bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
October
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

You have set off before eleven from Ballindalloch Station. The sky is high and overcast; delicate as an answer to prayer. The air is still and cool. These conditions are well met; bright sun is no more favourable to perspective than to walking comfort; wind is seldom acceptable. You must provide a merry heart to breast the matter ahead in snow time; it is a stormy region.

In the precincts of the Railway Goods Yard (the good thing implied is whisky) a commercial name suggests a subject for reminiscence, to pass the time.

There was a man named Gilbey, a breeder of shire horses, slight and wonderfully tailored, with a small, grey, cadaverous head; the two elements becomingly united by abundance of white stock.

‘The Prince once said to me (but that was, of course, before my title): “I am going to have a few serious words with Mrs. Gilbey.”

‘I must have looked astonished, for the Prince said: “I do not think that she takes proper care of you”; adding something about a man of value and importance.

‘I must have looked more astonished, for the Prince said: “I do not think you are sufficiently clad.”

‘“Oh, Sir,” I said; “I may mention that I am wearing at the present moment four pairs of socks, two pairs of drawers, three undershirts, two waistcoats, five coats, two pairs of trousers, some other garments and two pairs of boots.”

‘But the Prince did not seem at all satisfied.’ Cross the traffic road, and continue by the direction ‘Kilnamachlie.’ The scene soon gets to work.
Oscar Wilde
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

For the sake of those—perhaps the bulk of our readers—to whom the name of Wilde is only a faint memory, we may venture to say, with the help of D.N.B., that Oscar O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, wit and dramatist, born in Dublin on October 15th, 1856, was the younger son of Sir William Robert Wills Wilde, who married, in 1851, Jane Francisca Elgee, a granddaughter of Archdeacon Elgee of Wexford. This lady, who wrote under the signature of ‘Speranza,’ had a literary salon in Dublin, where much clever talk was listened to by the children.

From a school in Enniskillen Oscar Wilde went, in 1873, to Trinity College, Dublin, where he won a gold medal with an essay on the Greek comic poets. He entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1874, where he obtained with ease a First Class both in classical moderations and in literes humaniores. A vacation ramble, during which he visited Ravenna and Greece, in company with Professor Mahaffy, was followed by his winning the Newdigate Prize with a poem on ‘Ravenna.’ At Oxford he heard Ruskin lecture, and took part in Ruskin’s road-making schemes: he eschewed games and sport of alj kinds, except riding, and became the apostle of the aesthetic movement which took ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ as its watchword.

On leaving Oxford, Wilde was already well-known : he won the fame of frequent notice in Punch, and was caricatured in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience. He published Poems; founded the aesthetic cult, the symbols of which were peacocks’ feathers, sunflowers, dados, and blue china, long hair, and velveteen breeches; and his smart sayings were passed from mouth to mouth as those of one of the professed wits of the age.
Sir Mark Sykes and the Middle East
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

For those Catholics who have always been fascinated by the part played by the late Sir Mark Sykes, and other of his colleagues who were very definitely Catholic in their outlook upon foreign affairs, in connection with British policy in the Middle East during the war, the two volumes of Miss Gertrude Bell’s Letters will have aroused hopes of enlightenment upon several problems and paradoxes. It must be said at once that in this respect the two large volumes are a profound disappointment. But that does not imply any disparagement of the most remarkable qualities and the very varied interest of her correspondence. Her letters have already been one of the most successful publications of the year. And as a record of the adventures and the indefatigable energy and industry of a patriotic Englishwoman who devoted her boundless enthusiasm, her oriental scholarship, her wide experience of the Eastern peoples, and her brilliant and attractive personality to the service of the Government during and after the war, they deserve all the publicity that they have received.

Nor do the letters themselves give any suggestion, such as is apparent in the writings of Colonel Lawrence, that their author has assisted in creating the legend that has grown round her name. Gertrude Bell is described on the wrapper of the book, and has been referred to in innumerable reviews of these two volumes as the ‘Uncrowned Queen of Arabia.’ But nothing could be more modest and frank than her own account of her work among the Arabs.
A Glimpse of America
Authors: Belloc Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

There is a tragic poetry in the phrase ‘going West’ and not even the apparent banality of a journey to America in a huge modern liner could undo the ancient birthright of that phrase. The wild October dawns came up cold and desolate in the wake of the flying ship, and night after night we plunged into the heart of stormy red sunsets, as if making an effort to keep up with the fugitive daylight—only to be defeated in the race as the starless nights overtook us and shrouded us in bitter darkness and shrieking winds. Perhaps it is because of the thinning of the atmosphere that sounds become louder at night; or it may be a question of emphasis and setting. But the noise of the ship always seemed to increase five-fold with the fall of darkness. The strenuous chorus of engine and screw, threshing and booming, vied with the piercing whistling of the wind and the surge of the waters along the side of the ship. In the midst of this weird uproar, the Italian emigrants on the second-class deck would group together and sing a goodnight hymn before going down below, a lovely plaintive Italian chant with seconds and thirds : ‘O Santa Vergine—prega per me’—pray for me—‘because I am in the midst of the sea.’

After six days of racing and tearing across the Atlantic, the sense of direction became an obsession, and the very soul felt as if it was streaming east and west like a banner in a high wind. As our ship slowed up to go into New York harbour, The Majestic, the largest liner in the world, sailed out on her way to Europe, and it was almost painful to see such an immense object as The Majestic proceeding eastward with so much confidence and weight, opposing the whole Strained direction of one’s being!
Sir Robert Peel and O'Connell
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

When Sir Robert Peel, as leader of the House of Commons in the Duke of Wellington’s administration, dramatically resigned his seat for Oxford University in the spring of 1829 to obtain its approval for his change of front in regard to the concession of Catholic Emancipation, he was ignominiously rejected for his constituency at the very time when O’Connell had been triumphantly returned for Clare. Peel’s defeat was the climax of a long conflict between the two men. It had begun when Peel came to Dublin as Chief Secretary in 1812, a young man of twenty-four, at the opening of his ,career. The conflict between them was thus symbolical of the forces that were arrayed on each side in the last and most bitter phase of the agitation for Catholic rights.

Peel had come to Dublin full of self-confidence and energy, wealthy, backed by powerful interests, and as the rising hope of the English Conservatives, keenly interested in politics, hard working and determined to assert his mastery in a position which could be made important or insignificant according to his own abilities and success as an administrator. Miss Ramsay in her admirably sympathetic study of his life points out how chance favoured him in the first year of his new office. Neither the Viceroy nor the Chief Secretary for Ireland in those days had a seat in the Cabinet, and ‘the division of authority between them varied according to the character of the individuals who held the posts.’
Henry Swinburne the Traveller
Authors: Bracev Robert
Published: July 2007

There is a well-known passage in Lord Macaulay’s History, in which he describes the Catholic country gentleman of penal days. The typical Catholic squire (so he tells us) ‘if he differed from the neighbouring squires, differed from them by being somewhat more clownish than they. The disabilities under which he lay prevented his mind from expanding. His fields, his greyhounds, his gun occupied almost all his thoughts.’ This has always struck us as an entirely mistaken idea. For, so far from the Catholic squire being more insular than his fellows, he was from the very nature of the case usually far less so. In most instances he had had a foreign education, and consequently some opportunities for foreign travel. His uncles or younger brothers (denied a career in their own land) might be in the service of the Catholic princes of France, Spain, or Austria, while sisters and cousins would perhaps have entered English religious houses on the Continent. Among his correspondents would probably be relatives whose Jacobite proclivities had made them exiles abroad. He could hardly help being something of a linguist, and from time to time would receive parcels of foreign books and journals and scraps of international gossip; and (more likely than not) his domestic chaplain and family tutor—a daily companion—would be a man of scholarly tastes and literary ability. His outlook would as a natural consequence be altogether wider and more cosmopolitan than that of his neighbours.

One Catholic family of penal days in which the characteristics we have in mind were markedly prominent in many of its members was that of the Swinburnes of Capheaton in Northumberland.
Art and the Reformation
Authors: Manson Aelfric
Published: July 2007

Mr. Coulton is consciously out to break idols, and he does so effectively. In moderation it is healthy and exhilarating; pursued for long stretches, it leaves one a little weary, invites reaction and confuses issues. A more eirenic perusal, for instance, of M. Maritain’s Art et Scholaslique—the contents of which he realises so inadequately—would have shown him that the scholastics held art to be a contemplative activity in the natural order, entirely engaged in the right way of making things. It may use religious symbols for material; it does not ‘express’ religion. The only thing it expresses is the form in the artist’s mind. If the artist happens to be a mystic, his work, however secular the subject, will be religious art: it results from his being. In any given civilisation the artist will use the symbols common to it. During the Middle Ages these were religious. It by no means follows that specifically Christian art was abundant. Indeed, it becomes increasingly rare as we descend from the Byzantine heights to the dreary flats of naturalism.

We think also that Mr. Coulton has not escaped confusing a discussion of medieval civilisation—that brief period in the history of the Church of Christ— with a polemic against, or an apologetic for, the truths of the Catholic Faith. This imperils judgment, evokes unnecessary passion, and fogs objective vision.

‘It would be a mortal error,’ M. Maritain has written, ‘to confound the universal cause of the Church with the cause of a particular civilisation….
Catholic Martyrs and Anglican Historians
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

The English Martyrs are, for the majority of English people, the men and women burnt under Mary; in especial the Protestant bishops, Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper. So the history books have it. Our Protestant historians know nothing of Catholic martyrs—in England. The Protestant martyrs are the English martyrs. Foxe with his Book of Martyrs settled the matter a long time ago. Why re-open it? Foxe decided for the Church of England, and therefore for the English people, who were to be accounted martyrs; his decisions were not to be gainsaid. After all to accept the authority of Foxe is a much simpler process than to seek the decision of Rome. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was the Anglican martyrology; it was set up in parish churches, side by side with the Bible, for all to read. Its literal accuracy and complete truthfulness were no more questioned than the accuracy and truthfulness of the Bible itself.

The influence of Foxe, then, largely accounts for the refusal of Anglicans, and English people generally, to receive as martyrs the Catholics who died for their faith in England between 1535 and 1680.

Very broad-church historians, it is true, in their desire to be fair all round, freely award the martyr’s crown where death for conscience’ sake can be detected; and so will not deny a small percentage of martyrs to Catholics.

J. R. Green, for instance, in his Short History of the English People really does apply the word martyr (once) to the priests who suffered under Elizabeth :—’ The torture and death of the Jesuit martyrs sent a thrill of horror through the whole Catholic Church and roused at last into action the sluggish hostility of Spain.’
Walter Pater. In Memoriam
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

Hester (Tottie) and Clara Pater gave me their brother’s Rituate. The white and violet volume is now in the library of Blackfriars, Oxford. He would have been pleased, no doubt, had he been told that his house in St. Giles (’ with a plastered front of some antiquity, with a pleasant row of trees in front of it; at the left .... a little passage leading to the back of the house, the inner arch .... surmounted with a quaint carved face’ ) was fated to be occupied by Dominicans and that learning and sanctity would dwell where his learning and his aspirations had stretched imploringly towards holiness.

His aspirations: hear him (how unlike the Mr. Rose of Mallock’s New Republic) as he meditates on the Discobolus at rest: ‘With the heavy discus still in his left hand, he is preparing for his venture, taking stand carefully on the right foot. Eye and mind concentre, loyally, entirely, upon the business in hand. The very finger is reckoning while he watches, intent upon the cast of another, as the metal glides to the goal. Take him, to lead you forth quite out of the narrow limits of the Greek world. You have pure humanity there, with a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, but without vanity; and it is pure. There is nothing certainly supersensual in that fair, round head, any more than in the long, agile limbs; but also no impediment, natural or acquired. To have achieved just that, was the Greek’s truest claim for furtherance in the main line of human development.
Leo Tolstoy, 1828–1928
Authors: Bugeja Henery
Published: July 2007

For the best part of the nineteenth century Russia was intellectually divided between two hostile camps—the ‘Westernizers’ and the ‘Slavophils.’ Had Russia a particular mission of her own, or was she to follow the rest of Europe? The Slavophils stood for a national culture : they believed that Russia, with her profound religious sense, might bring together the scattered elements of mankind into an inner organic union. The Westernizers, on the other hand, were all for cosmopolitan eclecticism; some looking for salvation to a close co-operation with the Catholic West; others—the radicals—inclining to the scientific, liberal and socialistic ideas, then becoming prevalent in Europe.

From the early thirties of last century to the sixties both schools were under the influence of second-rate philosophers, mostly French and German. Spencer, Stuart Mill, and Comte did not influence Russian thought until later on. These theories, imported from abroad and followed with great enthusiasm, did not produce a single original thinker. For the last century Russia can only boast of one really great philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev. His was a creative mind. A great scholar, a profound thinker, one of the most delicate of Russian poets, Soloviev had no equal among his contemporaries. Apart from him all Russian philosophic and social thought found expression in fiction.

It was into this welter of religious, scientific, and political argument that Leo Tolstoy was born in August, 1828. The age in which he was born and ripened into manhood, and which he ultimately influenced so profoundly with his own writings, was not only an age of ardent quest for truth in all spheres of human activity, but—for Russia especially—one of

great passions and cruel strife.
Dickens and Monasticism
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

Not in the Pictures from Italy, published in 1846 after the first long visit to that country, is the true perception of monasticism revealed. In the presence of ceremonial activities the comic spirit possessed Dickens. Ludicrous comparisons invaded his mind when he gazed upon ecclesiastical or civil solemnities. The constitutional irreverence of the newspaper reporter could not be subdued—not even in Rome itself. Dickens noted that the Pope had ‘a pleasant and venerable face,’ but the carrying of his Holiness in a chair round St. Peter’s on a great occasion after High Mass had ‘nothing solemn or effective in it; and certainly much that was droll and tawdry.’ The ‘whole ceremony’ indeed left no other impression ; ‘except the raising of the Host, when every man in the guard dropped on one knee instantly, and dashed his naked sword on the ground; which had a fine effect.’

Dickens, of course, poked fun at the regular clergy —as good men have done in every age—and he found them everywhere in Italy in the forties. Dislike of the Jesuits is not concealed. The sons of St. Ignatius are ‘stealthy,’ they ‘creep in and out’ of St. Peter’s; in Milan they were observed in the streets ‘slinking noiselessly about in pairs.’ (But how did Dickens know they were Jesuits? Did the ‘velvet tread’ of popular repute give them away? Is the footgear of the Jesuit really unique? Father Thurston might clear up the mystery).
The Church and Politics in Alsace
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

Several pronouncements by Mgr. Ruch, the Bishop of Strasburg, within the past few weeks, have drawn attention to one of the most intricate and difficult problems of the Church in France since the War. Without attempting to present the whole problem that is involved, it is of considerable interest to note the attitude which has been adopted by the ‘patriot Bishop of Strasburg,’ whose conduct during the trying years since the War has shown him to be one of the most courageous and outspoken and also one of the ablest members of the French hierarchy. He has had to face a situation more embarrassing and more complicated than has any other bishop in France. Nothing proves more strikingly both the simplicity and the courage with which he has faced his duties than his own reluctant disclosure, made at a banquet of the Catholic Young Men’s Association in the spring of last year, that he had been prevented by the Pope himself, year after year since the War, from resigning his bishopric and retiring to a Carthusian monastery.

The circumstances which led to that revelation have already been described in BLACKFRIARS. Mgr. Ruch was speaking in reply to a campaign of persistent misrepresentation of his own conduct by the Action Francaise. It was not that the Action Francaise had attacked him personally. On the contrary, it was they who gave him the title of the ‘patriot Bishop of Strasburg,’ and proclaimed, week after week—until he was forced into making public the most intimate secrets of his spiritual life—that the Vatican had attempted to remove him from his bishopric because of his sturdy patriotism as a citizen of France. The facts were actually the direct opposite.
Why did't I do it Before?
Authors: Fox J.R.
Published: July 2007

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?
Aubrey Beardsley
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

Je ne sais pas grand’ chose de plus. Mais que sais-je de mes autres amis? Chercher l’amitie, la donner, c’est d’abord crier ‘Asile! Asile!’ Le reste de nous est sfirement moins bien que ce cri, il est toujours assez tot 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.
Robert Browning
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

‘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 ....
Sinn Fein and the I.R.B.
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

From several books which have been published in the past few years, it has become possible to understand more clearly one of the most remarkable mysteries in the history of Irish political agitation. The full truth will probably never be known, though it concerns the whole subsequent development of Irish history. To any student of politics, the growth of the Sinn Fein agitation must always be a fascinating and perplexing problem. And the more recent books which have thrown light on the matter have made no attempt to deny that Sinn Fein, as a policy, and still more as a violent agitation, was not only unpopular, but was actually hated by the mass of the people in Ireland at the time when the organisers of the Dublin rising of Easter week, 1916, carried out their carefully arranged plans, which were intended to take the country by storm. Mr. P. S. O’Hegarty, whose Victory of Sinn Fein was the first complete revelation published by one of the chief organisers of the secret society which launched the Dublin rising, quite openly glories in the claim that the leaders of the rising had acted in a way which the people as a whole disapproved.

‘The insurrection came upon the people of Ireland like a thunderbolt. They had not been expecting it, and they did not want it. . , . The insurrection was therefore universally and explosively unpopular. The populace fraternised with the British soldiery during the fighting, gave them food and smiles; in Cork the Redmondite Volunteers mobilised and helped the British by guarding bridges, etc.; in Dublin the populace attacked the wives of the men who were fighting; and the resolutions of various public bodies in the country condemning the insurrection may still be read. If Ireland as a whole could have got hold of Tom Clarke and his comrades during that week it would have torn them to, pieces. For a moment the whole fate of Ireland stood in the balance. Had the English but the wit to see it, the insurrection played right into their hands. ... If they had laughed at it, tried the promoters before a magistrate, and ridiculed the whole thing, with no general arrests and no long vindictive sentences, they could have done what they liked with Ireland. But the completeness of their victory, their crushing of the insurrection with the approval of the Irish Parliamentary Party and of the mass of public opinion, took away their political sanity. . . . When Sir John Maxwell shot to pieces the Government of the Irish Republic he put an end to the English domination of Ireland.’
The English Martyrs
Authors: Pontifex Dom Dunstan
Published: July 2007

In reading one of the most recent histories of the Tudor period, the impression was gained that the Catholic martyrs, admittedly gallant men, worthy to be compared for courage even (amazing admission!) to Drake and the seamen, were swept to a glorious doom for attempting to stem the tide of inevitable change. The stirrings of the Renaissance and Reformation, the coming-of-age of the spirit of nationality, the mental activity that followed the spread of printed books, and, to crown and clinch it all, the popular, forceful, ruthless, but progressive tyranny of the Tudors—all these forces were sweeping away the mediaeval Church as surely as the rising tide sweeps away a castle of sand.

The martyrs, one gathers, were brave men—to be admired for refusing to change with the times out of base motives, but their cause was as hopeless and their protest as useless as that of (say) a modern upholder of the legitimist claims of the Stuarts. And it is as well, the history almost makes us feel, that this was so, because their cause and the modern world, even that adolescent modern world of the sixteenth century, had nothing in common.

If after reading such a book, we go straight to some contemporary account of the martyrs, we find a complete absence of any sense on their part of fighting the inevitable, of Being out of date or of championing a lost cause. It never occurred even to the Protestant leaders of those days to attempt to justify their actions on the ground of progress, or of national or social needs.
A Cisalpine Apologia
Authors: Bracey Robert
Published: July 2007

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.
Trespassers will be Prosecuted
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

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.
Through a Glass, Darkly
Authors: Montgomery Francis
Published: July 2007

‘SOEUR Marie Bernard est morte : quelles souf-frances depuis vingt ans!’ Sister Mary

Bernard is dead : how she must have suffered all these twenty years.’ Nearly fifty years have come and gone since the day in Easter week when these words fell on my ears from the holy and revered priest, the friend and guardian of my childhood. He had known and loved the little peasant-girl of the Pyrenees and had often spoken about her to the child, still unfamiliar with death, who listened to his words. To the latter the name of Sr. Marie Bernard had hitherto called up only wonder and admiration. She had seen more than once the Mother of fair Love, the Cause of our Joy! Had not the Beloved Mother promised, too, to make her happy in the kingdom of her Son?

But there was no mistaking the accents of compassion in the mouth of the good priest. He knew so well what poor Bernadette had had to endure for those twenty-one years she still dwelt in this vale of tears, after having beheld, fleetingly no doubt, perhaps ‘through a glass, darkly,’ the Vision of incomparable Loveliness.

The shy, retiring child had had to submit to the harsh interrogatories of officialdom, to be followed by the scarcely less intolerable and more persistent, crossquestionings of numberless enquirers, doubtless wellmeaning, often tactless, sometimes even baldly curious. In a later period her Superiors sought to shield her as much as might be from the inquisitive,
A Saint Among the Theologians
Authors: Whitacre ÆLred
Published: July 2007

For many reasons a whole-hearted welcome will be given to Father Brodrick’s Life of Blessed Robert Bellarmine. The profound sanctity of the great controversialist was a legacy to the Church which has long called for recognition and acclamation; and all Catholic students have felt deep gratitude to the Holy See for raising this great member of the Society of Jesus to the altars of the Church. The new Beatus will rightly become a fitting patron in these days of missionary need. The period of his life was, roughly speaking, the hour when the great schism in modern Europe was becoming stabilised. Looking back now over the intervening centuries, we see him as one of the last great warriors in defence of the old Church of Christendom, before the night of the Reformation had settled down upon us. After his day the Church withdrew in large measure from the guidance of Northern Europe, and a situation arose in which Catholicism stood enclosed and in a state of siege. Even into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the siege had to some extent been raised, the Church seemed to have been passed by, and half Europe stood determined to forget it. During this long period intermittent warfare has continued, and in the ephemeral and local controversies Catholic writers have mainly drawn on the armoury fashioned by Robert Bellarmine.

But the northern nations, until quite recently, went another way, and only in our generation have men begun to see that the way was false, and has led us all towards chaos.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

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 . . . F or 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;
The Status and Ethics of teh Legal Profession
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

Dear X,

I take it that an obligation is laid upon me, when you who have honoured me by being my pupil, still further honour me by the following request; which for the benefit of casual readers I will set down at length. You write :—

‘Yesterday I spent the whole afternoon with Mr. Justice Y. He was my master in the Law.

‘He is full of anxiety for the future: for the whole ethical position of Judge, Advocate, Solicitor and Witness. It is quite a new anxiety to him; the fruit of his experience on the Bench, I fancy.

‘It is clear that something must be done by a Master of Ethics. Now as you have been dealing with these matters in St. Thomas during the year, they will be fresh in your mind.

‘Will you be good enough to write an essay on the Ethics of Advocacy? You told us during your lectures on the Sumtna of St. Thomas that you looked to the professions of Law and Medicine by the retention and the restoration of their traditions to save the State.

One of these professions now asks you of your charity to give it back a statement of its tradition and its own ethical ideal.’

I have said that this request honours all too much the one to whom it is addressed. But I need hardly add that it honours still more the one by whom it was addressed. Let me forget my own limitations in an attempt to offer you the intellectual alms you seek.

It is the name you mention in your letter that reassures me against my limitations.
Bombs and Daggers in Italy
Authors: Bugeja Henry
Published: July 2007

The bomb outrage perpetrated at Milan on Thursday, the 12th of April, is one of a long series of crimes which have gained for the fair name of Italy an unenviable notoriety.

Bombs have been exploded in other countries, revolvers and daggers have been used by other nationals, but statistics are there to prove that for the last century Italians both in and outside their country have been the authors of the greater number of these horrible political assassinations. One has to go back to the early second half of last century to find a parallel to what has recently occurred at Milan : to 1858 when Orsini made the attempt upon the life of Napoleon III, or 1867 when Monti and Tognetti blew up the Serristori Barracks in Rome. On both occasions, as at Milan, the result was a veritable and indiscriminate slaughter of innocent persons. Agesilao Milano, Luccheni, Angiolillo, Carserio, Oberdank, Passanante, Acciarito, Bresci, Crispi, Gallenga and others more recent all belong to that infamous class of Italians who have dishonoured their Mother Country before the civilised world.

The Italians are a warm-hearted, generous and chivalrous people, they belong to a highly civilised and cultured race; their family ties are intense, their respect for women and children borders the romantic. How comes it then that sweet and gentle Italy is responsible for this brood of monsters called political assassins? An exhaustive answer can only be given when a true and real history of Modern Italy is written.
The Letters of Baron von Hugel
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

The writings that Baron von Hugel gave himself to the public were, no doubt, more important, but they were surely in many ways less interesting, than the volume which has been made up by others from his private letters. The short memoir of sixty pages prefixed to them by the late Mr. Bernard Holland is interesting enough, but it is a commonplace that a man is best known from his letters, and certainly the Baron’s letters here given reveal the man, and the revelation is of absorbing interest.

It is interesting, first of all, for the view it gives of his limitations, both the limitations he outgrew and the limitations that limited him to the end. The letters begin in December, 1896, when he was forty-four years old, and the last one is dated December 29th, 1924-he died at the end of January, 1925. Most of the letters of the first half of this period are addressed to his Modernist friends, and are concerned, more or less, with the Modernist movement. And how sadly out of proportion he saw both the men and the movement! One gets the impression that for him the group to which he belonged were the only hope for the future of Catholicism. What he says in 1899 of Tyrrell-and to Tyrrell-in England he would have said of a few others on the Continent.

‘ I have, thank God,’ he wrote, ‘ a fair number of English Catholic scholar friends, and amongst non-Catholics I have, also on this side of the Channel, several good and much-cared-for friends : but there is, amongst the Catholic Englishmen I know, somehow no other one whom I feel and see to be one of those self-spending children of the dawn and of Christ’s ampler day ’ (p. 76).
A Theologian among the Saints:
Authors: Brodrick James
Published: July 2007

In the course of two interesting articles in the April

and May numbers of Blackfriars, Fr. Aelred Whitacre has developed a view of Bd. Robert Bellarmine which would have gladdened the heart of the ‘Advocatus Diaboli.’ Blessed Robert, we are to believe, was a man torn between two loyalties, that to truth and conviction on the one hand, and that to his own Order and its Superiors on the other. In the event, it was the latter which prevailed. Arnica veritas, sed magis arnica Societas is in substance Fr. Whitacre’s verdict. Such a view of one whom the Church has been pleased to honour with beatification is piquant, and, could it be sustained, might well cause grief to those who respect the Church’s decisions. Fortunately, however, for a great man’s reputation, Fr. Whitacre would appear, from the manner in which he has endeavoured to prove his point, not to have had access to the findings of recent research on the life of Bellarmine. His reading, it would seem, has been in the main confined to Serry’s eighteenth-century Historia Congregationum de Auxiliis Divinae Gratiae, a partisan document, long since discredited, and known to all students of the subject as utterly untrustworthy.

This History, besides having been, according to general belief, edited and prepared for the press by the arch-Jansenist Pasquier Quesnel, was based to a very large extent on documents about which Pope Innocent X ruled as follows in a decree against the Jansenists issued in 1654 :
Henriette Gabrielli
Authors: Michaelson Alexander
Published: July 2007

‘Le chacal, monté sur un piédestal vide, allonge son museau de loup derrière le buste d’un Pan à tête de bélier; la gazelle, l’autruche, l’ibis, la gerboise, sautent parmi les décombres, tandis que la poule sultane se tient immobile sur quelque débris, comme un oiseau hiéroglyphique de granit et de porphyre.’

We search in vain Brunetiére’s History of Classical French Literature for a chapter on St. Simon; George Saintsbury deliberately omits Les liaisons dangereuses from his French Novel. Brunetiére and Saints-bury give their reasons, good or plausible; but who can tell us why Madame Gabrielli in hitherto published memoirs shares the fate of the due de St. Simon and Choderlos de Laclos?

She may haunt the manuscript pages that will delight and amaze the first quarter of the twenty-first century, if there are still readers to be delighted and amazed in those scarce imaginable years : in white, always, white boots, white gloves. She will trip or stumble, high-heeled, short-sighted, with her white silk bag containing sometimes diminutive white shoes (in rainy weather), with her wig frankly like a night cap. ‘In my youth they called me the lily,’ she declared at some dinner table, and the foreign butler tittered. When reproved the following day, he defended himself :’ Yes, I know, Miladi, mais le nez.’

Her hair was never white. In my time it was the colour of fuller’s earth. I saw her first at Mrs. Singleton’s. I thought her copper-coloured : but it must have been, a lighting effect.
The Miraculous in Catholic Fiction
Authors: Henderson Agnes
Published: July 2007

'There seems to be a growing tendency among writers of Catholic fiction, especially of the short story, to fall back on the miraculous in the working out of the plot. There is a two-fold lure. The writers, possessed of a belief in the miraculous themselves, may aim at augmenting the faith of others, or they may use the miraculous as a deus ex machina in the evolution of a plot beyond mere human power, unaided, to solve. It may be contended that after all, as fiction, it is all in the realm of fancy and, being so understood by the reader, no harm is done. But consider how our sense of accuracy is being daily vitiated by the ordinary allurements of fiction and of film. And yet never was there an age when the possibilities of accuracy were greater, for research in every direction is piling up verified facts, which are gradually, though slowly enough, being disseminated. But there are so many who are being drugged into indifferentism, and even into unbelief, by the very embarrassment of the riches of the unveracious. Is it wise, therefore, to use a miracle like ‘a golden banner dragged in the mud’ to add to the enhancement of an ordinary tale, or even of a story grandly told?

It is an incredulous age, but it is not through the medium of fiction, no matter how reverently written, that belief in the miraculous will be inspired or increased.
St. Thomas and Dr. Wicksteed
Authors: Walker Luke
Published: July 2007

In the last two numbers of Blackfriars we have been considering the use that St. Thomas makes of the New Testament in the Summa contra Gentiles—that is, when defending the Christian Faith against unbelievers. Since writing those articles we have read, for the first time, a lecture in which the late Dr. Wicksteed deals with the same subject. The work of which the lecture forms a part has been highly praised in Catholic, as well as in non-Catholic, reviews for its presentation of St. Thomas’s doctrine. We wish to pass no judgment on the book as a whole, but concerning this particular lecture we think that there can be no doubt that it utterly fails to do justice to St. Thomas’s thought. As the point is an important one, and Dr. Wicksteed’s account is likely to be taken as satisfactory, we propose to attempt to justify our criticism of him. In doing so we may perhaps supply some of the deficiencies in our previous treatment of the question.
Celtic Churches
Authors: Erskine R.
Published: July 2007

From Irish and Scottish books on architecture and Irish and Scottish archaeological writings in general, one is apt to take a very erroneous impression concerning the ancient ecclesiastical buildings of these two countries. This impression is not, of course, deliberately produced by the writers responsible for the literature spoken of; but it is apt to form in the ‘average reader’s’ mind, nevertheless, and to tincture all his thoughts and comments that have to do with this subject. The matter turns on the employment of the word ‘primitive’ to describe the type of stone building associated with the planters of Christianity in Ireland and Scotland. The use of this word in connection with these structures is quite correct, but the circumstances under which it has become so ought to be explained to the lay reader, who, without any such explanation, and so far as my observation extends none gives it, is apt to draw very erroneous conclusions touching these same ‘primitive’ ecclesiastical erections.