The question, ‘Why did I not become a Catholic before?’ is an idle one enough at best, and to discuss in public one’s own private relations with the Lord is hardly seemly; yet there is one aspect of the matter I would like to draw attention to, if perchance in so doing I may help a few to some understanding of my own state of mind, three and more years ago, and of those whence I sprang. I am referring to that species of Anglicanism which has the greatest appearance of orthodoxy. Those who compose this amorphous group are often very tiresome folk, for in dealing with them you have to surmount, not merely ordinary national pride, but also pride in their own special (Oxford) culture. One must—but I’ll go no further on this point. For as soon as you begin to speak of the Church of England you fall into a slough. Agree with them, and they think you are compromising, and will start to talk about re-union, while, on the other hand, mere negative polemic only drives them away. Nevertheless, there they are! Why are they there? Why do so many English people cling so passionately to ‘their’ Church? I am sure there is some motive force besides mere nationalism and pride. Moreover, I think I can say (with only a beginner’s knowledge of theology) that, mixed up with their apparent orthodoxy, is much that is real. But where does it come from?

How charming were those nights and wintry days we spent at Charter Alley. Experiences, poignant at the time and wholly occasional, are now rounded in contemplation of them and generalized by apparent distance. We have the curiosity to find if a place to us so notable is known to readers of the gazetteer. They should be thankful for what little they learn from that useful book: that it has a post office and is a mile and a half from Ramsdell. It is also near Monk Sherborne (where retired and retiring people enjoy electric light) and The Fighting Cocks ; and sometimes exasperatingly far ; when the crow as she flies can count the ducks at our home. We believe that there are no revolving guide-posts upon the dry land of Great Britain ; but, aedepol, they seem sometimes to possess that dreadful property in Hampshire. The way to deceive the pixie is to inquire for Pamber End ; and indeed, what you miss in the main you gain on the bye; for though the lanes are all alike tortuous, gravel-surf aced, with hedges for ever trying to reach hands across them, it is a good type and change might be for the worse.

It is somewhat startling to find that decidedly Anglican body, the Society for Promoting Christian knowledge, acting as sponsor to a history of the domestic controversies of the English Catholics, even though that history be penned by a writer of the broad and liberal outlook of Miss Maude Petre. The Society indeed explains in a Prefatory Note that its own standpoint is by no means that of the author, and that it publishes her book only ‘in the hope that it will contribute towards the cause of Christian Reunion.’

The Lord Petre whose Life is here set forth was, in his common sense, strong-willed character, deep personal piety, very extensive charities, and constant patronage of struggling scholarship, a fine example of his class. In the present volume he figures almost entirely as the ostensible and social leader of the Cisalpine section of the English Catholic laity in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Charles Butler being the brains of the party. Miss Petre has not very much that is new to tell us of the complicated disputes and negotiations that led up to the Catholic Relief Act of 1791. She just goes over the ground already made familiar by Bishop Ward in his Dawn of the Catholic Revival, here and there supplementing that remarkable work by letters and papers drawn from the archives of the Petres, the Throckmortons, and other ancient Catholic families, and setting out at length documents hitherto known only in summary. Her main object seems to be to vindicate the memory of her great-great-grandfather and those associated with him from the aspersions of Dr. Milner and his school.

‘If all the nonsense which, in the past quarter of a century, has been talked on all other subjects were thrown into one scale, and all that has been talked on the subject of education alone were thrown into the other, I think the latter would preponderate.’

This sweeping statement—which I borrow as a useful diving-board, a plank from which I may comfortably plunge in medias res, is not my own. Neither would I have it thought that I identify myself with the opinion so tartly expressed, nor held to be casting any undeserved reflection on the writers who, during the course of the present century, have dealt so laboriously and so voluminously with educational principles and theories. Education is proverbially a dull subject. It is also a subject on which every man thinks he has something to say. Naturally, therefore, it becomes the focus of a considerable amount of dull nonsense—dull because only the man of practical experience can find, or make it, interesting—nonsense because it is pre-eminently a subject in which the apparently obvious is most often wrong.

My words are a quotation. The novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, in whom there has lately been a revival of interest, puts them into the mouth of that estimable and excellent clergyman, Dr. Opimian, the most charming character in that most charming novel Gryll Grange, which was the fruit of the Indian summer of its author’s genius. Peacock wrote this novel in 1860 after many years of silence.

‘Mr Whistler is, for all I know to the contrary, an artist who has the suffrages of his brother artists, a great painter in the judgment of those who live by painting, but if he had not followed the example of Mr. Oscar Wilde his name would be comparatively unknown. He had the wit to see that genius must in these days wear the crown of eccentricity. . . . He developed a little group of characteristics which pleased the fancy and impressed themselves on the memory of society. First, he cultivated a lock of hair sprouting from amidst his tresses and fashioned after the model of a feather. Next, he substituted for a walking-stick a staff .... exaggerating his American twang [he] invented a species of Yankee dialect hitherto unknown. In this he made it his business to utter grotesque antithetical incoherences, and to ramble on in a maundering monotone from theme to theme. Some clever things he contrived to say, for he is undoubtedly an exceedingly clever man. Concurrently with this he imported a novel mode of painting.

‘The critics were divided in their opinion. Some said it was genius, others said he was a daub. Society (being already prejudiced in favour of the man) now welcomed the artist, and saw in everything which came at long intervals from his studio the transcendent gifts of a great original. . . . From the artist he rose to the oracle. Having induced many gay and lively persons in London society to believe that he was the sole painter of the period who had the slightest notion of the rudiments of art, it occurred to him that he might as well explain from a public platform what these were.

This little town, so famous throughout Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries as a school of saints and doctors, is situated on the left bank of the Shannon, about ten miles south of Athlone, almost in the centre of Ireland. It gives its name to the small and ancient See, which, conjoined with Ardagh, now forms the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois in the province of Armagh. Its patron, St. Ciaran, or Kieran, born in 516 (one account gives his birth as 483, and says he was baptised by St. Patrick), died in 549 after having founded in the previous year his celebrated Abbey of Clonmacnois.

Another earlier St. Ciaran, a contemporary and afterwards a companion of St. Patrick, is said to have built a church here ; but his labours; were more generally confined to the southern portion of the country. St. Patrick, on his first journey into Connaught, crossed the Shannon at this point. Here, too, according to tradition, he set up a Cross where had been a pagan monolith, and baptised a great number of the natives. (It is curious to note that learned antiquaries are of opinion that the Celtic Crosses, so numerous in Ireland, superseded in the ninth and tenth centuries other Crosses of wood or rough stone which had been erected by the early missioners wha assembled their neophytes around them before churches had been built.)

‘HAVE you never heard of Cupid and Pish!’ exclaimed once, with a contralto’s disdain, the English Alboni, Madame Patey (nee Whytock), when General Clark Kennedy ventured to inquire why she called her favourite dog Pish? The Dog Pish could well be the Patron Dog of the Rationalist Press, of blatant atheists like Sir Leslie Stephen : they turn on the orthodox or would-be orthodox believers and exclaim : ‘ Have you never heard of Cupid and Pish, of physical pain and moral deformity, of avoidable suffering, of Torquemada and Galileo and Voltaire and Calas and Noah and the morbid imagination of diseased nuns, of Cupid and Pish?’ Saint and theologian and ignorant Catholic know what can be known concerning Pish. . . .

On a top shelf Leslie Stephen’s Essays on free thinking and plain speaking gathers dust between Buchner’s crass Kraft und Stoff and Pétrone (that Manon Lescaut of antiquity for precocious schoolboys) close to poor George Tyrrell’s later volumes, Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love and Spiritual Diary, and the Scottish Criminal Trials.

A milkmaid Cosie Lennox decided. In those far-off years he had given St. Philip Neri his seven lamps in memory of Lord Alexander Gordon Lennox, compiler of the Daily Prayer Book, and of Lady Boo, a Townley; he had the air of a young Roman patrician who shared all the pastimes of Catullus ; stage-struck but not yet a mummer; young enough to shake off the obsession of painted faces : ‘I am never attracted by anyone I have not seen made up; almost anyone made up can attract me; no attraction responded to outlasts six weeks’ he once confided to me. That conversation has weighed on my memory like a dream from which unlikely, unseemly, isolated episodes emerge. Can it all have happened, can he have told me about those Jews, the widower, the mother? (How little we had to learn from Proust.) He was not yet married to Miss Marie Tempest, nor contemplating such an alliance; he was indeed already, had we but known, an animated signpost that leads to the tragic desert.

A milkmaid, Mabel, our Mélisande: it was inconceivable that she should ever have suggested a milkmaid, unless one imagined Madame de Lamballe or Madame de Polignac at the Petit Trianon. Not that hers was a Beardsley type, either naturally or willingly, like Baroness Olga de Meyer, for instance; she had nothing of the girl with Messalina; perhaps at her most triumphant she recalled or inspired the beautiful Venus of Under the hill. Not long before her blessed release from this world, when she suffered from delusions, writing cheques, giving them away or thinking she did so, to dear compassionate friends, her face appeared to me like a gilt mask, carved, lacquered, lovable, heart-breaking.

In 1862 Henry Adams was a guest of Monckton Milnes at Fryston : Laurence Oliphant, Sterling of Keir will not detain us, although we owe to the future Sir William Sterling-Maxwell a definition worthy to rank with Max Beerbohm’s visit to The Pines, Putney, and with George Meredith’s Daumier lithograph of Theodore Watts Dunton.

‘The fourth [man] was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action—and in this trait was remotely followed, a generation later, by another famous young man, Robert Louis Stevenson—a tropical bird, high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and screams of humour, quite unlike any English lark or nightingale. One could hardly call him a crimson macaw among owls, and yet no ordinary contrast availed. Milnes introduced him as Mr. Algernon Swinburne. The name suggested nothing. Milnes was always unearthing new coins and trying to give them currency .... Conversation ran first to Oliphant who told his dramatic story simply, and from him the talk drifted off into other channels, until Milnes thought it time to bring Swinburne out . . . For the rest of the evening Swinburne figured alone; the end of dinner made the monologue only freer, for in 1862, even when ladies were not in the house, smoking was forbidden, and guests usually smoked in the stables or the kitchen; but Monckton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his guests smoke in Adams’s bedroom, since Adams was an American-German barbarian ignorant of manners;

Fr. Brodrick’s main contention in his reply to my criticism of his Life of Bd. Robert Bellarmine is that practically the whole of my criticism is drawn from the eighteenth century History of Hyacinth Serry, O.P., which he would have his readers believe is full of fables, falsehoods, calumnies, etc., and has long since been discredited as a serious attempt to throw light on the Great Controversy.

Moreover, Serry’s Historia derives its matter from documents or ‘Acts’ which were condemned by Pope Innocent X in a decree issued in 1654. According to this decree, these ‘Acts,’ together with the alleged Bull of Paul V, ‘are to be given no credence whatsoever.’ Throughout his article Fr. Brodrick calls these documents the ‘Condemned Acts,’ and Denzinger-Bannwart (Enchir. Symbol. No. 1079) is quoted in confirmation. To throw doubt still further on Serry’s Historia as worthy of credence, Fr. Brodrick mentions for the benefit of his readers the muchdisputed opinion that the Jansenist Quesnel prepared the Historia for the press, and (as a final thrust) that after a year of its publication the Historia was prohibited by the Spanish Inquisition.

Though the following pages are concerned with the Fourth Book of the Summa contra Gentiles, we may be allowed first to mention the fact that the English translation of the Third Book has now appeared. It is sufficient here to say that, as in the case of the former books, the translation has been carefully done, and it both reads well and is reliable. One would think it would not have been difficult to publish the whole of this Third Book in a single volume, and we think it regrettable that it should have been published in two, for, thus divided, it costs the no small sum of twenty-four shillings. The work itself, of course, would be worth any price asked for it; but, in fixing a price, more consideration might have been had for the many would-be purchasers who will now find it beyond their means.

There is a difficulty in the way of the translation of the Fourth Book, and it is that we are still without a critical text, that book not yet having appeared in the Leonine edition of the works of St. Thomas. It is to be hoped, however, that it will not be long before we are given a translation of it not below the level of the translation of the other books. For it is concerned with such high themes as the Trinity and the Incarnation, and St. Thomas supplies just such a treatment of them as we need to-day. Nowhere is the robust, vigorous common sense of his genius more in evidence.

This sketch of C— H— is written against my death. Ever since God took him down from his cross there has murmured in my conscience the phrase, ‘You must tell the world of him before you die.’ To leave his story untold would be to meet death with unpaid debts. To tell his story will be a royal preparation to go where he went even if in my cowardice, I cannot follow his hero way of going.

His father, who held high office in his native town of M------, thought to prepare him for citizenship of England by sending him to Oxford. I am not sure he ever won, or even sought to win, academic honours. It was Oxford of the playing fields and playing honours that made him captive. Perhaps with fine medieval chivalry he could not brook the sacrilege of a liberal education used as a mere preparation for a business career. An instinct, the very soul of scholarship, forbade him to make the higher serve the lower even at the risk of losing kindred or friends.

It was in the playing fields, where honour, and not gain, is youth’s only prize that C— H— learned to follow his leader, Jesus Christ. Perhaps it befell him as it befell the youth Edmund—who in these same playing fields of Oxford saw Jesus of Nazareth as a fair, smiling boy! Be that as it may, when C— H— heard the call of Christ beckoning him out of the playing fields of Oxford and of life into the Church and into the cloister he did not lag in following his leader.

‘Mr. Browning, the poet of incomprehensible mannerism, the taste for whose writing in England is probably to be explained in the same way as the popularity of double acrostics . . . . lives for society, and in society. If he can not be at the homes of the great, he is satisfied to be seen at the establishments of the small .... He is an agreeable man, full of anecdote accommodated to his audience, profound or superficial, light or serious, scientific, poetic, historical, or what you will. He is more than a septuagenarian: yet he enjoys the mild distractions of the most common-place drawing-rooms with the unsophisticated freshness of early youth. He has the vanity as characteristic as irritability itself, of the race of bards. His venerable fascinations are, as he piques himself on believing, irresistible by ladies of all ages and all degrees. He does not trumpet forth his conquests to miscellaneous assemblages, but he is fond of telling the favoured fair of his achievements among their number. Mr. Browning is a professional diner-out, and has not yet satiated his appetite for evening parties. If peers and peeresses, plutocrats of high degree, and others well placed in the London world, do not happen to invite him, he condescends to shine in the firmaments of society’s minor queens. The region in which he thus, finds himself is, to the social student, the most curious imaginable. Poets, painters and players, publicists, critics and essayists abound. The women are mostly the wives of professional men, not a few of them lion-hunters by calling ....

Je ne sais pas grand’ chose de plus. Mais que sais-je de mes autres amis? Chercher l’amitié, la donner, c’est d’abord crier ‘Asile! Asile!’ Le reste de nous est sûrement moins bien que ce cri, il est toujours assez tôt pour la montrer.

That Sunday afternoon early in the spring of 1894, when Henry Harland called on Henry James to introduce Aubrey Beardsley and the as yet uncradled Yellow Book, ‘this young man, slender, pale, delicate, unmistakeably intelligent, somehow invested the whole proposition with a detached, a slightly ironic and melancholy grace.’ Henry James ‘had met him before, on a single occasion, and had seen an example or two of his so curious and so disconcerting talent— an appreciation of which’ had, of course, ‘stopped quite short.’ A year later I had not been interested in the Yellow Book, not even in those ‘literary efforts of Beardsley’s own that matched’ his pictures ‘in perversity.’ I had seen him once at the Annan Bryces’. His sister Mabel (met first at the Bruntons and then in Waterloo Place) had persuaded me to hear him lecture. The slender youth did not attract me nor his lecture. The Jacques Blanche portrait accentuates the little I remember: some hardness, much affectation. La voix du sang was quite silent, and yet we were fated to be more brothers than friends. I left without any wish to encounter the Beardsleys again.

Not many weeks later, when I returned to South Audley Street from an early call in Park Lane (it must have been about 10.30 a.m.), I found a strange visitor in the drawing room, near Gustave Moreau’s Sappho.

Though a bright young lady remembered to have read a notice Trespassers will not be Prosecuted, the attentive will mark no fatal difference of futility between this alleged and the well-known warning. Departure Platform; Beware of Pickpockets; and there are others; juxtapositions of words which do not scan, are not irreducible, leave the uninstructed ignorant; and, if we consider them in any carping spirit, are filled with false assumptions, petitiones principii, innuendoes and concealed negatives. Warn a man; do. Warn him briskly, leaving him no rejoinder; laconically. A warning connotes danger, proximate or contingent. It is useless to say Wolf to a stranger in the Tube. He would only reply: ‘Excuse me, sir, my name is Lambb.’ But when the voltage is known and protection is nugatory, express your thoughts succinctly. No matter in what land of Europe, you have seen the notice, pictorial, resembling the design of the jolly roger, affixed to posts supporting live wire. There is the human spirit: alike expressed in the will, fulfilled, to have the tramcar hurtle through the province, threading hamlets like pearls upon a worthy chain, as far from the waterfall as it desires; and in the sober stare of death: Do not meddle, brother.

But Trespassers will be Prosecuted; a decayed relic of that noble fruit of the mind, the expedient rules drawn up by the piratical farmers old Norwegians were, to the end that fighting and plunder might continue their honourable course, and life be yet prolonged for the service of God and men.