In this year of Byron’s centenary, Leigh Hunt’s name inevitably recurs. His relations with Byron are told and re-told, and ‘the common weakness of throwing the principal character into a high light by darkening the shadows around those who surrounded him’ at times relegates Hunt to the outer darkness. He is ‘sly and venomous’ according to one critic, who on Byron himself is admirable. It is not, however, our intention to discuss the Byron-Hunt episode. A severance of friendship is always a tragedy. And an attempt to justify the one at the expense of the other is only to accentuate the tragic note. We can afford to forget that they ever ceased to be friends. We may leave Byron in his ‘high light,’ but we would fain dissipate somewhat the shadows that surround Leigh Hunt’s name, not by putting forward a reasoned defence of the man and his actions, but by recalling one of his Essays wherein he describes his discovery of a Saint. The genuine appreciation of goodness and virtue which the Essay exhibits may help us to see him in his true light—to see him, perhaps, as Shelley saw him :

The essay is to be found in The Seer; or, Commonplaces Refreshed, a collection of Hunt’s Essays published in 1841.

[While the name and the story—a spiritual romance—of Blessed Edmund Campion are known to all, we are probably less familiar with the name of his contemporary and friend at Oxford, Gregory Martin, one of the notable scholars of the day, who spoke the word that under God converted Edmund Campion.

Martin, after giving brilliant promise in his studies, left Oxford in 1569 to accept the post of tutor to the sons of the Duke of Norfolk, but resigned it in the following year when the duke’s household were ordered to conform outwardly to the new religion.

Before leaving England to practise his religion unmolested in Flanders, he made his appeal to his friend Campion, entreating him to abandon the idea of a merely worldly career, to choose the better part, and to accompany him into poverty. The pleading prevailed, in that as we know, Campion turned his back on Oxford and entered the Society of Jesus.

Martin went to Douay, there presided over by Dr. Allen and was ordained Priest in 1573. He then went to Rome to take part in the foundation of the English College—but in 1578 was recalled to Rheims. There his great work was the translation of the Bible from the Vulgate into English, the version which came to be known as the Rheims Version. Martin died at Rheims, 1582. His death was a blow to Dr. Allen and the College; for he was not only a fervent Catholic, but a ripe scholar, and one with the intellectual modesty that characterises the true scholar—one of Oxford’s most distinguished sons.

A town and Gown affray in these days is not usually regarded as serious. In fact such conflicts have almost ceased to be, the gown confining its attention to the annoying of college authorities rather than attacking town. In the Middle Ages, however, there occurred bitter and bloody fights between students and citizens. Anthony Wood tells of many killed and wounded in these affairs. After the battles, peace was secured, for the time being, by the paying of compensation by the town, because the gown, being well up in logic and law, could always prove that it was right and the town hopelessly wrong.

A great affray in Paris, early in the year 1229, led to disastrous results. The fight began in wine and ended in blood, which was the ordinary procedure; what was extraordinary about this particular riot was that when the citizens were tired of being knocked on the head, the civic authorities sent out the Civic Guard, and Queen Blanche ordered her archers to quell the tumult. These two bodies of disciplined soldiery shot down the students without mercy. They, badly beaten and resentful, clamoured for redress. The Masters— Paris University was a guild of Masters—took up the quarrel. The Queen refused them satisfaction, and in a short time a deadlock was reached; then the University had recourse to a very modern weapon of retaliation—they declared a strike. If they expected by this means to achieve their ends they were disappointed, since town and court stood firm.

Some of the finest literature in the world has been written in the shades of the prison-house. Ovid composed his Tristia as a convict in the Crimea, the reason for his marooning being that he had loved the Emperor Augustus’ daughter too deeply. Boethius penned his Consolations of Philosophy when under sentence of death. James the First of Scotland solaced his days of captivity at Windsor with the creation of that noble volume, The Queen's Quhair. A distinguished French prisoner in England, Charles D’Orleans, the contemporary of Villon, beguiled his dull leisure with the invention of beautiful poems.

Villon, jail-bird and man of genius, was not as well housed by his captors and jailers as Charles, but his miserable condition was a sharp spur to his quick brain. In the Castle of Meung he was cast into a cell without light or air, dripping with water and swarming with rats, toads and snails. In such miserable conditions he wrote his Ballad of Debate of the Heart and Body of Villon and his Ballad of Villon in Prison, a most poignant appeal to help Francois living instead of saving up prayers for Francois dead. Here is a taste of its quality:

There is a saying that Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched. I have often wondered just how much truth there is in this expression. Opinion seems to vary. Some Catholics have read into it the condemnation of Erasmus as a secret heretic inwardly gnawing at the very vitals of the Church. Few perhaps until late years have made any honest attempt to interpret the great Humanist’s position in the light of his own explanations or by reference to the times in which he lived. No one wants to condone the faults of Erasmus, and heaven knows they were many. But let us not overlook the good points in his character, or the excuses for the bad ones.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Erasmus occupied an enviable place among the esthetes of the new Humanistic learning. He may be taken as a fair example of the critical attitude of mind in which many of the best and most loyal Catholics approached the religious problems of the age. Alive to all the abuses that prevailed among his fellow-ecclesiastics, Erasmus is perhaps injudicious at times in the manner in which he insists upon reform. But after we have sifted the matter to the bottom, we shall find that in most cases his ideas are just. He demanded a thoroughly literary education for the Churchmen of his day to put them in touch with the leading spirits of Humanism. Had they possessed this knowledge, there is little doubt but that the tide of religious affairs could have been changed for a saner direction.

The recent visit to London of a troupe of players from the Comédie Française gave us a welcome opportunity of studying a few of Molière’s greatest works in the only completely satisfactory way in which they can be studied. For though we may read and re-read our Molière with never-failing joy till we know every line by heart and every character as well as the members of our own family, it is not until those familiar figures are actually moving before us and revealing their characters in every word they utter that we can realise quite fully the greatness of their creator’s genius.

Surely no dramatist has ever equalled Molière in his power of writing dialogue that is at the same time apparently so faithful a reproduction of real speech and so entirely characteristic of each individual speaker. The talk is all so natural, so spontaneous, that the fact that in many plays it is carried on in Alexandrine couplets never jars on our sense of reality in the least—it is not until afterwards, if at all, that we reflect that after all nobody ever did talk in Alexandrine couplets in real life. Molière wrote his plays for the stage and not for the study, consequently this quality of naturalness in the dialogue strikes us even more forcibly when we hear it spoken than when we read it. In the same way we have to see the characters not merely with the mind’s eye, but as actual living beings, in order fully to appreciate them.