Plato has long since taken his place in company with Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, and other Olympians of literature among authors who are more talked about than read. It may be true that none but a scholar in the exact and classical sense is in a position to appreciate to the full the beauty of Plato’s style and the clarity of his thought, but those of us, and they tend to become an ever-increasing number, who can only read him in translation should not be deterred by that consideration. Plato’s nearness to the present age is remarkable. Though Athens of the fifth century B.C. bears little enough resemblance to London of the early twentieth century, there is this broad comparison to be drawn between, them: each looks to the future with hope out of a time of distress and the uncertainty that accompanies change; each feels itself to be politically bankrupt and puts little confidence in its accredited leaders; each feels that the trouble arises, not so much from the institutions in vogue as from the weakness, folly and incompetence inherent in human nature. It is for these reasons that Plato has much of value to say not merely to the poet and the philosopher in all ages, but also to the men and women immersed in practical affairs.

To-day we are apt to feel impatient of doctrinaire dreamers who draw up systems of government that look well on paper. The. very word ‘utopian’ has come to bear a meaning that is suspect, if not downright sinister.

Some fourteen years after Boswell’s Life of Johnson was given to the world there appeared a small collection of Letters addressed to Dr. Johnson which had found no place in the great Biography. These were contained in a slim volume published in London in 1805 and bearing the title Original Letters to Dr. Johnson by Miss Hill Boothby. The little work has never once been re-printed, although some few extracts from it are to be met with in the notes to Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Johnson's Letters, and it has occasionally been referred to by other commentators. A copy of this now exceedingly rare book lies before us as we write, and suggests to us to set down something about one of the most singular of Dr. Johnson’s many friendships.

When Johnson was a very young man, poverty-stricken and unknown, he paid the first of many visits to his friend, the Rev. Dr. Taylor, of Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. There, we are told, ‘the daughters of some of the Derbyshire squires showed their good taste and good sense by desiring the company of the young genius, poor and unpolished as he was.’ Or, as Miss Seward, the ‘Swan of Lichfield,’ most appalling of poetesses, and a life-long enemy of Johnson, preferred in her acid and waspish way to put it, ‘They probably amused themselves with the uncouth adorations of the learned though dirty stripling, whose mean appearance was overlooked, because of the genius and knowledge that blazed through him, albeit with umbered flames owing to his spleen and melancholy.’

It may appear strange to those unacquainted with social organization in France and Belgium to learn that the latter country has left the former decades behind in the curing of crime. While France is only just waking up to the necessity of coping with the appalling crimes, daily reported, of youthful criminals and with the cases of cruelty to young children by their natural protectors—a factor which partly accounts for the first evil—Belgium has for over twenty years tackled the question of the protection of childhood and the proper provision for caring for and re-educating deficient and abnormal children. The efforts being made to rescue children from the almost inevitable career of crime and degradation to which vicious surroundings and congenital infirmities have driven them is one of the most admirable examples of practical idealism in the present age, and places Belgium in the front rank as a civilizing agent of humanity.

From the period of the crêche to the kindergarten stage, the dossier of every child rescued by the Oeuvre de la Protection de l'Enfance and its various co-operating organizations is carefully preserved with the report of any necessary curative or corrective treatment applied. When the period of school education arrives (compulsory from the age of 8 to 14), the process of segregation is virtually accomplished; the normal and the abnormal child are separately classified. The latter is assigned to a special class, the classe des anormaux, which is attached to the great public schools and conducted’ by teachers trained for that particular purpose.

The history of the world has its great people and its great periods which one can isolate for the purpose of more detailed study as representing turning-points in the march of civilization, epochs which seem to sum up all the movements and cultural forces of the preceding centuries, bringing them to a flowering bloom in a few brief years, and seemingly bequeathing a glorious inheritance to the fortunate age to follow. Such a period was the early European Renaissance. Such, especially, was the early Renaissance in Spain.

Calderón, in one of his autos, says that the study of history only serves to make men learn their lesson and take warning. He only saw in history the ruin of great enterprises, powerful and prosperous nations brought low by the folly of their rulers, and the human race given over to pleasures and lusts, heedless of the future. Writing as he did in the Spain of the seventeenth century, he voiced the disillusion and despair of the more enlightened and high-minded of his countrymen who saw no hope for humanity in a world eaten through and through with rottenness. Had he lived two hundred years earlier, in 1460, his feelings would have been identical. Passing from the court of Philip IV to that of Henry IV, he would have noticed little difference. He would have seen vice and corruption reigning in the court of Castile, anarchy in the country, the peasants bled white by grasping nobles who only served their country when they engaged in mutual extermination. The Middle Ages in Spain, as indeed in most countries, had sunk as low as this, to an agonizing death in anarchy and civil war.

The present weakness of Western civilization may be more apparent than real, and in part the exaggeration of a press-hysteria which, concentrating on the plight of the modern and mushroom centres of industry and finance, makes little account of the deep-rooted strength which Europe draws from its countryside, traditions, and religion—convictions inarticulate perhaps, but largely operative. Still, a menace to our culture looms so heavily on the Eastern frontier, and its economic achievement is so impressive, its application of the dialectic of materialism so ruthless and complete, and its direction so intelligent, that it is easy to be overawed by the mere size of Bolshevism, to admit over-readily its claim to a universalism, and, granting it a weight in the order of ideas which it certainly possesses in the order of fact, to miss seeing it for what it is, a sect.

Then, considering its anti-God campaign and its emphasis on economical and mechanical facts to the exclusion of any other, thinking of it as a resolute common-sensism that scoffs at everything it cannot see, picturing it in a bright hard light and religion as a thing for the twilight, it is easy to pass over the fact that the whole movement derives its impetus from the worship of an ideal every bit as slavish as that of the religion it displaced, and without the justification. Prostration to the lord of eternal life and death is at any rate a pretty natural sort of attitude; abasement before a man-made projection, an ens rationis, the human herd considered as an economic group, however vast the herd, however insistent the economic pressure, is a definite degradation.

Among all the vivid characters which Ireland produced during Grattan’s Parliament and the following decades, the memory of Charles Kendal Bushe retains a singular freshness and gracious charm. His chief fame was as an orator and a pleader in the law courts. Charles Lever has paid tribute, in his Jack Hinton, to ‘the elegance of manner and classical perfection of wit that made Bushe the Cicero of his nation.’ Outside of Ireland his fame is less widely known; and the printers may well be pardoned for having altered the name Bushe to Burke in the first edition of Jack Hinton. This memoir of him, compiled as a labour of love by his great-grand-daughter, assisted by the old box of his papers bequeathed to her by her cousin and collaborator the late Martin Ross, presents a delightful picture of a very lovable man. Handsomely produced and copiously illustrated with portraits and with many amusing little sketches which recall the inimitable humour of the ‘Irish R.M.,’ the memoir would surely have delighted that elegant and courteous gentleman who was so devoted to his family life all through a career of great public distinction and success.

Students of the history of Catholic Emancipation will be familiar with Bushe as one of the generous-minded Protestants who in a period of shameless corruption and indifference to public justice was always a champion of Catholic claims to equality before the law. Miss Somerville might have added many striking tributes to him from the Catholic side.

The last few years have been marked by events which bring to light the new growth of the Church since she regained her liberty in countries in which she had suffered, first persecution, then suppression, and finally an obstinate, lingering prejudice, kept alive by a false tradition. Three years ago Catholics in England celebrated the centenary of their emancipation, and the few thousand Catholics of Sweden kept with great rejoicing the eleven hundredth anniversary of St. Ansgar’s coming to their shores with the gospel of peace, which Danes had celebrated three years earlier, at the same time commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the religious freedom granted to them by the Constitutional Law of 1849. With great fitness the day chosen for these festivities was August 1st, the feast of St. Peter’s Chains. Seven centuries after the coming of Ansgar, Denmark was torn away from the unity of the Church, and lost that contact with the world outside which had been like the freshness of the open sea and which she has only begun to regain in other ways during the last forty or fifty years. The doctrines of the Reformers came at a convenient time for the king and his ministers, and it was really by a coup d’etat that the new regime was established in 1539. After a generation or two very little was left of the old Faith; it was carefully and thoroughly stifled in the minds and hearts of the people, though it must not be forgotten that there was still so much love for what it had given them, that it could influence their lives.

At four o’clock on a June morning of the year 1624 the sister and niece of Master Isaak Fettiplace, Parson of Kintonbury Parva in the County of Dorset, came down to put the Parson’s study to rights while the Parson was still a-bed. The elder woman opened the casement and a warm mist lapped in from the sea, whose purling waves, visible at the base of eroded chalk-cliffs, foretold a tropical day. Her daughter, with a bundle of kindling in her apron, approached the hearth. Contrary to his custom, the Parson had demanded a fire on his return from London the night before, and had sat up late by it. The women, wakeful and a trifle anxious, had heard him move up to his bed-chamber hours after midnight. Now the embers must be swept up and the pyre between the heavy steel dogs re-laid.

‘He hath burnt his journal!’ —the cry came from the niece, on her knees before the hearth.

‘He hath burnt his journal?’ —it was the incredulous riposte of the mother, wheeled round to face the scene of catastrophe.

Flake upon flake of burnt paper, steel-grey like the ‘debris of a wasps’-nest, mingled with, where they did not cover, the brands of the extinct fire. A binding of pig-skin, wrenched off before the rest of the folio met its fate, lay under the Parson’s table.

He was in Westminster Cathedral and it was also a railway station of intolerable vastness and silence. A church has chairs, vaulting; these provided abominations on the floor and overhead. A station has taxicabs, advertisements, kiosks, angles. What a wilderness of these features. There was a covered lorry with a stupid bill pasted on its hood : ‘G. S. R. Man is omnivorous.’ The lorry became multiplied to infinity in dreary perspective, the alignment perfect like an army-train or a boy’s drawing. Park went down the line in his vestments looking for the sacristy and a third-class smoking compartment. He had lost his server and his railway porter. I shall recognize him, for he is black. An unending train went through, pouring out passengers without stopping; all were negroes. Park halted and addressed himself prophetically :

Go through the swinging glass doors; no one will notice you, as you are black. With a wrench and a struggle he came to himself.

Terribilis est locus iste’ are the opening words of the Mass for the Dedication of a Church and the exceeding power of that phrase is perhaps never more completely realized than when one enters for the first time one of the famous old Churches of Western Christendom. Even a slight knowledge of the awesome weight of Christian thought and tradition entering into its creation, overpowers one, for every truly great temple raised to the Glory of God is a meditation of centuries, written in stone. The continuity of development of our Catholic art inspires us with a deep sense of pride in its glorious past and of responsibility to the future. Because it is a real duty to try to appreciate the vast treasure of Christian expression in all its originality and depth of thought, as it is to preserve and to hand on what is best and noblest in our precious inheritance of the fine arts.

Some people still cherish romantic ideas about the Middle Ages. They form visionary pictures of the typical medieval lady living on the principles of popular hagiography and doing embroidery in a high tower of ivory, while her husband was in the Holy Land. Indeed, she must have smiled, as we do, when St. Thomas, writing on the adornment of women, says that it is unlawful for a Christian woman to paint her face, unless it be for a valid reason, such as re-capturing the affections of an erring husband.

Some theologians loved to make catalogues and put woman in just her right niche in the social universe; but she was an inveterate Pagan at heart, and had a disconcerting way of popping out of her bandbox. If the scholastics would call her the unregenerate daughter of Eve, they must abide by the result if she became the cause of all evil.

The Aristocracy, on the other hand, placed woman on a pedestal. Opinions were varied : Jacques de Vitry writing in the thirteenth century, says of Eve that ‘she had no rest until she had succeeded in banishing her husband from the garden of delights.’ On the other hand, a manuscript at Cambridge says : ‘Woman is to be preferred to man, to wit: in material because Adam was made from clay and Eve from the side of Adam, and in conception because a woman conceived God,’ and so on.

As the cloister became the citadel of the finest spirits of Christendom, there arose the vision of woman as the supreme temptress.

I was staying a few days in a Missionary College, where two hundred boys, of all ages and types, are doing their schooling, so that when they go forth to teach all nations they shall not be found wanting. I had said the Community Mass, and was making my thanksgiving. Two little boys—my servers—were putting out the candles, they were solemn-eyed, radiant, and the red of their cheeks outshone the crimson of their soutanes. I was distracted: insistently those children associated themselves with something. Remotely, subconsciously, an analogy was forming. But for the time I got no further. In the evening I remembered. I had been walking, and when I returned the college was wrapped in a toga of mist, the hills were frosted, the world white and grey, transfigured by the moon. A year back—almost to the very day— rattling through a land of frozen forest and morass, I had been sitting for twelve hours in a railway carriage. Opposite me were two young Bolsheviks. It was they (I realised with a shock) in their crimson exuberance that co-ordinated and completed my analogy.

They, too, were missionaries, those Bolsheviks. They even hoped to convert me. They, too, were ardent, sincere and well instructed. But the gospel they preached was not of the Saviour of mankind. Their gospel was the story of despair, man made, man tricked, man rebellious, self-assertive against he knows not what. (For here is a generation that cannot admit the God its heart is seeking, and secretly has always loved.)

In an age of shifting values, even those who reject most deliberately all Christian standards are unable to free themselves from the complex and pervasive influence of a recent profoundly Christocentric past. The Jewish race alone escapes such influence. With a combination of a practical grasp of detail and a high imaginative vision it is given to the representatives of the Semitic culture to view that Christendom in which they never merged. To those so vitally concerned it is of interest to observe the Christian structure as seen through the alien eyes beneath the caftan, patient and suffering. Among those groups familiar with the Western European peoples, two standpoints remain defined and clear, the Catholic and pre-Christian. How deep is the contrast between these long inherited traditions and the wavering affirmations made in the gaunt mental shadows of that great, wrecked, Lutheran Theology which still cumbers the mind and the prepossessions? Freed from such burden the pre-Christian tradition now reveals a curiously integral quality : Lion Feuchtwanger in this points the example. He can describe, in some ways more clearly than a less remote writer, the external apparatus of the Christian life and the flavour, for no other word can so well express it, of certain individual Christian lives. Still he has the defects of his great qualities, and in dealing with the Goyim he is limited, as far as successful portraiture is concerned, to those in whom all trace of the Christian spirit has vanished. He has, in fact, an admirable gallery of portraits of those who only wear the Christian mask.

May I introduce this article by giving two personal reminiscences? I once asked the Headmaster of a well-known choir school whether he had ever noticed that boys gifted with a keen musical perception remembered what they heard more easily than what they read. It was an unusual question, but the answer was immediate and unequivocal. Such, he agreed, was his experience. He had often wondered why many of his boys remembered so little of what they read; if, for example, he asked a class to sit down and read silently an Act of Hamlet and then afterwards examined them on their knowledge of it, he invariably found that the majority remembered far less than if he himself had read the Act aloud to them.

On another occasion, when I happened to live for several months with a musician of rare talents, I was always amused to find on entering his room a heap of garments in the middle of the floor. My amusement bewildered him; quite seriously he could not understand why such raiment should not occupy the centre of the room, provided, of course, the floor was clean. In this matter he was unteachable. I labelled him in my own mind the most untidy fellow I had ever met, until one evening, whilst he was playing, the simple truth dawned upon me. My friend was not untidy at all—he was non-tidy in the usual sense of the word ‘tidy.’ Tidiness for him was a musical, auricular, euphonic thing; it was harmony; and discord, dissonance, was untidiness.

Few people now read Vathek, and Redding’s Memoirs of William Beckford are probably read even less often. Indeed the book is not easy reading. The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it ‘prolix,’ and someone recently said that it was the worst biography he knew. With the advent of other biographies of Beckford it may cease to be even useful. Yet the patient reader is not wholly unrewarded. There are passages in it that he would be sorry to have missed, even though the feelings they arouse are not precisely those intended by the author. Thus in a long and reverential account of Beckford’s travels we mark with pleasure that he left Bologna, ‘renowned for sausages and lap-dogs,’ ‘as an earthquake had just before put the land and people much out of humour.’

But it is when the Church is concerned, and especially monasticism, that Redding is most interesting. Catholic worship always fascinated Beckford, and its lasting effect on his mind will appear from later extracts. He was at the Grande Chartreuse when he was nineteen. He stayed there three days, read the works of St. Bruno, and wrote with some enthusiasm of the place. Indeed he left some exceedingly poor lines in the album of the monastery, ‘the larger portion being those of the tutor, Dr. Lettice, the pupil being, perhaps, not at the moment duly inspired.’ These favourable impressions never wholly faded, but other experiences were not so happy. In 1780 he made another tour, and in the Low Countries ‘he was active, and visited all the public buildings, and lions in the churches, such as the statuary and pictures.

In 1546 occurred the great plague which ravaged Marseilles, Lyons, and Aix. So terrible was the scourge that all the doctors fled and left the dying to their fate. The Comités of the towns assembled in despair, ignorant even whether they too were not already in the grip of the disease. Just as the inhabitants of Elatea received the news in the eventide, so the desertion of the doctors struck their bewildered minds with horror. Although they turned to the Church with groans of supplication, the people died, and dying gave to their neighbours the seeds of death. They died as they had died in the past, and they continued to die until the world of medicine perceived the squalor of their living. And it is of this dawning perception that I wish to speak.

The plagues which ravaged the world in the course of the Middle Ages were probably all offshoots of that form of plague known as Bubonic, Oriental, Levantine, or Miliary, and the symptoms were a high fever, accompanied by glandular swellings and carbuncles. It was generally supposed to have originated in Northern Africa, and to have made its first appearance in Europe at Constantinople in the reign of Justinian. The great plague of Athens described by Thucydides seems from its symptoms to have been of a different nature, although equally destructive. In Constantinople, ten thousand persons were carried off in one day; in 1352 Oxford lost two-thirds of her academic population ; at about the same period thirteen millions perished in China from the same disease.