A Man who seven hundred years ago lived from the age of twenty-five to that of forty-five a life of extreme self-discipline, and who yet preached of love and joy with a Doric simplicity, has captured the imagination of the modern world, as he did that of his contemporaries, and been found so faultless and so fascinating that both those who are scholars and those who are not keep on bringing out new books, as we see once more. His joy and his love of nature, which made him hail the water and the moon and death as his sisters, and the sun and the wind and fire as his brothers, call even to the present age with a sweet secret voice, and there is in holiness itself a romance which stirs the heart of the most earthly of us. But otherwise it would be hard to explain the popularity of St. Francis of Assisi, or to tell why so many people share enthusiasm with the Catholic pilgrims who are now crowding the Umbrian town which, seen from Perugia, looks like a pale patch upon a purple hill, why, in every country, many ordinary people are thinking of that scene of 1226 when the worn-out body, poor ill-treated Brother Ass, refused to go any further, and marked strangely in hands and feet and side, as though a copy of the Crucified, it grew finally still in the twilight of an October evening in a thatched cell on the plain beneath the little town, while, according to St. Bonaventura, innumerable larks, with full throats, alighted on the thatch, singing the songs of dawn at nightfall.

Sir John Marriott has suggested that to cut out of of an English history book all the pages that concerned the relation of Church and State would leave but a few pages in the book. That the problem is no dead one is testified by the present conflict in Mexico. In its widest, most universal form, the problem arises in the relations of the Empire and the Papacy—a problem which, I think, can be shown to continue long after the break up of the mediaeval system, and, recently, to have received a fresh emphasis.

In a side group from the Lateran Mosaic (appropriately reproduced by the Temple Edition of Dante’s Latin Works) are shown Peter and Constantine receiving the symbols of their authority from Christ, while Peter alone gives these symbols to Leo and Charlemagne—an apt summary of European history from the start of the Christian era to the Reformation. But it represents even more than that. Napoleon was content to refer to ‘Charlemagne, my august predecessor, Emperor of the French’! This statement (however false historically) was used as a bludgeon against the Pope.

Always has there been a conflict between Caesar and Peter. And yet, always, Caesar has been forced to confess his indebtedness to Peter. Charlemagne was crowned at Rome by the Pope : Charles V as near Rome as possible, at Bologna: and Napoleon— though he brought the Pope to Paris, kept him waiting in the Church, and snatched the crown from his hands—was unable to bend him to do his will. Even Bismarck had to go half-way to Canossa.

The young are not expected to be wise: there is something uncanny about old heads on young shoulders; but there is so much foolishness uttered about hymns, even by those old enough to know better, that one wonders why the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Undergraduates did not interfere to stop this essay, and the fact that the subject was set for a prize essay is sufficient proof that wisdom in hymnology does not necessarily come with age. You have a form of composition in which the greatest fail, and the second best quail, to wit, the Hymn, the religious hymn, and the next class in order, the academic arbiters, toss it for a bone of contention to the unblooded. What boots it them? What reck they? They are sped.

Doubtless the subject was set to provoke thought and discussion, and thereafter experiment, effort, and practical results. This prize essay scarcely carries out the intention, and incontinent one asks, What were the others like?

In one of his Studies in Arcady, entitled ‘Christianity and Language,’ R. L. Gales asks himself whether ‘as regards the mass of the (English) people the result of the Reformation may not be summed up in one sentence, “They have taken away my Lord”’ ? The thought has probably occurred to many Catholics that certainly the Reformation took away from us Our Lord’s chosen courtiers and friends, the saints. Before that date in England the names of the Saints were in all men’s mouths, and their images graced many a wayside shrine instead of the modern statute of a parliamentarian or philanthropist. How rich are the Irish, Bretons, Tuscans, and Spaniards in their beautiful saint-lore. Just as any ordinary man loves a powerful friend at court, so do these Catholic peoples love the friends who they know are helping them at the only Court that matters. Accordingly, they still do what our own fathers did—rely on the saints for help in every need. Faith directs the steps of Catholics in their choice of helpers. Our Lady in all things is our chief resource, because she is our mother, and the saints, our brethren, can always be relied on. All sorts of reasons led to the choice of particular patron saints, many of these choices being whimsical enough, but full of affectionate reverence. Countries and towns, arts and crafts, states of life, all have their own distinct protector, but help in sickness has from all time been sought from all God’s saints, though even here circumstances have guided choice of particular patrons, and some saints have by the faith of the people been granted a monopoly of curing certain ills the flesh is heir to.

North Berwick is justly esteemed. The sea there is what water is supposed to be, transparent. There are skerries ghostly enough in certain lights to be worth journeying to see, in the wide proportions of nature at the opening of the firth acceptable in all lights. And the villas, with their Scotch comfort and dignified rents! a place, too, where you meet the more discerning of your southern acquaintance ; and in the social atmosphere there are particulars to which visitors rightly attach value: the incidence of immovables to feu; a division of time often overlooked, the forenoon, separated between two ticks of the clock from the afternoon. Many accuracies of speech besides assert indeed no grammatical superiority, but hint with politeness that historical English has more than one arbiter; and, above all, for holiday purposes, give a zest to trivial conversation; and— many things are to be said in favour of North Berwick.

But there is a solid background to that ephemeral watering-place all praise. No doubt villages easily reached meet the approval of the visitor and survive comparison with those of Oxfordshire: Dirleton, Whitekirk, Athelstanford; and winding, shady roads lead to desirable spots like Tyninghame Bay, where the river which crosses the county from Fala direction discharges reluctantly in flats dense with sea buckthorn; but better lies closer along the northern wreckage of the moor, Spott, Garvald, Gifford, and many a hamlet. The general aspect of the land, precarious farming, hesitating lines of communication, secure varieties of view to satisfy the exacting.

Of France, yet not in their own opinions French, in spite of the distance apart in race, in language, in country, Breton and Basque have much in common. Both agricultural people they cling to their old traditions as races apart from the French of whose country their lands form part, to their own languages, and they are devout Catholics.

The Breton is a Celt, he claims, and history supports his claim to be descended from Celtic immigrants from Great Britain. The Basque knows not whence he came, some people say the Basque people are the only remnant of the population of the lost continent of Atlantis, the last of an earlier wave of immigration from the East than those which bore Westwards the other peoples of Europe. The language of the Breton bears out his claim to a British origin, for it is near akin to Gaelic, in Finistère and the Cotes du Nord very near indeed to Welsh, less so in Morbihan, but there the difference is more a matter of pronunciation than actual language, the people of Finistère say those of Morbihan speak a patois. The Basque language gives no clue to the origin of the race, it bears no affinity to any known language, with one solitary exception, so it is said, of the language spoken by a tribe living in a remote corner of Manchuria.

A few months ago a Southampton lady, a recent convert to the Catholic Faith, showed us an ivory triptych, about nine inches high, which appears to have been in the possession of her family since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and proves to be a fourteenth century ivory with the arms of John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter (1327-1369). In the centre piece (slightly damaged) are carved the Crucifixion in the upper compartment, and in the lower the Madonna and Child. The wing on the left has standing figures of St. Peter and St. John the Baptist; and that on the right corresponding figures of St. Paul and St. Thomas Becket. The authorities of the British Museum have arranged to secure this ivory for their collection of mediaeval antiquities.

There now exist but comparatively few English ivories of the later Middle Ages; doubtless their rarity is due to the Reformers’ fanatical zeal for the wholesale destruction of sacred images. In the British Museum have been for some time two ivories with the arms of Bishop Grandison : one of them is a triptych somewhat similar to the one mentioned above, and the other a panel of a diptych of which the other leaf is in the Louvre at Paris. There also is a mediaeval English diptych in ivory in the Salting Bequest at South Kensington. Such ivories now have a market value of nearly ;£1,000 each.