seen and the Unseen, 1846), he acquired fame as a Catholic poet and translator of ascetic and liturgical works and poems. Worthy of note are: Lyra Catholica (1849); Office of the Immaculate Conception in Latin and English (1850); Verba Verbi, The Altar Manual (1859). Original poems full of feeling and faith are: The Masque of Mary and other Poems (1858, often reprinted); A May Pageant, A Tale of Tintern (1865). One poem is dedicated to Card. Newman, to whom C. was most devoted and by whom he was greatly loved. Several of his hymns, original and translated, are included in the Westminster Hymnal.

Enrico E. G. Rope