Friendship, according to the philosophers, is founded on resemblance. The more two persons have in common, the easier for them to be friends.

‘Pares cum paribus facillime congregantur.’ In the absence of books and a reliable memory I venture to think that this is Cicero expounding the foundation of friendship with Laelius for mouthpiece.

St. Thomas I am happily able to quote. He is emphatic and explicit.

‘Is likeness a cause of love? It seems not. Potters, says Aristotle, quarrel with one another. A man, says Augustine, loves in another what he would not be himself : he loves an actor, but would not himself be one. Sick men love health and poor men riches. We all love those who give us money and health; and those who continue friends of their dead. So likeness cannot, it seems, be a cause of love.

‘On the other hand, however, it is written in Eccle-siasticus : Every beast loveth his like.

’ My own answer is that likeness, properly speaking, is a cause of love. But there are two kinds of likeness. Actual presence of the same quality in two things make them alike. Thus two white things are alike. But presence and absence of the same quality in two things can also make them alike, when the thing that lacks the quality tends to it. Thus a body at rest and a body in motion are alike in respect of rest and motion, which are the same fundamentally, since related as act to potency.

‘The first kind of likeness begets the love of friendship ; the second, the love of concupiscence, or friendship based on usefulness or pleasure.

Once upon a time a clerk in Holy (Roman) Orders was ipso facto a professional man of letters—even in England. Nowadays, the profession of letters is become a secular luxury for which English Catholic priests, though amply endowed with the requisite talents, rarely have opportunity, inclination, time or energy. They do not, any more than other classes of Englishmen, lack ambition to enrich the literature of which they are the heirs, and to win it back to the service of Catholic Truth in which it was begotten. But as a class they are disciplined to selfdenial. Though devotion to letters may be urged upon them as a duty—which indeed it is—there are other more pressing and less romantic duties, in sacristy, confessional, class-room and slum, which most of them would consider it a treason to postpone to the delights of reading and writing in a well-appointed study. Here and there, however, circumstances make it possible, or even necessary, to develop a vocation along the line more agreeable to nature. Such circumstances are becoming more normal nowadays than they were formerly. The discipline of self-denial is as necessary for young priests to-day as ever it was—perhaps more necessary than ever it was. But there are certain external conditions, as well as certain internal dispositions generated by modern education in many candidates for the priesthood, which make the old-time discipline of parochial life, with its paucity of pens and books, and its plenitude of accounts, bazaars, and committee-meetings, as dangerous to some individuals as it would be unprofitable to the community if those individuals were condemned to it.

We were on Isola Pescatore. The heat of the day had iessened. It was six o’clock. Odours of garlic, fish and unwashed drains, drifted after us as we made our way through crazy alleys. Houses lolled towards each other; steps rose to join erratic arches, or give access to crooked balconies. The cobbled way played tricks with one’s step.

We reached the limit of the island and were about to turn back, when we discovered a wooden stall, set out with peasant’s ware.

There were mementoes displayed of every kind: little vases of Venetian glass; pots made of local marble; boxes of olive wood, and trays garnished with coloured inlaid designs; bronzes and beads. From the cross-bar supporting the white canvas awning hung rosaries of nuts gathered in the woods and dried in the sun.

Everything was attractive, though much would look tawdry enough away from its setting. I admired a number of trinkets, but saw no gift that would please my friends.

I was moving on, when I heard music and saw the Fiddler. He stood on a rough block of wood, the large black, worn-out boot on his right foot nosing round to the left. His trousers, coarse and biscuit-brown, creased voluminously about his legs, and were secured round his waist by a thin scarlet belt. His coat, blue, a little shrunken, a little faded, was unbuttoned, and revealed his white shirt, open at the neck; his cuffs were rolled back from bis brown wrists.