Those novels about the Young Idea versus Crabbed Old Age, those films about Our Dancing Daughters, those Boy-Scout Jamborees, that Hiking Movement, that Slimming Campaign, that ‘Beaver’ Ramp, those foolish letters to the papers from alleged old colonels about the spinelessness and cocktails of the younger generation, those nostrums for preserving the School-girl Complexion, that glorification of Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan, those prodigies of Jehudi Menuhin, those babblings of Gertrude Stein, that smile of Mr. Drage, that shortening of skirts and bobbing of hair, those Nazis and Fascists and Bright Young People—perhaps you did not even see a connexion between these things? And, so far as the newspaper stunts were concerned, perhaps you did not take them seriously at all? Or are you one of the crétins who swallow the whole thing?

Now Mr. Wyndham Lewis takes it all very seriously indeed. He has written a book about it which claims to be a ‘research, as “scientific” as any branch whatever of biology or chemistry.’ He has made a valuable collection of this nonsense from the press, but he does not regard it as nonsense. He sees a Sinister Purpose behind it all. The gigantic ‘Youth-racket’ of these post-war years is a put-up job. It is a machination of Big Business in its bid for power. It is baby-snatching on a large scale for the enslavement of Western Man.

It was on a day in early March of this year, with a cloudless blue sky overhead, that I stepped carefully off the muddy track on to the little strip of ‘sown field’ —with the blades of wheat, brilliantly green, just showing above ground—which separated me from Luke Copse Cemetery. This tiny spot, ‘for ever England,’ lies just over the old German lines that for so long lay, an impassable barrier, between Hébuterne and Serre.

I had come up that morning by car from Amiens. We had bowled along the great road to Albert in smooth security. The driver—who had done this kind of work often before—began by being vastly communicative. I must see the old G.H.Q. at Querieu Château; but it had meant little to me during the war years, and meant less than ever to me now. Then there was the bold notice painted in English on a barn wall, Dangerous Corner; that, too, I must note. Reminiscences of 1870 began to brim over his practised lips; a cemetery on the left, a monument on the right. But I was dull to respond; memories were marshalling themselves anew, stirring out of their long slumbers, awakening at contact with the familiar slopes of Picardy : that road there, on the left, it recalls a march —its destination long since forgotten, not even now to be recalled—but, somehow, clear as crystal, is the memory of that moving column, and myself a tiny part of it.

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.

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.

It has been said of the Dictionary of National Biography that its compilation has permanently put out of employment the writers of what used to be called the Miscellanies. Drudging, uninspired work it was, this labour of the writer of miscellanies, yet one may have a feeling of sympathy for the painstaking and reasonably honest workman who might have earned his bread for a day or two by quarrying in the pages of the Greville Diary.

My edition of Greville is that of Philip Whitwell Wilson, published by Heinemann in 1927. The editor informs us that nothing printable has been suppressed, and that only a rare and irrelevant vulgarity of the stables has been omitted. There is since, I believe, a more complete edition.

Within the limits of the edition before me, there are occasional passages of interest to any Catholic with a relish for the quaint or the unexpected. There are the usual reactions characteristic of the fair-minded Protestant of the period, to Catholic persons and institutions, and to what we may call Catholic aspirations, whether religious or political. We know the kind of thing a Protestant Englishman of the period would think and say about the Popes and the Temporal Power, Daniel O’Connell and the Irish, Mazzim and united Italy. We know all this, and need not trouble to reproduce what Charles Greville thought, said, or wrote on these matters. But it may be at least of passing interest to read of a few of the contacts made with the Catholic Church by a cultured man of affairs in the early Victorian age of the world, the English world.

On the Feast of the Assumption in the year 1498 Columbus discovered this island and called it Conception Island. But it was not till two hundred years had passed that resident missionaries, French Dominicans, were established, as we learn from Père du Tertre and the famous Père Labat, in their accounts of those early days, 1651-1657. During two intervals they were replaced by Capuchins, 1657-1663 and 1763-1784, and by a series of secular priests, French, Irish and Spanish, till the English Dominicans formally took over the mission in 1901. So long as the French occupied the island its Catholic history was peaceful, but when the British seized it in 1762, and again, after an interval of French occupation, secured it finally in 1783, the Catholic Church in the island entered on a long period of storm and trouble. The whole forms a dramatic picture which is well set out by Fr. Devas, who has for years been occupied with the history of the island, and who has spared no pains in accumulating materials for its compilation.

Ecclesiastically the island was under the jurisdiction of the Vicars Apostolic, Challoner, Talbot, Douglass and Poynter, up to 1819, when the West Indian Diocese was erected and Dr. Buckley was appointed as first Vicar Apostolic with his residence in Trinidad. But long before that date troubles had arisen. The British regime started well—on paper : Catholics were to be Members of the Council, one was to be assistant Judge and one on the Commission of Peace in each town or parish.

It is, we believe, uncontested, though a ‘fact not generally known,’ that English illustration attained a splendour in the sixties never equalled before or since. The fifties gave little promise of such a dazzling display, and there was already a perceptible declension in the seventies. One is sure to overlook some names if one tries to enumerate great illustrators of the sixties, but here is a sample sheaf: Millais, Tenniel, Keene, Leighton, Poynter, Du Maurier, Pettie, Pinwell, F. Sandys, A. B. Houghton, Fred Walker, J. D. Watson, Arthur Hughes. Volumes of Good Words, the Cornhill, and Once a Week lie dusty and forlorn in the ‘Threepenny Box,’ although they contain illustrations that the discerning eye could contemplate long and lovingly.

But in the decade of which we are speaking, it was common opinion in the artist-world of London that a young man had already produced such admirable work and was giving such promise of still better, that he seemed certain to make a great name for himself. So ‘man proposes.’ But Deo aliter visum. Matthew James Lawless was born in 1837. In 1864 he was lying in his grave in St. Mary’s, Kensal Green. He died in Pembridge Crescent, Bayswater.