Contrasting the Stuarts and Tudors in one of her letters, "As to moral standards,'" she says, " poor old Charles II. never failed to honour goodness wherever he found it... whereas Henry VIII. battened on cruelties and tyrannies of all sorts, and took infinite pains to clear the kingdom of every high-minded head which he could reach. I think my beloved Surrey, his victim of 1547, very like in character to your Edward, Duke of Buckingham (Surrey's grandfather) his victim of 1521. Both were proud, clean, artistic, munificent men: the sort who had to be cleared away if a being like Henry VIII. was to make his will the paramount thing in the universe. I often thank God I didn't live in that unutterable reign ! " 1 And again, on another occasion, as to the Tudors and their iconoclasm :

"About superstitions... A popular religion, old as the race, almost, clung to and grown about by the common people, must necessarily be misconstrued to some extent at all times and by some individuals, groups, or even nations: e.g., we English-speaking Catholics consider the Italians superstitious; all Orientals are so; most Irish and Welsh are. Superstition, after all, is too much faith, an excrescence on true faith... the Reformers never in the world measured it unexaggeratedly or checked it legitimately, as the Council of Trent did, but brought it forward as a pretext and a catchword when they were set on destroying the POETRY and ROMANCE of Catholicism. The Church really did, and does, intend that blessed palms, ashes, candles, water, etc., should have a special accidental objective value, apart from their symbolism; her liturgies express this in passing, and all R.C.'s are brought up to believe it, and never treat these things breathed upon and blessed by Holy Church without reverence. . . . You can see how easy it is for certain minds to go too far. . . .

The Reformers did away ruthlessly with all the touching and beautiful sacramentals'; not one did they spare save the royal sacring, as you say, and that

1 To Miss Gwenllian E. F. Morgan of Buckingham Place, Brecon.

only because it was royal. They wanted everything prosy and practical, so they called the immemorial loveliness of ritual fuss,' and flung it away.'

Of all objects of pilgrimage, the one which stirred the deepest feelings of Louise Imogen Guiney was the Shrine of Saint Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.

"To an English-speaking Catholic there can hardly be a more touching and attractive spot than the Confessor's chapel, bound up as it is, by visible and invisible links, with the poetry of human history and surcharged with the imperishable aroma of the Catholic past.'

"The high Shrine in the middle, as everybody knows, is ringed with the six royal tombs. . . . Over them is no roof proper to an enclosure, but only the lofty vaulting of the aisles or ambulatories, a dusky heaven of masonry, braided far up with the amethystine London light, the most beautiful light in the world.

"East is the stone screen separating the Shrine from the High Altar and the sacrarium; north and south runs a converging pageant of apsidal chapels (overcrowded and spoiled with intruded monuments); westward, and encroaching on the more ancient burial-places of Eleanor and Philippa,

-'Queens

Whose names are written up in gold '—

rises the H-shaped Perpendicular chantry of the dear soldier who was once Holinshed's and Shakespeare's wild Prince Hal. From top to bottom it is one blossom of elaborate sculpture, every figure in its place, except the altar Crucifixion which is gone. Full length figures in their lonely niches look gravely down, and on a tie-beam, above them all, hang in full sight the saddle, helmet, and shield, not indeed of Agincourt, as is commonly said, but of the funeral of seven years later when 1 To Miss Gwenllian E. F. Morgan.

'Harry the Fifth, too famous to live long,' was borne to his rest-aged thirty-three- to the great grief of all good men.'

Although each detail of this is, or ought to be, already imprinted on the memory of every Briton who has seen it, who should need no reminder of its beauty, yet just as we enjoy a skilled picture of some well-remembered landscape, so the familiarity of the subject in this case also enables us the better to appreciate the firm and loving lines in which the American pilgrim draws her sketch.

Unknown to English readers, and in America out of print for the last fifteen or sixteen years, this masterful while tenderly affectionate article, with its blend of antiquarian lore and vivid freshness of human feeling, deserves reprinting as a booklet; and some such possibility may have crossed its writer's mind, for a number of MS. notes were found with her own copy of it, and a treasured picture of the Shrine as decorated on the eve of the crowning of King Edward VII.,

the first reigning Edward not Catholic born." "A most graceful golden Rood, a lovely bit of work, having the attendant figures of Our Lady and St. John, was this King's gift to the Abbey (in 1902) and replaced the symbol of our redemption in a spot whence it had been absent more than three hundred years."

"The time of all times to see the Confessor's chapel, and to feel to the full the mystery, romance and sanctity of the whole environment, is on St. Edward's Day. Catholics have always found their way to the Shrine on October the 13th; even through penal times it was so; very noticeably has it been so for the last fifty or sixty years, since the Oxford Movement. . . .

"The Abbey authorities never have opposed in any way these annual gatherings; and gradually, culminatively, they have taken on a definite form and come to be one of the striking though unadvertised sights of London.

1" The Shrine of Saint Edward the Confessor," American Catholic Quarterly Review, July 1906.

"It is wonderful to watch thousands of people quietly and recollectively pouring into St. Edward's chapel, mounting and descending by two small ancient staircases, as oblivious of everything outside their pious purpose as if Protestant occupation were a dream, and exile and persecution had never driven their forebears from home. For this is indeed home: this is the very quick and lodestar of Catholic England.'

With the throng of Catholics, mingle devout Anglicans who remember that their ancestors, too, were Catholics. "Whether Protestant or Catholic," says Louise Guiney (ending with a quotation), "these people care. And care

is love; and love is service; and service is Salvation.'"

CHAPTER XII

HENRY VAUGHAN, SILURIST

IT sometimes happens that an invisible magnetism draws the booklover to the destined book; and, by happy chance or blessed destiny, in a fortunate hour, even the impecunious have been known to purchase some treasure which wealthy men and famous Libraries have striven in vain to acquire.

Among rarities of the period Louise Guiney best loved, there are few more difficult to find than "Thalia Rediviva: The Pass-Times and Diversions of a Country Muse," printed in London in 1678, just eighteen years after the evermemorable day when the reign of gloom was ended, and King Charles the Second, at the invitation of his people, rode into London through "a lane of happie faces... the ways strewn all with flowers; bells ringing, steeples hung with tapestries, fountains running with wine"; as one of his welcomers relates, amidst trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking; and two hundred Horse and Foot brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy."

For a long while the British Museum boasted possession of what was believed to be the only specimen of Thalia time had spared. Subsequently Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, the ever-delightful singer of "London Lyrics,"-connoisseur, bibliophile, wit, and (in the old and literal sense of a oncerespected word) amateur of letters,-could point to another copy in his famous library at Rowfant: that library of which even to scan the catalogue is to be at the same moment fascinated and tantalised.

As Vaughan's poetry began coming slowly into its heritage,