The April to which I look forward is a thing of more marvels than the April the colts snuff up on the March winds, with such promises of life ahead that in sheer joy they suddenly send the mud splashing behind them in the paddock, rearing and chasing in the ecstasy of that beckoning festival.

The Easter to which I, as a Christian, look forward, comes after long Lent of February and March with their penance of pruning knife and scourging rain and skies grey-white as wood-ash in that long fast of bare black trees and beaten turf. But all through the forty days, Easter has been in the air; sometimes we have received the promise afar off, even before the immaculate conception of the first snowdrop in its humility. Certainly in March, when the sun is so veiled and weak that only the larks find it, when only jessamine and winter wallflowers give alms of gold, you may know the stir of sap under the dead bracken as you go to early Mass. England begins her preparations in good time, because she has always kept Easter with great liturgical splendour in her orchards and gardens, in field and farmhouse. She brings out the trinity cups of woodspurge and crocuses like gold, frankincense and myrrh, and St. Joseph’s violets, one by one. Then her gold and silver willow, white violets and wild daffodils, anemones under the old pear-tree, bracken fronds like a bishop’s pastoral staff, her yellow chickens and ducklings. In rain or sun, we hear the numes of bird-song, unconsciously obedient to the Motu proprio.

Those fortunate enough to live in the country in early spring know well the pleasure that is to be found in watching and listening to the birds. Now legends grow in the country, and when towns were only houses collected together in the country they grew there also. Legends are amongst life’s most precious gifts, telling us, as they do in story-shape how God is love, and how the saints were his friends. Perhaps it is in legends that we get nearest to the real man in the saint. The saints loved God, and therefore all his creatures—a solid fact, not a beautiful phrase. They spent their days helping others to come with them to God, a work which made them the busiest of the busy, and yet gave them leisure to thank God for all He had made and to admire His handiwork. Their love overflowed to the animal creation, the beauties of which inspired them to sing such canticles as we find in the life of St. Francis of Assisi, wherein God is thanked for the beauty He has given to His creatures. No more beautiful legends exist than those which tell us of saints and birds, and even Our Lord’s life became in the middle ages a centre of bird-lore. The wren was placed in the stable at Bethlehem, and the robin got his little red-breast from staunching the Precious Blood, so that ‘Robins and wrens are God Almighty’s friends.’

When we first went to the Pyrenees we lived in a tiny village at the foot of the Pic de Ger, about half-an-hour’s walk from Lourdes.

Our village was a charming place. It was made up entirely of farmhouses, little and big, all of them colour-washed, most of them end-on to the road with their cobbled yards beside them, and all of them enclosed behind great gates as if they expected to be put into a state of siege at any minute. Even Monsieur le Cure’s house had originally been a two-roomed farmhouse. So, too, had ours till it had been converted to a villa by an enterprising son of the village. He had knocked away the lofts and the pent roofs with their little dormer windows, and the house now boasted two stories, with the traditional galérie and a series of attics.

All the floors had been renewed. From that fact hangs my tale.

Savonarola’s adversaries had failed in their attempt to have him condemned, but as Florence was firm in her refusal to break the alliance with Charles VIII, and as this attitude was attributed to Savonarola’s exhortations, in all probability another effort would be made to have him silenced. One of the strongest opponents of the Alliance was Alexander VI. He knew that Cardinal della Rovere had urged Charles to have him deposed and that this same Cardinal, a refugee in France, was pressing the King to have a Council summoned for the reformation of the Church. The fear of a Council was therefore a very real one for Alexander, and in order to paralyse Charles VIII, it was necessary to cripple Savonarola.

On October 16th, 1495, Alexander VI issued another Brief, Licet uberius, by which the former Brief Quia divini consilii of September 8th was annulled. The Pope had received Savonarola’s letter of September 29th and the copy of the letter of July 31st, and accepted Savonarola’s reasons for not having gone to Rome. By ‘some hitherto unexplained cause,’ Pastor tells us, this Brief ‘did not arrive till after the 26th of October.’

The Catholic Church and Art. By Ralph Adams Cram. (Calvert Series; Burns, Oates & Washbourne; 1929; 4/-).

Art Nonsense. By Eric Gill. (Cassell & Co. and Francis Walterson; 21/- net).

The first-named work deals with all that manifestation of the aesthetic instinct which flowered within the influence or the territory of Christendom whilst Christendom was at variance on things mainly human and material; and with its curious deviations and altered canalisations ensuing from Iconoclasm, as well as with the blight which came to it from Manicheeism and the sour-faced offspring Puritanism, that palmer-worm which devoured the leavings of the locust. It is truly a great little book, a masterly synthesis of all the movements which moved anything in the category of things that may be made. It is not only scholarly but abounding in observations which bespeak a right intuition upon a realm much enhavocked by people who are sure of what is not so. But can Bach be called a Catholic musician? He wrote a Mass in B minor which is one of the world’s chief treasures, but of no use to the Catholic Liturgy even were nothing enacted Motu Proprio. A greater than Bach is here, William Byrd, but though he is a very Catholic, even Papist, musician, I do not remember that he is mentioned. He labours under the disadvantage of being English. He also conducted Anglican chapels-royal for Elizabeth in her spacious time. But there is documentary evidence that both he and his organist, John Bull, kept their places at court on purpose to be able to hear Mass and get others to Mass, with impunity.

In that strip of country that lies between France and North Brittany, and is locally known as the pays gallot, the racial characteristics of the people are peculiar. They come of a very anciently mixed stock, and do not closely resemble either of their neighbours; less excitable than the French, they are shallower and more pleasure-loving than the Bretons, and if they follow their church with no less faith, they treat it, sometimes, with more levity. They fulfil the duties that belong to the solemn days of Lent and Easter—though in Saint-Malo, at any rate, carnival has a surprising habit of breaking out on all the earlier Sundays of Lent—but they are very ready to turn to the irresponsibilities of life with a sense of having done all that is required of them. They lose no time in starting on that amazing series of fairs and assemblèes that follow on each other’s heels during the latter half of April and May.

In the district surrounding Saint-Malo, indeed, one of the oldest and best-beloved of these assemblèes is held no later than on Easter Monday, when all the world and his wife, his children and his neighbours, set forth on their yearly pilgrimage to La Boul’neu— which is, being interpreted, the very ancient fair of Bourgneuf, a small village on the road between Dinard and Pleurtuit. It is not, of course, a pilgrimage in any literal sense of the word to-day; but of what it may have been in the past it is impossible to speak with certainty.