He is an unfortunate man that cannot feel proud of his nationality; but it has to be confessed that it is difficult to be English during these days in Palestine. Thanks to the religious habit which I wear, the Palestinian native frequently looks on me as a Faransāwi, or Frenchman—a fact which bears tribute to the influence French Catholics have exerted here in times past; and it is not always that I correct his mistake.

Indeed, one has to confess at times to feelings of downright shame and a desire to hide one’s head; to-day, for example, when the streets of Jerusalem are being paraded by armoured cars, and when groups of those known to you at home as the ‘Black and Tans’ are scattered about in the company of Hindoo troops. Because yesterday, to-day and to-morrow, the 13th, 14th and 15th of July, have been chosen by the Christian and Mahommedan Arabs as a sort of ‘down tools’ protest against the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration favouring the establishment of a Jewish national home, in the British mandate of Palestine. Shops are closed : bazaars are idle : one waits in some trepidation for the events of the next few days. There are rumours that some who are in the know have left the country. The authorities, fearing a repetition of the troubles of May and November, 1921, and of Easter, 1920, have issued proclamations and brought up armoured cars and soldiers.

Little people get pleasure and also pain from quite little things, and I have not any respect for supermen who pretend that small things do not count. Yet one has to suffer from a majority or a vogue in favour of sham greatness, from the never-decreasing number of those who muddle greatness into bigness, and at last are found practising grossness, carelessness, recklessness, on the plea that their lives at least are too precious to waste in minding minutiae. Professional writers are constantly saying ‘not as big as,’ instead of ‘not so big as,’ and the subjunctive is a thing of the past even when the meaning is in peril. For instance, on a screw-stoppered beer-bottle one sees the injunction: ‘Observe that this label is unbroken.’ To keep this grammatical, one should never break the label. And does one really conjugate the past indicative of the verb To Be: I was, Thou wert? In France, imperfectly educated persons avoid like poison the past subjunctive, and even more commonly in Italy do the natives shirk the preterite, even in writing. I am always puzzled to know if Leo XIII wrote : ‘He has given thee to us that we may hope still more,’ or ‘He gave thee to us that we might’ &c. The English version leaves us in doubt, for it says: ‘He has given thee to us that we might’ &c., which is just wrong enough and careless enough to be the very opposite of style.

One hundred years ago this September, the independence of Brazil from the Crown of Portugal, and the formation of the new state into an empire, were declared. In commemoration of that series of events, special celebrations are being held over there during September. The Holy See is being (as, indeed, how should it be otherwise?) represented at those rejoicings, and so also are Great Britain and many other Powers. It may be of interest to glance at the very stirring and extraordinary history of that far-away land.

The first European to land in Brazil was Vicente Yañez Pinzόn, who, in the year 1500, coasted as far as the Orinoco River, discovering also the mouth of the Amazon. During the same year, Pedro Alvárez Cabral, a mariner from Portugal, also reached Brazil. He disembarked on Easter Sunday. A solemn Mass was celebrated, and to the newly-discovered regions the voyagers gave the name, ‘True Cross’ (Vera Cruz). A vessel was sent back to Europe to announce to the King of Portugal the discovery which had been made, but Cabral himself had quite another object in view than following up that particular matter. In point of fact, in the voyage which had brought him to Brazil, he had been under the impression that he was on his way to India viâ the Cape of Good Hope! He contented himself, therefore, with leaving two of his sailors in the newly-found land, and then himself continued his original journey.

The great Whig historian’s sneer at the Cavalier dramatist’s conversion to the Catholic Faith was equally ungenerous and untrue. For Dryden had in all probability become a Catholic before Charles II died, as his wife and one of his sons had already been received into the Church. And the ‘pension,’ contemptuously referred to by Macaulay, was simply the belated payment of his salary as Laureate, already four years in arrears, together with other sums owing to the poet by the spendthrift King Charles. Lord Macaulay might have discovered if he liked, in the course of his historical researches among seventeenth century documents, the existing Treasury Warrant, signed by Rochester and dated May 6th, 1684, authorising the payment to Dryden of £50, being one quarter’s annuity (as poet laureate) due at Midsummer, 1680, and also the sum of £25, being one quarter’s additional annuity by Letters of Privy Seal, due Lady Day, 1680. James II, having a stricter sense of justice, thus paid off his brother’s debts. But Dryden lost his court post, and had the mortification of seeing it transferred to Shadwell. And he died in William Ill’s reign, a staunch Catholic and a poor man under a Protestant king.

The editor of the Daily Shouter was conscious from his salutation that it was young Phelps, the new reporter, who stood behind him, so it was not necessary to turn round. He went on sorting his papers, remarking as he did so, ‘You can run down to Airminster and see if you can get a story from the R.A.F. man who got stuck up on the roof of the abbey yesterday. See if he’s got anything to say about how it felt being up there for eight hours—not about how he got down, we had all that last night; but just see if he has anything to say that you can make into a story. Hullo! ‘The editor had transferred his attention to the telephone.

Young Phelps accepted his assignation readily, and hopefully. The news editor of the Shouter had a wide reputation as a discoverer of possibilities in the events of the passing hour. True, he sometimes tested the mettle of new men on forlorn hopes, but young Phelps rather liked being put on his mettle; he hoped to be a news editor himself one day. At any rate, it was up to him to get a ‘story’ out of the hero of yesterday’s misadventure. The papers had given a due account of the accident which had brought down Flight-Lieut. Cliffordson’s aeroplane on to the roof of the fourteenth-century minster church from which Airminster derives its name. The machine had got itself entangled amongst the intricate masonry that surmounts the west facade, and when it came to earth with its pilot it was found that the lieutenant had been left clinging to a narrow ledge up amongst the gargoyles.

The dogmatic duel between the two intellectual leaders of Anglo-Catholicism and Modernism within the Church of England is a struggle of giants made homely by irrepressible sallies of the ‘average man.’ Neither the Bishop nor the Dean can lay aside that human nature which feels and even repays a hurt.

We should have no joy in recording one of these sallies if strangely enough it did not bind into a single sheaf of words what it elsewhere scattered over the field of controversy. In the August number of The Modern Churchman Dean Rashdall has an article entitled ‘Bishop Gore and St. Thomas Aquinas,’ in which he writes :