George Moore said of Edward Martyn:

‘There is nobody like him. He is more wonderful than anything in literature.’ This inspired thought becomes vivid in Denis Gwynn’s story of Edward Martyn’s life. The memoir is compiled from extracts, chaotic in their confusion as they were left, from Edward Miartyn’s own writings. The result, however, despite the incompleteness of these papers, is the most enlightening story of the state of Ireland in a period when Edward Martyn contributed to its public life by his work of reform. They were the most vital movements of a reform in Ireland, which might never have existed or begun but for him whose courage, perseverance, learning, independence of mind and indifference to criticism, ridicule and hostility made him the most remarkable instance of what one great man of such qualities can do in the public service of his country.

Religion, literature and art always meant much more to him than politics and he had by nature and by grace an aristocracy of mind, a strong mind which estranged him from many literary friends. Religious by a native instinct, he the layman, was truly the ‘uncloistered monk,’ and he chose to live as a hermit, shunning the world : he lived in a garret, whitewashed and bare, in the tower of his ancestral castle of Tulira. Magnificent in his generosity, he would give all his possessions in the interests of education and the uplifting of his country, and to none was he more bountifully lavish than to him who would be the disciple of his idealism.

‘Originality’ was the sin of this son of Adam, but fortunately or unfortunately he could not hide it.

Our ignorance of the fortunes of Catholics in the Scotland of the Commonwealth period is for the most part utterly abysmal. Happily, Major Hay has been busy writh the manuscripts and other historical documents in Blairs College, with the result that now we may really know a good deal of what happened in the years that immediately followed the execution of Charles I. It is ‘a story of courageous struggle against cunningly-devised persecution’; of gallant adventure for Catholic clergy, regular and secular, with disappointments and hardships, hopes and fears, and the inevitable quarrels and mistakes. _

The Scottish Jesuits of this period ‘come to life again, with their virtues and defects, with theif likes and dislikes; they are real men of Scotland, not phantoms from a hagiological romance,’

Father John Seton, S.J., for instance, seeking to rally Catholics to the standard of Montrose (which work, no doubt, ‘was contrary to the rule of the society’), and keeping his mission secret, ‘not only from his enemies, but from his fellow-Jesuits in Paris.’ Howbeit the good fathers were not undisturbed by the mysterious comings and goings of this intrepid priest, whose fate it was to die of fever in the Scots College in Madrid.

Jerome of Moravia was born on the 30th of September 1200, at Olmutz, the Fortress gate of Bohemia, where his father, one of the Minnesingers attached to the Emperor’s Court, had been rewarded with an estate by Frederick Barbarossa. As these Court musicians were, to a man, the creatures of the Ghibelline sovereigns, the son could not altogether escape the taint of heterodoxy that stamped the enemies of the Church, though this malign spirit was largely neutralised by the fidelity of his mother, Ysen-trude, who, as a maid.of honour to the wife of Conrad II of Hungary, had caught some measure of the intense piety that distinguished his daughter St. Elizabeth. At an early age the boy was placed in the care of the Archbishop, who wisely recommended the tempering influence of the severe discipline of the Song School. During his leisure hours between school and chancel Jerome found delight in fingering the psaltery, rota, gigue and symphony, and made the day merry with the simpler songs of the Troubadours. He would listen wide-eyed to his father’s tales of the fifth Crusade and the Wartburg Tournament, though more frequently—for his father’s visits were rare—he would fall asleep to his mother’s stories of Tristram, Parsifal, the Nibelungs, and the Holy Grail. Soon ambition awoke and made the Cathedral school with its midnight Lauds distasteful. At fourteen he entered upon his trivium at Brunn, but he was old enough even then to find a magnet in Cologne, which was nearer Eisenach, the home of Reinmar, Wolfram and other stars in the Minnesingers’ firmament; and nearer also to his father. He attained his immediate goal in 1216. At Cologne the quadrivial course was lightened by his passion for harmony and acoustics, but his hopes were dashed when his father made it plain to him that the knightly singers’ calling was hastening to decay.

It was a widow’s worm-eaten, tottering chair. And it was set up in a basement in N.W.3. In saying this I have unveiled the mystery lying behind what once I wrote under the title—her title, T00 Much for One. For that undying story which, thank God, I had the wit to write, had been written post haste after the widow R-----, R.I.P., had trudged from her basement to tell me of my mistake in giving her as a Christmas dinner what was ‘too much for one.’

My readers will remember how in that quivering phrase from the bowed, half-blind, four-score year widow I had seen more political and economic wisdom than was being vouchsafed by any university, or avouched by any Government Report. Moreover, when I recalled how high finance and big business were based on the horse-leech cry, ‘it is never enough,’ I saw, and perhaps said that England’s Saviour, if ever found, would be found not in a bank or in a manager’s office, but in a hut or in a basement.

As I honoured myself and my priestly profession by burying the widow R-----in Kensal Green some twelve months ago, I will set down some of the notes I wrote after having speech with her one afternoon in the half-light of her cave-dwelling.

To-day, August 6th, 1927, Widow R-----gave me a complete dramatic Philosophy of History. In other words she showed me the right way of looking at things that happen, and even of things that seem to happen wrong.

(St. Mary’s Loch from Megget Water Bridge, January.)

Lean evenly, white pool of light, before the spirit held intent, each power of sense impelled into one point of sight; no radiance on the glassy face or aught created eyes the vision holds, absorb, embrace; so all in silence lies.

The eyes behold a hundredfold a million ripples lap inaudibly upon a lap delicious curves enfold; around the water’s sinuous verges where the meek hills loll felicitously intermerges long lines’ rhythmic roll.

In a bright vault stand little clouds immobilized by frost, which yesterday were rolled and tossed and dragged in ragged shrouds. Hushed is the wild and rainy west before the tender north, to still the scene for one rough guest whom chance has driven forth;

round whom, attentive, motionless, each happily unseen in his impenetrable screen of leaves which once twigs dress; from odorous moor and windy height and opalescent haze like planets on a starry night all those spirits gaze.

John Gray.

At two things stands my mind amazed, But a third costs my heart its glee :

A woman by a woman praised,

A good poor man to honour raised,

And Christ dead on his Mother’s knee.

Vincent McNabb, O.P.

Mrs. Seemsby-Gore liked, one to have a title, so when she went to the Pyrenees she made up her mind to look up Miss Fairleigh—the Honourable Miss Fairleigh, she would remind you, Lord Fielden’s daughter. If you said ‘Ah!’ vaguely, because you didn’t know Miss Fairleigh and had never set eyes on Fielden, she was tempted to write you down an outsider.

Miss Fairleigh—‘Dubbin’ to her intimates, though Mrs. Seemsby-Gore didn’t know that—was staying in Lourdes while she put in a month of service at the Piscines. Consequently she wasn’t at home when Mrs. Seemsby-Gore called. However, she returned the call the following evening just before dinner, explained the situation and said she would be free to go for an expedition into the mountains two days later. There would be no big pilgrimage in, she said, so she wouldn’t be missed at the Piscines.

Miss Fairleigh’s talk of Piscines and Pilgrimages bewildered the other lady, who wasn’t a Catholic and thought that Catholics, with rare exceptions such as Miss Fairleigh, weren’t good form.

‘Do I “see” Lourdes?’ she asked doubtfully. One saw a Duomo or a Gallery if there was one. She wasn’t sure about Lourdes.

Miss Fairleigh’s eyes twinkled a little.

‘I think one should,’ she said. ‘I’ll lend you a book. I could drop it in as I pass in the morning. You could glance through it while you breakfast and then wander about by yourself. No one’ll say anything to you. Anybody can go anywhere.’

Mrs. Seemsby-Gore faintly liked the idea.

Must I submissive bow to earth my head?

Restrain the restless daring of my mind?

Bound by the palimpsests of men long dead,

Live in the daylight as a man made blind?’

‘Yea, lowly bend thy stubborn neck and knees,

And thou shalt win what thy proud ardours seek.

This pathway leads to kindled mysteries

That none have ever seen except the meek.’

‘Never for me such craven sacrifice!

Bravely I go upon a lonely quest.

I will not fold my hands and close my eyes

To gain an easy and ignoble rest.’

‘So thou hast courage? Test it. Thou shalt find

Precipitous the pathway to be trod.

Summon the utmost valiance of thy mind.

Only the audacious ever win to God.’

Theodore Maynard.

When a summer visitor goes to Saint-Malo, he sees the obvious; the ancient town peering over her encircling walls, the narrow streets and tall old houses, the great church with its single soaring steeple and the arrogant castle of the Duchess Anne: very interesting if he cares for such things and likes to inquire into their history, very picturesque if he prefers to take them only at their scenic value. And in most cases he is probably content so to regard them, or to read of them in the common or garden guide-book. But for those who care to look a little deeper, Saint-Malo has other and more intimate tales to tell—tales that are sometimes based on history and sometimes have grown out of tradition, and oftenest of all belong to both. And these tales have left shadows behind them—shadows that like ghosts still linger about her shores as in her houses, and if unseen are at least unforgotten to-day. Assuredly, on both sides of her, seaward and river-ward, there are places that have every right to be remembered.

On the Sillon, the roadway that links Saint-Malo to the mainland, there stands opposite the casino, a cross of granite. I was not able to discover its precise date, but it is said to be very old; it is known locally as the ‘Stone-Cross’ and a story is told of its origin for which there seems to be little reliable authority. Be that as it may, it serves now to mark a spot on the beach above which it stands that is a place of very notable memories; there is nothing else now left to record them—and yet these memories are actual history, and not only tradition.