Since writing in the last issue I have seen something in a popular publication which constitutes a sort of commentary on what I wrote; something that is in form a contradiction and in fact a confirmation. I remarked that Mr. Wells, who had previously maintained that things could not really be assimilated to each other at all, had afterwards assimilated the historic religions to each other a great deal too much. I pointed out that what we call the world’s religions differ not only in the sense in which they are true, but in the sense in which they are religious. They differ not only in what they succeed in doing, but in what they profess to do. One of the most interesting of them, Buddhism, is in some sense the subject of a passage in the current publication called The Outline of Literature, and there Mr. Wells himself is quoted as an authority on the Gospel of Buddha. He begins by saying, ‘The fundamental teaching of Gautama, as it is now being made plain to us by the study of original sources, is clear and simple, and in the closest harmony with modern ideas.’ This may be very consoling; but a man who has turned over a reasonable amount of modern journalism and controversy may still feel impelled to ask : Which modern ideas? Even in the work of Mr. Wells alone, there is so large and rich a variety of modern ideas as to make it a little difficult to be in the closest harmony with all of them. We all have a vague popular impression about Buddhism, that it advises abnegation, the extinction of the ego, and so on; but these phrases might mean several different things.

I imagine that there is hardly a living mortal, be he poet or acknowledged critic, who, called upon for an appreciation of Mrs. Meynell’s poetry, will not approach his task feeling as might a surveyor called in to take the measurements of the Holy of Holies. The everyday reviewer will have the shamefaced consciousness of hobnail boots added to that of the surveyor’s incongruous calling.

Mrs. Meynell was undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of an age of great poets. The greatest we may not call her, since some extra merit must be accorded to the difficult achievement of excellence sustained throughout bulky volumes; but making necessary allowance for differing tastes, perhaps it were not too much to call her the most perfect poet of the nineteenth century. What other has so matched the perfect word to the perfect thought? Where else than in the hundred or so brief poems she gave to the world, shall we seek vainly for a commonplace line or phrase, or a word put in merely to fill up the measure of rhyme or rhythm? Had she chosen to put her art before her life, her vocation as poet before her vocation as wife and mother, possibly the inimitable quality of her poetry might not have lost by quantity—wherein, however, such rare excellence as hers is hardly to be looked for, perhaps not even desired. We best appreciate the faultless specimen of some rare flower in its cloistral solitude of the hot-house.

This is an age of revivals, and many of the minor writers of the past were never more appreciated than they are to-day. The Restoration dramatists are read in preference to the Elizabethans, and Mr. John Gay walks, where Wordsworth fears to tread. It is not merely a revolt against accepted standards that we are witnessing, it is rather a fresh outbreak of the adventurous spirit and that insatiable curiosity and methodic doubt, which serve to distinguish man from the beasts.

So much is, perhaps, needed as an apology for voicing the desire for a fuller measure of recognition for the works and, above all, for the personality of William Cobbett. Those who know his name are not iare, but those who have read him are probably very few.

The Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites (12th January, 1921) authorising the Office and Mass of our Lady ‘Mediatrix Gratiarum’ (Mediatrix of Graces), has given rise to a theological discussion on the nature of this mediatorship of our Blessed Lady.

The most common, and perhaps the most convenient, formula of this mediatorship is :

In an article on French literature during 1921, which was published in this review last April, emphasis was laid on what was named the ‘stationary’ character of present-day French literature. The principal cause of this, it was suggested, was to be found in the abnormal loss of her young writers and intellectuals which France suffered in the war. In the course of the past year a change seems to have come about. Without giving any comprehensive account of French literature for the last twelve months it would be impossible to state all the reasons for this impression, but close students of France’s literary production would probably agree that, although it would be idle to generalise too confidently, more idle still to talk with any definiteness of new ‘tendencies,’ yet there has been a greater spontaneity, a greater virility, less aimlessness or wanton experiment in the past year than during any year since the Armistice.

There are some poetical personalities who disdain the heroic equipment to such an extent that to all but a few intimates who care to penetrate below the mask, they must remain imcomprehensible, and therefore, in an age that has no use or time for reticence, uninteresting. A Hugo or a Wilde catch the eye of the crowd, a Lionel Johnson never.

He was an Epicurean in the finer meaning of the word, and if it were not common knowledge now that Pater drew his hero from R. C. Jackson one might be tempted to imagine that he took for model his most distinguished pupil. Not an Epicurean in the popular sense of ‘Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie/ but one to whom ‘les roses’ meant all that survives of what was finest in Mediaeval art and life in our age. In the cool-shadowed cloisters of Winchester and Oxford he found his natural environment, and brought to such an environment a white passion for the literature of Greece and Rome, and that ‘native instinct for devotion’ which finally found a resting place in the Catholic Church.

This is a remarkable play by a young poet who is, undeservedly, little known. As the title indicates, it deals with the character of Judas, but it finds very unusual motives for his betrayal. Judas is not the mean and miserable wretch of tradition, nor does he betray his Master through greed of gold. The play is built on the conviction that he betrayed Him solely with the idea of forcing Him, through the stress of danger, to show that He was the all-powerful God, and of precipitating, in this manner, his triumphant vindication.

The Judas of tradition would naturally not suit that motive. He is abandoned in favour of a Judas who is a dreamer and a thinker, a man far removed from the rest of the disciples.

‘Judas is not of us,’ says Simon the Leper,
‘For he is learned, wise in many tongues,
And dwells apart from men;.’

He is a man who has thought over the problems of existence in a profound manner, and who is deeply concerned with the obvious physical suffering of mankind. In his thinking he is constantly seeking a remedy to this state of affairs. He is an idealist, for he has always in his mind the vision of what man could make of the world, but his state when the action of the play commences is one of despair at man’s impotence and indifference. He has abandoned hope in