MEMOIR OF KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
MEMOIR 
 
 OF 
 
 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 BY 
 
 BERNARD HOLLAND, C.B. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE AND 30th STREET, NEW YORK 
 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
 1919 
 
HIS 
 
 DEDICATED 
 
 IN MEMORY OF HER FATHER 
 
 TO MARY 
 
 THE HONBi-E. MRS. HUBERT DORMER 
 
 42^349 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Kenelm Digby took no part in public affairs ; his 
 history is that of his writings and private Ufe. My 
 motive in composing the present Memoir, with the 
 approval of his descendants, is to direct the attention 
 of, at least, a few readers, to the never well-known, and 
 now almost forgotten works of this Author, to whom 
 I myself owe so much that my own labour is payment 
 of a debt of gratitude. A record of his Hfe is, I think, 
 the easiest and pleasantest method of so doing. 
 
 I must warn readers who expect to find in a Memoir 
 a number of letters written by its subject, that in this 
 case they will hardly find one. Most letters written 
 by men in private life who died, like Digby, near forty 
 years ago have been lost or destroyed, or are put away 
 in unreachable places, and it seems to be so in his case ; 
 at any rate I have not been able to discover any. It 
 matters little, I think, because Kenelm Digby infused 
 into his works a large amount of autobiography. One 
 can reconstruct from them his childhood, and boyhood, 
 and University days, and friendships, and the joys and 
 sorrows of his family life. But as all this is scattered 
 through nearly forty volumes of his books — most of them 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 not easily obtained now — it was necessary to bring the 
 events together in a consecutive way. 
 
 The events of private life, when mirrored in a reflective 
 mind, and felt by a feehng heart, and expressed by one 
 who has the gift of expression, have, in narrative, this 
 advantage over events in political, or other active hfe, 
 that they turn on matters not transient, like those on 
 the public stage, but at all times intimately interesting. 
 For this reason a book like the Recit d'une Soeur will 
 outHve masses of biography of once seemingly important 
 men of action. 
 
 Catholic readers, not already acquainted with Kenelm 
 Digby, may be especially glad to be introduced to him, 
 but his writings ought to give pleasure to many not yet 
 included within the bounds of the Central Church of 
 Christendom. 
 
 BERNARD HOLLAND. 
 
 Hakbledown, 
 
 NEAR CanTERBDRT, 
 
 March, 1919. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Preface - . . - vii 
 
 I. Descent ; Boyhood ; Cambridge 1 
 
 II. Travels 18 
 
 III. Conversion to the Catholic Church - - - - 34 
 
 IV. "The Broadstone of Honour" 59 
 
 V. English and French Society 81 
 
 VI. "Mores Catholici" 94 
 
 VII. "Compitum" 122 
 
 VIII. Family Life 133 
 
 IX. Family Life — continued 162 
 
 X. Latest Writings 197 
 
 XL Close of Life 235 
 
CHAPTER I 
 DESCENT, BOYHOOD AND CAMBRIDGE 
 
 *' Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind 
 whicli disposes men to heroic and generous actions, and keeps them 
 conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual 
 and moral world. It will be found that, in the absence of conserva- 
 tive principles, this spirit more generally prevails in youth than in 
 the later periods of men's lives ; and, as the heroic is always the 
 earliest age in the history of nations, so youth, the first period of 
 human life, may be considered as the heroic or chivalrous age of each 
 separate man ; and there are few so unhappy as to have grown up 
 without having experienced its influence, and having derived the 
 advantage of being able to enrich their imaginations and to soothe 
 their hour of sorrow with its romantic recollections." 
 
 J^B^'ELM.'DiGBY, Broadstone of Honour, " Godefridus.''' 
 
 The Digbys, whose very name has a fascination, were 
 a true old English race, and what, in the way of races, is 
 better than that ? * They descended from one Aelmer, 
 who in the reign of Edward the Confessor held land at 
 Tilton in the County of Leicester, in the heart of England. 
 Some of them are said to have gone crusading. Everard 
 Digby, High Sheriff of Rutland, was slain at Towton 
 Fiel3. in 1461, fighting on the defeated and more romantic 
 Lancastrian side. From one of his sons descended Sir 
 Everard Digby, who was executed in 1606 at the age 
 of twenty-four, for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. 
 A son of this Sir Everard was the Sir Kenelm Digby 
 
 ^ There is a village called Digby in Lincolnshire, which may have been 
 the first origin of the name. 
 
 K.D. 1 A 
 
2 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 of the seventeenth century, the multifarious writer and 
 natural philosopher, and man of society and action, 
 the assailant of the Venetian fleet at Scanderoon, a 
 Catholic and courtier of Charles I., yet a personal friend 
 of Oliver Cromwell, and, daring man, the husband of 
 Venetia Stanley, that " woman of an extraordinary 
 beauty, and as extraordinary fame," Lord Clarendon 
 diplomatically says. A poet called him : 
 
 " The Age's wonder for his noble parts, 
 Skilled in six tongues, and learned in all the Arts." 
 
 " His person," says a contemporary, " was handsome 
 and gigantic, and nothing was wanting to make him a 
 complete Chevalier." 
 
 The Kenelm Henry Digby who is the subject of this 
 Memoir did not, however, descend from this hero, but 
 in a distinct line from their nearest common ancestor, 
 the Everard Digby who fought and died for the Red 
 Rose at Towton. One son of this Everard was Sir Simon 
 Digby of Coleshill, in the County of Warwick, who, still 
 on the Red Rose side, fought, with six brothers, for 
 Henry of Richmond against Richard IH. at Bosworth 
 in 1485, and was well rewarded by the winner. His 
 great-great-grandson was Sir Robert Digby of Coleshill, 
 who, in 1600, married Lettice, (afterwards) Baroness 
 Offaley, heiress of the great Norman-Irish race of 
 Fitzgeralds, Earls of Kildare. After his death she was 
 besieged in her castle by Irish rebels of 1642. Kenelm 
 Digby thus speaks of her in his Broadstone of Honour : 
 
 " Equally memorable was the conduct of that excellent 
 Lady Offalia, from whom those of my house boast their 
 descent, bearing the arms of her family, a field argent, 
 a saltire gules, quarterly upon their paternal Coat. This 
 noble woman was besieged in her castle of Geashill, in 
 
DESCENT 3 
 
 the King's County, Ireland, by an army of those faithful 
 and injured men whom intolerance and injustice had 
 driven to insurrection. Her reply, upon their summons 
 to surrender, evinced a noble spirit, and, at the same 
 time, a degree of affection for the Irish army opposed 
 to her which, although rare in persons who were engaged 
 against them, became nevertheless a feature in the 
 character of her posterity. She appeals to them as to 
 her having been always a good neighbour amongst them, 
 never having done any wrong to any of them, declares 
 her resolution to live and die innocently, and to defend 
 her own, leaving the issue to God ; ' and though,' she 
 concludes, ' I have been, and still am, desirous to 
 avoid the shedding of Christian blood, yet, being 
 provoked, your threats shall no whiit dismay me Lettice 
 Offaha.' " 
 
 John Digby, a distinguished diplomat, younger 
 brother of the last-mentioned Sir Robert Digby, was 
 created Earl of Bristol in 1622, and his son, then Lord 
 Digby and afterwards second Earl of Bristol, who became 
 a Catholic, was the Cavalier leader famous in the Civil 
 War. This Hue of Digbys died out in 1698, but not so 
 the elder, and now Irish, line. 
 
 Robert, eldest son of Sir Robert Digby by his wife 
 Lettice, Baroness Offaley, was, in 1620, created Baron 
 Digby of Geashill in the Irish Peerage, and from his 
 eldest son descended the existing Barons Digby of 
 Sherborne, and also from the fifth Lord Digby a numerous 
 cadet progeny. Sir Robert Digby and Lettice had also 
 a younger son named Essex Digby, who became Bishop 
 of Dromore. The eldest son of this bishop, named 
 Simon Digby, in his turn became Bishop of Elphin, and 
 died in 1720. The Bishop of Elphin was Jacobite in 
 his sympathies. He saw James 11. at dawn, after the 
 battle of the Boyne, riding south, his hat slouched for 
 
4 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 concealment, and visited him later at St. Germain in 
 France, when poor James said to the Bishop that if, as 
 he trusted, what he had suffered had benefited his soul, 
 then even William of Orange would have proved his 
 best friend. 
 
 It was a strongly clerical family. Four daughters of 
 the Bishop of Elphin married Irish clerg3Tiien, and two 
 of his sons were ordained. The eldest son of Simon 
 Digby, Bishop of Elphin, was John Digby of Landestown, 
 the grandfather of Kenelm. He was member for 
 Kildare in the Irish House of Commons. One merry 
 night he was the only member, it is said, of that most 
 festive of legislative assembhes who was not intoxicated, 
 and on the next day, as he was known never to drink, his 
 fellow-members and the ofiicials came flocking to his house 
 to find out what business they had done the night before. 
 
 The Landestown estate descended to Simon Digby, 
 the eldest son of this John. The second surviving son 
 of John Digby, M.P., was William, who became Dean of 
 Clonfert and Rector of Geashill, in King's County. 
 
 The Dean of Clonfert was a man of uncommonly all- 
 round talent. In his youth he was a great athlete, 
 skater, runner and jumper. At Lord Digby's place, 
 Sherborne in Dorset, he made a leap which was marked 
 and long exhibited as a great feat. He had a passion for 
 painting, also for carpentering and mechanics and 
 landscape-gardening. He was a Hebrew scholar, and 
 v/rote lectures and treatises. He had travelled in Spain 
 and France, and in the latter land, his son hints, had a 
 mysterious love-affair. 
 
 " He seemed a kind of lord on his domain, 
 Where peace for great and small alike would reign." ^ 
 
 * Temple of Memory, Canto II. 
 
DESCENT 5 
 
 He was a man " supremely just," and tliereby,. in 
 Ireland, made " open and embittered foes." The boy 
 Kenelm loved his sire. 
 
 " All ! with what love he saw that figure tall 
 Pacing so thoughtful from their lofty Hall, 
 To wander in his groves so bowed the while : 
 As if he felt that in a little while 
 He must leave all things that on earth were dear, 
 Though till his last month none for him would fear. 
 Ah ! with vrhat grief he left those walks and lawns 
 Where first he ran as life's sweet morning dawns." •'■ 
 
 Evidently Kenelm Digby derived much from this 
 striking and original father : his love of nature, painting, 
 riding, swimming, travelling, and his talent, rather 
 discursive than concentrated. 
 
 Wilham Digby, Dean of Clonfert, married thrice. His 
 first wife was Mary Anne Butler, by whom he had 
 children who all died young ; his second was his cousin, 
 Mary Digby, by whom he had three sons ; his third 
 was a widow named Mary Wood. 
 
 She was of " lovely face," her son says, and of Devon- 
 shire race, but also related in blood to the Anglo-Irish 
 family of Edgworth. Her great pride was to be of 
 kin to the Abbe Edgworth, who attended Louis XVI. on 
 the scafiold, and her treasure was his rosary enshrined 
 in a shell. She died soon after her husband, and was 
 so much loved that a multitude came from all the country 
 round to follow her funeral procession. Says her son : 
 
 " Oh ! verdant Isle, that still so honours death, 
 Love thee I will, and to my latest breath." ^ 
 
 By Mary the Dean of Clonfert had two sons, the 
 elder Richard by name, and the younger Kenelm Henry, 
 who was born in the last year or two of the eighteenth 
 
 1 Temple of Memory, Canto II. ^ Idem. 
 
6 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 century, and is the subject of this Memoir.* Kenelm 
 was born when his father was between sixty and seventy 
 and was still a boy when he died in 1812 aged near 
 eighty. Since Kenelm, the son of so old a father, was 
 tall and very strong and hardy, and himself passed the age 
 of eighty, the vital force in the race must have been great. 
 
 Richard Digby, Kenelm's eldest whole brother, died 
 in 1820. He left his inheritance to Kenelm, who in 
 this way, and by the fact that his wife had property, 
 had a good income, enough to live upon for life without 
 entering a paid profession, or having to earn a liveli- 
 hood by his pen. It is an advantage of estabUshed pro- 
 perty and " unearned income " that it allows some men 
 to pursue unremunerative occupations which are bene- 
 ficial to their fellow-beings. When Socialism has been 
 fully established, and we are all Government employes, 
 no one will have time to write a book like Mores Catholici. 
 
 Kenelm spent a happy childhood at his father's 
 rectory of Geashill, with its distant prospect of the 
 purple, heathy, hill-range of Slieve-bloom, in the very 
 centre of Ireland, playing by himself at imaginative 
 games, or with rustic lads, reading poetry, Shake- 
 speare and, above all, Walter Scott, roaming through 
 woods and meadows, climbing about the ruins of 
 Geashill Castle, which his ancestress had so valiantly 
 defended. Sometimes he was at Lord Charlesyille's 
 castle, seven miles away, where a charming child of 
 
 ^ The parish register at Geashill was carelessly kept, and has no baptismal 
 entries between 1784 and 1801. According to Mr. Rouse Ball's Admissions 
 to Trinity College, Cambridge, vol. iv., Kenelm Digby, at the age of 
 eighteen, matriculated in 1815. This would make the year of his birth to 
 be 1797. But according to the obituary notice in the Times he was 
 eighty when he died, and thus born in 1799 or 1800. Probably the date 
 1797 is the correct one. / 
 
BOYHOOD 7 
 
 the house seemed to him a " vision in the sky " so 
 beautiful she was, and gentle. This was Catharine 
 Tisdall, a daughter of Lady Charlesville by a former 
 marriage, who afterwards married Colonel George Marlay, 
 and became the mother of Lady John Manners. She 
 was an intimate friend of Kenelm Digby's later years 
 in London. Kenelm learned to ride from an English 
 groom named Jones, to whom he was much attached. 
 
 Kenelm Digby never seems to have visited Ireland 
 again, after he left it while still a boy, except once, 
 to attend his mother's funeral ; at least there is no record 
 of his having done so, for he never cared to go anywhere 
 except to the Continent ; but he cherished its memories, 
 and in his writings always praised the Irish race. 
 
 " Island of Saints, still constant, still allied 
 To the great truths opposed to human pride ; 
 Island of ruins, towers, cloisters grey. 
 Whence palmer kings with pontiffs once did stray 
 To Rome and Sion, or to kindle fire 
 Which amidst later darkness can inspire 
 Lands that in fondest memory and song 
 Thy pristine glory fearlessly prolong ; 
 Thy peaceful image floating in the West 
 Denotes a Cause to yield all spirits rest ; 
 Ancient, yet never past, as years gone by, 
 But rising gloriously in eastern sky, 
 As oft as finding in the setting light 
 A symbol of thy grandeur in that night 
 Of ages, when thy fame from sea to sea 
 Extended as a blissful mystery. 
 For grandeur, nations, kingdoms have their day. 
 But Faith like thine will never pass away." ^ 
 
 After a time Kenelm was sent to school in England, 
 with his brother, at Petersham near Richmond. Here 
 his great sport was rowing on the Thames. He carried 
 
 1 Digby's Short Poems, 1866, p. 82. 
 
8 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 this art to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he arrived 
 
 in the year of the battle of Waterloo. The " tubs that 
 
 then did serve for boats, on which the drowsy Fen-man 
 
 floats " were far inferior to the craft of the Thames. He^ 
 
 and some equally enlightened friends, assisting the 
 
 enterprise with money aid, induced the boat-keeper 
 
 at the locks to construct " some boats at which the 
 
 Fen would stare." In his poem of memories, written 
 
 when he was over seventy, Kenelm proceeds to say : 
 
 " In brief, before they left the place 
 The University could trace 
 The good effects of their renown 
 That followed them from London down, 
 Until their eight-oared races proved 
 A school for art they long had loved ; 
 And then, observe, to him was given 
 The task of pulling number seven 
 In Trinity's first famous boat, 
 As, sooth, already someone wrote. 
 For never, and the fact he'll swear, 
 Was it with him once beaten there. 
 Founder of boating on the Cam, 
 By memory taught, he'll say, I am." ^ 
 
 A monument should be erected to Kenelm Digby on 
 the banks of Cam. 
 
 He and his friends often rowed down by the Cam and 
 then the Ouse, dull, muddy streams, into the fens, and, 
 though at first he "had found those regions '•' dreary " 
 after the Thames valley, he came to discover " great 
 beauty in that level ground " above which long flights 
 of geese, or now and then wild swans, would cleave their 
 mysterious way. Once he and his crew rowed their 
 eight- oar all the way down the Cam and the Ouse to 
 the sea, crossed the Wash, and went up the river through 
 the marsh levels to Boston. Even a primitive heavy 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto III. 
 
CAMBRIDGE » 
 
 eight-oar could hardly cross the Wash except on the 
 calmest days, and the crew had to return to Wisbeach 
 walking, while their boat travelled on a cart. In 
 crossing the Wash they saw seals lying on banks of sand. 
 Do seals ever visit these sandbanks now ? 
 
 Like Don Quixote, Kenelm Digby once challenged 
 a lion. A travelhng show came to Cambridge. He 
 entered the cage of a lion named Nero and sat on his 
 back. Nero revolved on him an " awful eye," but did 
 no more. Afterwards, in a northern town, poor Nero, 
 weary of the tricks of men, slew a professional lion- 
 taming damsel, and was shot for the crime. 
 
 Kenelm Digby did not altogether neglect the dry 
 schools of Cambridge, though he could only just acquire 
 the tincture of mathematics necessary for a degree. 
 He took his B.A. degree in 1819. In the year 1820 he 
 won the Norrisian prize essay, and as by rule this had 
 to be printed, he for the first time had the rapture to 
 see himself a book. There is no book hke one's first 
 book. It was " respectfully dedicated to the Rev. 
 Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity." The 
 subject was the " Evidences of the Christian Religion." 
 The essay was not very closely reasoned, but showed, in 
 its quotations, a range of reading very remarkable in 
 one so young. Romilly, the Trinity lecturer, praised 
 Digby for a " metaphysic turn." But Kenelm's great 
 study now was that of books of chivalry and mediaeval 
 history, towards which liis first bent had been given by 
 the heroic poems of Walter Scott. As an undergraduate 
 he resolved to be a knight, and getting into King's 
 College Chapel at nightfall, kept his vigil there till dawn. 
 He had a design to keep a night's vigil in Ely Cathedral 
 also. He had a friend of like humour, George Darby^ 
 
10 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 and at Marklye in Sussex they held a solemn tournament, 
 with ponies for steeds and hop-poles for spears. In 
 imitation of the bold Deloraine they rode one night to 
 Hurstmonceaux Castle, and touched its walls with their 
 lances. One day, as Kenelm was riding by himself, he 
 had a knightly adventure. A pretty damsel of seventeen 
 came down a side lane and said that she had been 
 molested by a felon. Would he let her walk by the side 
 of his horse, and protect her, into Hastings ? In a 
 vacation ramble in the Tyrol he swam by moonhght, 
 in hope of adventure, across a lake to a huge old castle 
 called Sigismundsburg, standing on an island, but found 
 nought but ruins, and heard nothing but owls. On an 
 earUer journey he first saw the castle of Ehrenbreitstein, 
 opposite Coblentz, on the Rhine, and conceived the title 
 of his book, the Broadstone of Honour. 
 
 Kenelm Digby was a chivalric figure, almost seeming 
 born out of his right period of history into the nine- 
 teenth century. He was over six feet in height, 
 strongly built, with dark hair and eyes, a fine fore- 
 head. Edward Fitzgerald, in his beautiful Platonic 
 dialogue Euphranor, of which the scene is laid at 
 Cambridge, thus speaks of him. Something was said 
 of the Broadstone of Honour : 
 
 " And then Euphranor ask'd me ' Did I not remember 
 Digby himself at College — perhaps know him ? ' 
 
 Not t]iat,' I answered, ' but remembered him very 
 well. A grand, swarthy fellow, who might have stept 
 out of the canvas of some knightly portrait in his 
 Father's house — perhaps the living image of one sleeping 
 under some cross-legg'd Effigies in the Church.' " And in 
 the same dialogue the young Alfred Tennyson is called 
 *' A man at all points, Euphranor, — like your Digby— 
 
CAMBRIDGE 11 
 
 of grand proportion and figure, becoming his ancient 
 ^nd honourable race." 
 
 Edward Fitzgerald went up to Trinity in October, 
 1826, and so saw Digby when he was still often at 
 Cambridge, and twenty-eight to thirty years old, or 
 thereabouts, in the prime of young-knightly vigour. 
 Fitzgerald's testimony is worth anything. What a 
 pity that Digby was not one of his friends and corre- 
 spondents in later life ! If so, Digby's memory would 
 have been embalmed in that imperishable record of the 
 Cambridge elite of near a hundred years ago. 
 
 During the years when Kenelm Digby was an under- 
 graduate, and those after he had taken a degree and 
 still made Cambridge his English headquarters, there 
 was at Trinity a remarkable set both of dons and under- 
 graduates. The College has never, perhaps, had a more 
 massively intellectual high table. Wordsworth, the 
 brother of the poet, was Master. Among the younger 
 tutors or lecturers, men a few years older than Digby, 
 were Julius Hare, tutor and classical lecturer at Trinity 
 from 1822 to 1832 ; * William Whewell, who was son 
 of a Lancaster master-carpenter, and became successor 
 to Wordsworth as Master of Trinity ; Adam Sedgwick, 
 the hearty Yorkshireman and ardent geologist ; Thirl- 
 wall, man of immense learning, knowing many languages, 
 the historian and subsequent Bishop of St. David's ; 
 Joseph Romilly, the Registrar of the University ; Hugh 
 Rose, an early High Churchman, and George Peacock. 
 The most stirring and vivacious of these active minds 
 was, perhaps, that of Julius Hare, and Kenelm Digby 
 well knew him in those rooms in the gateway tower of the 
 New Court which look down the " long walk of limes." 
 
 ^ Julius Hare was born 1795, Whewell 1794, Sedgwick 1785. 
 
12 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 The undergraduates of Trinity were also, some of them,, 
 remarkable. The brilliant Etonian, Winthrop Mack- 
 worth Praed, whom Digby knew well, and T. B. Mac- 
 aulay, afterwards the historian, both came to Trinity in 
 1818. Richard Chenevix Trench, afterwards Archbishop 
 of Dublin and poet, went up in 1825, Frederick Maurice 
 in 1823, John Sterhng in 1824, Edward Fitzgerald in 
 1826, Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam in 1828, all 
 younger men than Kenelm Digby ; but they may have 
 met him or known him by sight when, for some ten years 
 after his degree, he was sta}dng a good deal at Cambridge 
 and reading in the Libraries ; and they certainly read, 
 and were much influenced by his Broadstone of Honour^ 
 published first just before they came to Cambridge, and 
 re-published while they were there. It had much to do 
 with the " Young England " movement, which was, 
 mainly, a romantic young Cambridge enterprise, and 
 with Tennyson's early poetry. 
 
 Digby had a special admiration for Whewell. Many 
 years later, Aubrey de Vere, in a letter to the lady who 
 wrote a Memoir of Dr. V/hewell, said : 
 
 " The friendship of Whewell and Kenelm Digby is a 
 thing the more remarkable when one remembers the 
 different characters of the two intellects. But then both 
 these men had in common that greatest of all gifts 
 (greater than any degree of genius), a great heart ; and 
 that, doubtless, was the source of their mutual sym- 
 path}^" 
 
 Digby himself, writing to Aubrey de Vere after 
 Whewell's death in 1860, said : 
 
 " I had reason to regard Whewell as one of the most 
 generous, open-hearted, disinterested and noble-minded 
 
CAMBKIDGE 13 
 
 men that I ever knew. I remember circumstances that 
 oalled for the exercise of each of these rare quaUties, 
 when they were met in a way that would now seem 
 incredible, so fast does the world seem moving from all 
 -ancient standards of goodness and moral grandeur." 
 
 To the same lady, Mrs. Stair Douglas, who wrote the 
 Memoir of Dr. Whewell, Digby wrote this letter in 1873, 
 from Kensington : 
 
 '*' You will easily understand that though my acquaint- 
 ance with Dr. Whewell began very early at Cambridge, 
 it is chiefly of his genial and generous disposition as a 
 friend and companion that I can speak. This anyone 
 could observe who knew him as intimately as I did. 
 Though on my first coming up to College, he consented 
 to have me as a pupil, I can only venture to say of him, 
 as a tutor, that he was always encouraging and indulgent, 
 possessing a singular faculty for reconcihng those whom 
 he instructed to subjects of study for which they would 
 otherwise have felt no inclination. 
 
 " Having formed one of a party of Trinity men who 
 spent a Long Vacation with him in North Wales for the 
 sake of study, at the expiration of the time he refused 
 to take any remuneration from me, saying that he would 
 not be justified in doing so, as I had not paid any atten- 
 tion to his lectures. In fact, I liked him better on 
 horseback than in the professional chair, and he was 
 always, during the intervals of study, scouring the hills 
 with some of us. On one occasion, having walked wdth 
 him from Aber-Menai to the coast of Anglesea, opposite 
 Carnarvon, we expected to find the ferry boat ready 
 to take us across, but, on the contrary, it being very 
 late in the evening, the boat was moored out a hundred 
 feet or more from shore, the ferryman having retired 
 for the night into a Httle hut. On his refusing to turn 
 out to take us across, we asked if he would let us take 
 the boat, if we could get into it. On his assenting, 
 Whewell was the first to dash into the stream and swim 
 
14 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 to the boat. We drew up the anchor and effected the 
 passage safely, while the ferryman raged on the shore 
 and called us all manner of names. 
 
 " The year that he went with me to Normandy ^ 
 visiting all the cathedrals and abbeys, he drew up a 
 table on which you saw at a glance the distinguishing 
 features of the different orders or epochs of Gothic 
 architecture — the Norman, the Early English, the 
 Decorated and the Perpendicular. As a travellings 
 companion he was unrivalled, being always ready to 
 rough it, and take everything in a good-humoured 
 way, and I shall not easily forget his riding with 
 me on the post-horses to visit St. Michel au peril de 
 la mer. 
 
 " During a long friendship I never remember hearing 
 him speak unkindly of anyone behind his back, though 
 he was free enough and bold enough spoken when he 
 had you face to face. He was wonderfully fond of his 
 friends, whom he never forgot. I remember his having 
 made one of them sit for his picture to Lonsdale, and 
 then his having given the portrait which he paid for to 
 a third party, a mutual friend. But it would be endless 
 to tell instances of his generous spirit. And, in fact, it 
 was that no doubt which gained him the friendship 
 of so many who were incompetent to profit by his 
 extraordinary mental powers. He conciliated all but 
 proud, self-conceited people, who did not like to be put 
 down by a word or two from him." 
 
 Whewell, says Digby elsewhere, taught him at Cam- 
 bridge " to distinguish the true bounds of reason." 
 
 Kenelm Digby loved Cambridge, all the more so, 
 perhaps, since no part of his patriotism had been deflected 
 into that of a great public school, and to the end of his 
 life he liked to summon up these memories. In one 
 of the carelessly- written poems of his old age, Ouranogaia, 
 he thus describes this long- vanished society which passed 
 
CAMBRIDGE 15 
 
 clieerfully at this time through those old courts and 
 streets and gardens : 
 
 " Cambridge, Alma Mater ! who but thou 
 Shouldst add an instance from experience now ? 
 While Friendship on this earth can still remain, 
 Turning to thee our search will not be vain. 
 For nature unsophisticated stays 
 With thee to sweeten all thy daily ways. 
 Thy sons are seldom stiffen'd into stone : 
 With thee no formal contradiction grown : 
 For no false, gloomy guides, as elsewhere, try 
 To pass off pride for truth, and manners high ; 
 And vessels out at sea are safe far more 
 Than those, steer'd wrong, left stranded on the shore. 
 Ah ! suffer me of some to tell and sing 
 Whose kindness in times past now aids my wing, 
 
 Thorpe was exact, enthusiastic Hare ; 
 Solid was Kose, and Sedgwick past compare, 
 For honest spirit and for noble mind, 
 The type of manhood, brave, and frank, and kind. 
 Hare, shall I only name him in my song ? 
 Right's fearless champion, pulverizing Wrong, 
 In depth a Plato, for the weakest mild, 
 A guide with Sages, and with youths a child — 
 Hare was a joy you thought could never end, 
 A light for judgments, and for hearts a friend. 
 Wordsworth was learned, timid, for delay, 
 Though conscious life was speeding fast away ; 
 Well skill'd on any coiirse the prize to win, 
 Yet still regretting he could not begin. 
 Valpy was curious, critical, though shy. 
 In mien still lowly, while his heart was high. 
 A classic fancy was to Shadwell given, 
 To Whewell all the knowledge under Heav'n. 
 Famed or obscure, name them altogether- 
 Master or student differ'd not a feather : 
 For Whewell had the virtues of a boy. 
 Though mental strength did oft the proud annoy ; 
 And Romilly's or Peacock's smile would seem 
 E'en to their pupils like true Friendship's dream. 
 
16 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Grave Porter would leave fluxions for his friend ; 
 And Bagshav/'s love with life would only end. 
 Oh ! that I could portray in worthy strain 
 Worsley's bright fancy, and the sense of Bayne, 
 Elmslie, who Fielding's very spirit owns, 
 So tuned to echo all its sweetest tones. 
 Aristophanic Barnes so skill'd to show 
 How Grecian wit in English verse should flow ; 
 Or Sidney Walker, whom Miltonian prose 
 Employ'd translating till liis life's swift close, 
 Timid, distrustful, all whose doubts had grown 
 From mental sickness, as his friends would own. 
 Kemble's good-nature, Churchiirs pluck and fire, 
 Than Talbot's Science some would more admire. 
 Then Darby was the model of a knight ; 
 "WTiatever Glennie said was always right ; 
 Flamank from Eton was a swimmer bold, 
 For whom the Cam in winter was not cold ; 
 With whom the three years I did breast its flow. 
 When ice would float and wild white tempests blow, 
 When fields were flooded (which delighted more), 
 And yellow torrents mined each green Isle's shore ; 
 Ah ! Friendship midst the willows then was warm, 
 While braving icebergs, sleet, or rain, or storm. 
 Poor Hastings ! an Adonis in his youth, 
 Aye practised goodness, piety and truth ; 
 Mansel had pluck'd all flow'rets that e'er grew 
 In English letters to present to you ; 
 Sage Kindersley would play each gentle part ; 
 And Kingdon brought you sunshine in his heart ; 
 Shaw, that from Westminster at first had flown. 
 Had guileless speech pure Innocence might own ; 
 And Murra}^ pensive, skill'd on the guitar. 
 Beyond the earth in mind would wander far ; 
 Bayley was gentle, even while afloat 
 And ruling eight men in our far-famed boat, 
 Of whom two, Blane and Mayo, proved to be 
 Heroes in war, renown'd for chivalry. 
 Phillips, deep-read in mediaeval books, 
 Had Heav'n around him, Heav'n in his looks ; 
 Praed could find merit, be it e'er so low. 
 And e'en on Digby some kind lines bestow ; 
 Spencer — my hand too coarse should fear to paint 
 The English noble, and the Christian saint — 
 
CAMBRIDGE 17 
 
 There was not one whose presence did not bring 
 For dulness Fairyland, for Heav'n a wing." ^ 
 
 A bundle of old Cambridge letters addressed to Digby 
 show that lie was dear to his friends. One writes, " No 
 one is more capable of giving or receiving pleasure than 
 you are." He was invited to become a member of the 
 Cambridge Conversazione Society, usually known as the 
 " Cambridge Apostles," to which so many men of 
 distinction have belonged during the last hundred years, 
 but he seems to have dechned the invitation. 
 
 ^ Ouranogaia, Canto IX. 
 
CHAPTEK II 
 TRAVELS 
 
 " Thus to the Catholic Church is every thoughtful traveller directed 
 by the spectacle of the most lovely spots of the world ; for the 
 sublimest scenes produced by nature or by art, instead of chaining 
 his soul to earth, impel it to rise upward to the eternal beauty ever 
 ancient and ever new, to which all that the Catholic religion ordains is 
 but a passage and a preparation." 
 
 Kenelm Digby, Compitum. 
 
 The young Kenelm Digby was a pilgrim of romance. 
 In his childhood in Ireland, he says, his imagination 
 played in this way : 
 
 " All things were magnified to youth 
 Far grander than they were in truth. 
 Each pond was then a spacious lake ; 
 Each copse for forests you would take. 
 Childhood had Alps before its eyes, 
 Yea, and the bright Italian skies 
 In the least line of distant blue 
 That ever came before its view. 
 Or in the pale and transient gleam 
 Which made it of Ausonia dream." ^ 
 
 He delayed not long to convert his childish dreams into 
 those realities which themselves, in memory, so much 
 resemble dreams. Indeed the old traveller must some- 
 times ask himself what is the difference between, for 
 instance, the Rome or Venice one saw twenty years ago 
 with one's eyes, and the Rome or Venice one has seen 
 in pictures ? 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto IV. 
 18 
 
TRAVELS 19 
 
 While he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and 
 during some yeafs afterwards while he still made Cam- 
 bridge his headquarters, Kenelm used to spend short 
 vacations in rambles over England, on horse or foot, 
 often also visiting the house of Lord Digby, Chief of 
 his Clan, at beautiful Sherborne in Dorsetshire. During 
 long vacations he roved the Continent, sketching, and 
 writing notes of travel. He traversed most of Belgium, 
 France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, only 
 avoiding the Puritan North, the Scandinavian lands, 
 Prussia and "■ cold " BerHn. He wished to see nothing 
 of what he calls the '" soul-sick Prussian nation." In 
 more southern Germany he was moved by what, he 
 says, Madame de Stael rightly called " a certain sweetness 
 in the voice of German women," and he loved the old 
 feudal castles and forests, and the storied and romantic 
 Rhine and Danube. 
 
 Here are some of the recollections of youthful travel 
 contained in the poem of his old age, the Temple of 
 Memory. This book, undeservedly, is known to so very 
 few that I need not apologize for quoting from it at length. 
 
 " In memory the Danube, Rhine, 
 Between their castled heights will shine, 
 There, in the silence of the dawn 
 To sweet Montpellier he is drawn ; 
 He sits beneath the Chateau d'eau. 
 And marks the rising beams that glow, 
 The Pont du Gard, or Nimes is here, 
 The Pope's old Palace will appear, 
 The broad blue waters of the Rhone 
 Reflecting not the sky's pink tone. 
 Then to Vaucluse with rocks so high 
 He hastes, and hears poor Petrarch's sigli. 
 The Isle-Barbe with its ruins fair, 
 Lyons, still pious, will be there. 
 Again these scenes are here that seem 
 
20 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Too bright for aught except a dream, 
 Such is that rich Aosta's vale, 
 So shaded with the olive pale. 
 Unnumbered palaces in sight 
 Made golden by the morning light. 
 The Campanile, graceful, tall, 
 Rough roseate crags that crown them all. 
 Or he sees Garda's clear, blue lake, 
 When o'er it the pale dawn will break. 
 The little coves, the tawny ground, 
 Olives the only green thing found, 
 While azure faint, or deep around 
 The tone prevailing all is found." ^ 
 
 Like Byron, who swam the Hellespont, Digby always 
 
 dwells with affectionate complacency upon his own 
 
 daring feats as a swimmer, from the time he used to 
 
 bathe even on bitter ice-breaking days in the Cam. 
 
 Here he says : 
 
 " Then, as a swimmer rather famed, 
 Again Geneva must be named. 
 Two sites for bathing you see here 
 To him incomparably dear. 
 To whom the Danube, Elbe, and Rhine 
 Were known to yield such swimming fine 
 As did at Cette of perfumed air 
 The blue Mediterranean there. 
 The first is formed by two rocks 
 Which meet the azure billow's shocks. 
 Rising together near the town. 
 From which you can plunge headlong down 
 To ultramarine depths so clear 
 That sapphires will the ground appear ; 
 And he remembers well the day 
 When dark dull clouds above them lay. 
 That, having dived, when he would rise 
 What he thought sky did much surprise. 
 To see the blue then overhead 
 Become so clear since he was sped. 
 Until, emerging from the wave. 
 He found all dark, and dull, and grave, 
 
 * Temple of Memory, Canto IV. 
 
TRAVELS 21 
 
 Just as he'd left it — azure so 
 Reigning but in the depth below. 
 The second site is where the Rhone 
 Has issued from the lake, and grown 
 So rapid that no diver's might 
 Can touch the bottom, though in sight. 
 There by a wooded strip of land 
 "With no return at your command 
 However skilled, and bold, and strong 
 You're wafted like a dart along 
 Until you reach the snow-fed line 
 Of waters where the Arve will shine, 
 Where between heat and cold you steer. 
 The most courageous feeling fear." ^ 
 
 Perhaps these careless lines may serve as a guide to 
 some bold yomig English swimmer of to-day, who would 
 like to try the same sensations. And do they not make 
 the old long to be young again, if it were but for one 
 summer week ? Digby plunged into the formidable 
 Rhine near Drachenfels, and was carried three miles 
 down-stream before he could reach the opposite shore. 
 Does man ever feel more man than when his life depends 
 on his swimming in dangerous places ? At Rome he 
 swam down the Tiber, and the peasants on the bank, 
 looking down on this strange sight, called him a water- 
 rat. His love of swimming was hereditary, for one of his 
 race, an Everard Digby of the sixteenth century (not the 
 Sir Everard executed in connection with the Gunpowder 
 Plot), had written an early treatise on that noble art. 
 
 Here, too, are lines enshrining some memories of Italy 
 
 on one of these Long Vacation rambles : 
 
 " Then too, though on no purpose bent. 
 To Italy he ravished went. 
 To Italy as in a dream 
 Lit with Hyperion's brightest gleam. 
 There Venice saw him dream or rave 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto IV. 
 
22 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 When first lie saw her glassy wave, 
 Or climb to that proud lofty tower 
 To look down at the evening hour 
 Upon those roseate purple isles 
 Stretching so far and bright for miles, 
 Along the Adriatic there, 
 Reflecting that illumined air. 
 Then of Ravenna's silence he 
 As if a worshipper would be, 
 Theodoric's vast tomb he saw, 
 And ancient palaces with awe. 
 But what deprived him of his breath 
 Was to see Classe laid in death ; 
 He knew its woods of pine would prove 
 A haunt for those who Dryden love, 
 Byron, and Ariosto too 
 Whose genius there all poets woo ; 
 But, what he never dreamt, he found 
 That vast Basilica still sound. 
 With its huge tower all alone. 
 Around which spirits seem to moan. 
 Then, need he add, to Rome he went. 
 Though hardly as a pilgrim bent ; 
 There, passing in the street, he'd see 
 The Pope, and down he went with glee, 
 Received his blessing like the rest 
 And felt that kneeling is the best," ^ 
 
 " Ausonia's shores," he says elsewhere, " how can any 
 traveller pass you without being guided rightly on his 
 more important voyage ? earth how^ like to heaven ! 
 Raise thine eyes then with Henry Suso, and see with 
 him the country of the celestial Paradise, to which these 
 churches, convents, and calvaries are directing thee." 
 
 At Rome he specially loved to see the rising sun 
 stream on the portals of the great church of St. John, 
 or the ancient Benedictine convent on the side of the 
 valley at Subiaco, or the view from Tivoli of " the 
 distant rising majesty of great St. Peter's matchless 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto IV. 
 
TRAVELS 23 
 
 P-. . . 
 
 pile " while the setting sun coloured all the plain with 
 
 deep, ruddy hues. And here is a passage in the volume 
 
 of Mores Catholici which appeared in 1833 : ^ 
 
 " With the solemn magnificence of the gothic cathedral 
 most of the northern nations are familiar, but religion 
 knew how to adapt her architecture to the locality 
 and the chmate. There is sanctity and faith, and the 
 deep thoughts of a revering spirit in the mysterious 
 piles of York and Canterbury, but there is something of 
 the beauty of Paradise at those eastern steps of St. John 
 Lateran, when the morning sun gilds the blue distant 
 hills of Tusculum. To form an adequate idea of that 
 perfect loveliness which is derived from the union of 
 noble edifices with the delightful aspect of nature, one 
 must see the dome and church of the Vatican, rising in 
 the midst of gardens with the mountains beyond, from 
 the groves of the Villa Doria Pamphili, or from the 
 bowers of St. Onofrio's holy cloister, or one should see 
 St. John Lateran and the Basilica of the Holy Cross from 
 the vineyards which are among the baths of Titus or of 
 Caracalla, or the tower and domes of St. Mary Major, 
 from the gardens near the gate of St. John." 
 
 And elsewhere he says : 
 
 " Rome alone seems invested with an interest which is 
 present and eternal ; and yet, amid the astonishing 
 concentration of present intellectual greatness there, 
 who, standing upon that awful ground, can avoid think- 
 ing of the past, and yielding to its immortal recollections ? 
 The approach to Rome is precisely what it ought to be. 
 Nothing can be imagined more sublime, more proper to 
 inspire meditation, and to fill the soul with the pro- 
 foundest emotions of wonder for the past and of pious 
 astonishment and reverence for the everlasting Ruler, 
 than a view of the vast and solemn plains of the Cam- 
 pagna, in which the history of the world seems written 
 in ruins, where no object appears but here and there 
 
 1 Vol. i. p. .383. 
 
24 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 some isolated fragment of an arclied aqueduct or of a 
 sepulchre, some aged cork-tree, or some spreading pine, 
 near which shepherds are seen sitting together round a 
 fire at night, keeping watch over their flocks. The 
 thronged and noisy suburbs of a modern capital would 
 belong to an order of ideas to which you would there 
 deny admittance, for they would indicate too much of 
 worldly sohcitude to be in accordance with what naturally 
 fills the breast of the Christian pilgrim as he approaches 
 Rome." 1 
 
 Kenelm Digby was fortunate to have first entered 
 Rome before the age of railways, tram-cars, motor-cars, 
 ofiices, and tenement buildings — all invasions of her 
 ancient calm and brooding dignity. But when he first 
 came there, in a Cambridge Long Vacation, he was not 
 yet a Catholic, and perhaps in this romantic time of 
 youth Rome pleased him less than scenes of wild nature 
 and northern castles and churches. Not till some years 
 later, in 1832 or 1833, " when the sixteenth Gregory sat 
 in Peter's Chair," did he behold at Rome 
 
 " an assembly of the sacred college, which seemed to 
 me the most august, majestic spectacle that could be 
 furnished by humanity, in harmony with its Creator's 
 will. Youth " [his own] " which was solitary, or 
 conversant with the poor, amidst its favourite haunts 
 had escaped from hearing the calumnies of men, and 
 therefore there were no lurking vile delusions to obscure 
 the vision. I marked in that audience the impress of 
 every noble spirit ; I could distinguish the wisdom of a 
 Justinian, the gentleness and goodness of a Rohan, the 
 dignity and platonic majesty of a Micara, the unsated 
 thirst of an Odeschalchi, the frankness and manly 
 sincerity of a Zurla, and the unaffected humihty of him 
 who once ruled the towers of Lul worth. There was in 
 one whose name is dear to Genoa, the air of a Gregory^ 
 
 * Mores Catholici, Book VII., chap. iv. 
 
TKAVELS 25 
 
 of Tours, in another the penetration of a Jerome, in 
 another the simphcity of a Fenelon. These things did 
 attract my soul's regard, and enable me to discover 
 new beauties in history, and to feel the grandeur and 
 tenderness of many scenes, the description of which may 
 seem a rhetorical exaggeration, if one has not, from experi- 
 ence, an internal sense responsive to the writer's word." 
 
 Does the reader like this, or does he prefer the wild 
 and ignorant ravings against priests of poets like Shelley 
 or Swinburne ? Dis-moi ce que tu aimes, et je te dirai 
 ce que tu es. 
 
 Here is another little travel-picture, from Switzerland 
 this time. 
 
 " I remember to what a golden world of bright and 
 peaceful images I used to be transported, when straying 
 of a summer's morning without the walls of Soleure, 
 immediately after the first mass in the churches of the 
 town. There one might walk through dehghtful 
 meadows interspersed with groves like a continual 
 garden, watered with a number of clear rivulets, sparkUng 
 amidst violet beds, studded with beautiful convents, 
 chapels and crosses, with villas and pavilions adjoining. 
 There one heard ascend through the clear air the sweet 
 hquid symphony of the bells of the different monasteries, 
 which are tolled at every elevation of the sacred mysteries, 
 and these too seem to answer one another from hill 
 to hill. There one saw the happy and courteous groups 
 that passed along ; the children, angel-mild, intent 
 upon some office of domestic duty, the cheerful scholar, 
 so anxious to salute the stranger, and the venerable 
 old men, whose smile is like a benediction ; and, if one 
 entered to say a short prayer in the church of the 
 convent, there would be seen at his devotions some 
 noble proprietor of an adjacent castle, who always 
 desired to be at the mass of the community. The 
 humble Httle cloister too is open. See the poor devout 
 prints which cover the walls, and the sweet flowers which 
 
26 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 grow within the Uttle court ; and, through one of the 
 small windows above, you catch a glimpse of some holy 
 friar, who is meditating in his cell. What a peaceful 
 and holy calm reigns around ! the groves and meadows, 
 the gardens and the surrounding liills seem to have 
 imbibed the celestial tranquilhty of the blessed enclosure." 
 " Ah," he says elsewhere, " those morning walks 
 through fairest bowers of Italian shore, those mountain 
 walks o'er moor and snowy Alp, those friends and 
 comrades of our elastic youth, those enchanting moments 
 of inhaling the sweetest loveliness of nature ? Where 
 are they ? Who will give them back to us ? At times 
 men believe they are returning, but they mistake memory 
 for hope. They are gone, yet not for ever perished. 
 He who gave them can restore them ; they were in his 
 mind before we existed, and they will exist there, 
 when we shall have removed hence. Ah ! in heaven we 
 may have again those early walks, fresher than ever the 
 balmy breath of incense-breathing morn 3delded on 
 this earth. In heaven again we may have them all 
 again, lakes, woods, mountains and Ausonian skies, 
 the angels ever bright and fair, the friends and com- 
 panions of our youth." ^ 
 
 Such may also be the consolation of those who 
 
 mourn 
 
 " To leave unseen so many a glorious sight, 
 To leave so many a land unvisited ; 
 To leave so many worthiest books imread ; 
 Unrealised so many visions bright." 
 
 Kenelm Digby's works are full of these charming 
 travel-pictures, and I hope that these few samples will 
 attract to them some readers who like to be taken back 
 into past days which did actually shine before a seeing 
 eye. Digby in these early travels had the advantage 
 that he could not go by trains, for there were none. 
 
 ^ Mores CathoUci, vol. iii. p. 67. 
 
TRAVELS 27 
 
 He travelled on horseback, or on foot, or in post-chaises, 
 or on the top of old diligences, and saw the world both 
 closer and more romantically than the modern traveller 
 by train, or even by motor-car. The old slow road- 
 travelling brought men into much closer touch with 
 each other, and, as Digby says, the chief use of travelling 
 is to teach men to love and understand those of other 
 nations. But he points out that, as, perhaps, an excess 
 in this direction, the risks of amours de voyage were 
 also greater. So many more nights were spent in lonely 
 inns, there was so much more time for lingering con- 
 versation by the road, before the English invented 
 railways, and vast hotels began to rise. " Speed has 
 suppressed adventures," said a French writer of his time, 
 Fromentin. It might chance that in Italy, when 
 travelling with a hired veturino your fellow-passenger 
 might be some one " rather used to a casino," who, 
 needing some distractions by the way, might be inclined 
 to " meddle with your heart," or, of an evening, darts 
 might be shot by eyes across a narrow old street, or at 
 an inn, where some " silent, shy one brought your 
 dinner," a Httle too much tacit sympathy might arise, 
 and just as you mounted your horse to ride away 
 there might be something in a look to cause remorse. 
 
 " 'Tis certain in those ancient and slow times 
 Were things that would not strictly suit these rhymes." ^ 
 
 On the whole, the express train, flying in a night over 
 four hundred miles of France, or Italy, or Germany, is 
 safer, though less romantic. 
 
 " What sweet companions often too by chance 
 He met in England, and no less in France, 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto VII. 
 
'28 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 What invitations sometimes intervening, 
 
 While youth knew not, in truth, their real meaning. 
 
 What opportunity for many pranks, 
 
 And for which others vainer would give thanks." ^ 
 
 Such little adventures, or incipiencies of adventure , 
 make half the charm of solitary roaming in days of 
 youth. Nothing so tempting as amours de voyage, 
 precisely because, by their very nature, they are so 
 transient. Why are beautiful things transient ? is the 
 question put to the deity in Goethe's epigram : 
 " Because only transient things are beautiful," answers- 
 the god. 
 
 Kenelm Digby liked to travel with Httle baggage, and 
 raggedly, so as to save trouble and have unshackled 
 freedom, and also to be more at home with the real people 
 of the lands which he traversed, the humble and poor. 
 Because of this he says in one of his books : 
 
 " I have been received as one of the people by those 
 who loved them best " [priests] " and asked, in the 
 confidence of holy affections, if I knew how to read. 
 Because smiles v/ere excited by my briar-torn clothes, 
 I have been asked to guide belated travellers through 
 dangerous lanes ; for not ' stalking up and down, and 
 wearing gentleman in my cap,' I have been invited 
 civilly to read some lines too pale for delicate eyes, and,. 
 as if my place were waiting at a gate, like some knavish 
 page or horse-boy, to hold the horses of an unknown 
 dame. For being noticed daily as among the first 
 comers, I have been archly asked by a friendly fellow- 
 pupil in the Louvre how I happened to be proprietor 
 of a watch ; and merely because my hands were brown, 
 I have been taken one time for an heir apparent to a 
 poor fisher's boat, and at another for a dusty-footed, 
 wayfaring scholar through the olive grounds of southern 
 
 1 Temple of Memory, Canto VII. 
 
TRAVELS 29 
 
 Prance, and, thougli some may disdain such motives, 
 or even prove incapable of comprehending them, there 
 are others for whom it does not form the least of the 
 attractions of Catholicism to find that it rather approves 
 than condemns the inclination which may be felt by one 
 claiming kindred, through Montacutes and Nevills, with 
 the pale ashes of the House of Lancaster, to be indis- 
 tinguishable from the sons of the poor." ^ 
 
 Digby's dark hue and not at all English appearance 
 came to aid his attire in achieving this object. With all 
 his pleasure in foreign travel, he still loved to roam in 
 shorter holidays, through England. Nowhere, he says, 
 is the stranger so free from police suspicion and sur- 
 veillance, and in no country are there so many pretty 
 and charming girls. 
 
 '' It is young women here who are supreme, 
 Who seem to change life to a summer's dream ; 
 'Tis not the hedge or garden here that shows 
 Most the tall lily or the fragrant rose, 
 The sweet carnation, or the blooming thorn, 
 For like a flower here each girl seems born." ^ 
 
 There is something, he says, in English country towns, 
 the walks by rivers, across fields, through woods, over 
 downs, something especially in the footpaths and stiles, 
 which he had never found outside England ; and he 
 thought that this " something " lies in the connection of 
 these things with young women of the less assuming and 
 more simple and natural classes, who, in this country, 
 move in freedom which is cheerful and also usually 
 innocent. Certainly an English stile calls up the shy 
 vision of an English girl. He found abroad much that 
 was grander and more picturesque and interesting, but 
 nothing like " our sweet English homes." However, 
 he thought that every race should be seen in its own 
 
 ^ Compitum, vol. i. p. 276. ^ Temple of Memory, Canto V. 
 
30 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 surroundings, the English amid corn or hops, and not 
 
 amid the vineyards and olive-gardens of the South, the 
 
 Spaniard or the Italian in their own, and not in an 
 
 EngUsh landscape. 
 
 It happened that in the second week of September 
 
 1824, Kenelm Digby was driving homeward from a 
 
 southern tour on a mail coach to Paris. At Besan^on, 
 
 early in the morning, he heard that Louis XVIII . was 
 
 very ill, and at Dijon that he was in danger. At 
 
 Troyes, next morning, there was rumour that the king 
 
 was dead, and at Provins, in the evening, it was said 
 
 that the Paris theatres had been closed. 
 
 " 'Twas the last 
 They heard that night ; for onwards then they passed 
 While risen high the moon hung pale and bright, 
 Which into Paris would their last stage light. 
 He always thought it solemn drawing near 
 To any capital ; and so 'twas here. 
 The Mail, so certain in its steady flight, 
 Seemed to bring laws of nature to his sight, 
 As if from nothing else could ever be 
 Such sure and constant regularity ; 
 But never felt he this impression more 
 Than now, as he can read in memory's store. 
 You know those endless avenues which shade 
 All roads to Paris. Theirs that night was made 
 More solemn still when they at times were passed 
 By some express who galloped by them fast, 
 No other signs of life in all around, 
 Such solitude upon the road was found, 
 By trees o'ershadowed, with vast plains in sight, 
 And scattered hamlets clear in lunar light. 
 In mind he wandered o'er the landscape there 
 And felt some change was pending in the air, 
 While as he gazed upon the moon so high. 
 He thought of Louis, then about to die, 
 For, after all, howe'er we spend our breath, 
 There's more than common in a monarch's death. 
 Arrived at last, the king was not yet dead, 
 But the last prayers around him had been said, 
 
TRAVELS 31 
 
 While he, expecting death, did calmly lie, 
 Evincing great and noble constancy." ^ 
 
 Louis died at four in the morning of September 15th, 
 the last of the long line of kings of France who was to 
 die in his palace. His body lay in state for two days 
 at the Tuileries, and the funeral at St. Denis was on 
 the 23rd. 
 
 Digby, as the king lay dying, found crowds of people 
 of all classes in prayer at Notre Dame and St. Roch. 
 The morning of the 15th, at six, he saw King Charles X. 
 driving out from the Palace Court to St. Cloud. When 
 the Grand Almoner approached to hear the last con- 
 fession, the dying king had turned to his brother and 
 said, with a dignity worthy of Louis XIV., " My brother, 
 you have affairs which claim your presence, I also have 
 duties to fulfil." 
 
 Then Digby heard all the solemn bells of Paris tolling, 
 the Bourdon of Notre Dame deep-sounding above them 
 all ; and on the 23rd he witnessed the procession, last in 
 the long history of the kings of France, across the plain 
 to St. Denis, according to ancient ceremonial, some 
 hundred poor men, monastically hooded, filing by, among 
 the rest, with tapers. The full brief bloom of the 
 pleasant and fruitful Restoration period was now over. 
 
 Six years later, Kenelm Digby was passing the 
 summer working at his great book. Mores Catholici, 
 in a lodging in the Rue Crenelle at St. Germain, near 
 Paris, and often came in, chiefly engaged in his favourite 
 pastime of old-book hunting along the " Quais." At 
 that time, even more than now, Paris, after so many 
 libraries of chateaux and monasteries had been dispersed 
 in the Revolution, was the earthly paradise of this 
 
 ^ Temple of Meviory, Canto VII. 
 
32 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 kind of sportsman, and the centre was the great 
 bookshop of the famous Merhn. 
 
 " With what enthusiasm," says Digby, " used I to 
 stride along those intricate alleys from the quay of 
 St. Augustine to the street of straw, immortaUzed by 
 Dante . . . streets that at another time at least seemed, 
 and in many instances with truth, to preserve, as in a 
 last asylum, the homely ways and serene thoughts of 
 poetic and scholastic times, where one house had its 
 store of knightly romances, so costly and so curious, 
 another its books, in binding emblazoned mth the 
 arms of noble owners, of falconry and hunting, another 
 its monastic philosophers and poets, in sohd boards with 
 clasps of iron, another its venerable vellum-bound 
 chronicles, another its works of forest Uterature." ^ 
 
 Then Digby would carry off some prize and make his 
 first dip into it under the trees in the Tuileries gardens, 
 or in the Luxembourg gardens, frequented by students 
 and their pretty friends, and think that this would be 
 an addition, some day, to a house he would have in 
 England. Alas ! the utilitarian rage of the Third 
 RepubHc for broad, straight, dull avenues, such as 
 the Rue Raspail, has almost destroyed that " Latin 
 country " with its " narrow, picturesque streets, where, 
 in so many sunny vine-clad courts, and up so many 
 antique turrets, and within so many homes of almost 
 cloistral seclusion, reigned still [in Digby's Paris days], 
 or might be thought to reign, the manners and habits 
 of the ' menagier de Paris,' or of the middle classes in 
 the days of St. Louis." 
 
 Wednesday, July 27th, 1830, was not a day favourable 
 to the calm pursuit of book-himting in the jpays Latin. 
 The day had been too intensely hot to do anything, and 
 
 1 Evenings on the Thames, chap. xii. 
 
TRAVELS 33 
 
 book-hunting, which involves long standing about, is 
 fatiguing. Digby spent most of it in the cool shades 
 of St. Germain, and towards evening, tired of reading 
 and note-taking, came in to Paris, about sunset, to 
 ■drink coffee and look at the newspapers, since politics 
 just then were rather exciting. The sky was still 
 *' pale with golden light " when he entered the cafe of 
 Desmarcs, an aristocratic resort of men of the ancient 
 regime kind. A waiter who knew him whispered, 
 *' Monsieur, take care to go round the Palais Royal and 
 not into it, on tire sur le peuple." The " three days " 
 had begun. Digby watched the fray with caution. He 
 heard the firing and saw many dead bodies floating 
 down the Seine those days. Digby would not wear the 
 tricolour in the streets, though there was danger in not 
 doing so. His sympathies were with the fallen Mon- 
 archy, not with the democratic Revolution, and when 
 he returned to London he found himself out of touch 
 with all the journals which said that these were glorious 
 days for France. No wonder, since the immediate 
 cause of the movement was the attempt by the Govern- 
 ment of Charles X. to curb the license of the press. 
 Besides, the mass of the English always do like, of all 
 things, to see the fall of a foreign throne, for this, more 
 than anything else, confirms them in the good opinion 
 which they have of the excellence of their own popular 
 institutions, and, sometimes, of their compromise in 
 religion, their moderate and rational Church. They 
 look complacently, as it were, from their solid-seeming 
 shore upon ships wrecked by ocean storms. This 
 attitude was especially characteristic of our happy and 
 prosperous age of Queen Victoria, after the Reform Bill 
 had made our shore more sohd-seeming than ever. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 CONVERSION TO THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 " But for you these difficulties are removed ; the night is past ,' 
 a bright and everlasting day has dawned ; there is an end of wander- 
 ing and uncertainty, of doubt and disputation. All the articles of 
 faith and all the truths of revelation are immoveably and definitely 
 settled." Kenelm DiGBY, Broadstone of Honour, " Morus." 
 
 At the end of the year 1825 Kenelm Digby was received 
 into the CathoUc, ApostoUc, and Roman Church. He 
 relates the story of his spiritual voyage in the eleventh 
 canto of his poem called The Temple of Memory. 
 
 Digby's immediate paternal family was intensely 
 Protestant, Anglo-Irish Protestant, and had been in 
 the past closely connected with the good things of the 
 Irish ecclesiastical Establishment. Whence came his 
 own disposition ? Perhaps through his Devonshire- 
 descended mother, of whom so little is known ; and then, 
 his boyish mind, like that of so many others, was turned 
 in a Catholic direction by the chivalrous poems of Walter 
 Scott, and other writers of the inflowing romantic tide. 
 To read The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and at the same 
 time to be living on Irish soil but among Irish Protes- 
 tants, might well produce in an imaginative and romantic 
 youth a ground fit for the reception of CathoUc doctrine 
 and ritual. 
 
 At school, at Petersham by the soft gliding Thames, as 
 it happened, Kenelm Digby came across two learned 
 
 34 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 35 
 
 elderly Catholic gentlemen, Mr. Charles Butler and 
 Sir Henry Englefield.^ They spoke mainly of classic 
 themes, Homer and Virgil, never about rehgious ques- 
 tions ; but the boy was impressed by a certain tone 
 and reserve and mysterious stamp about them. Charles 
 Butler was a man of much worth. He was born in 
 1750, so that he was over sixty when the boy Kenelm 
 came across him. He was nephew of the learned 
 Alban Butler, who wrote the Lives of the Saints. He 
 had been educated at a CathoUc school near London 
 and afterwards at the Enghsh College at Douai. He 
 became a conveyancing draftsman and consultant at 
 Lincoln's Inn, and obtained a large practice. The Act 
 of 1791 graciously allowed Cathohcs to be called to the 
 Bar without denying the doctrine of Transubstantiation, 
 the Sacrifice of the Mass, and Invocation of the Blessed 
 Virgin and the Saints ; and Butler took advantage of 
 this, and at last became a King's Counsel and Bencher 
 of Lincoln's Inn. He was a Liberal in politics, following 
 with moderation the ideas of Fox, and strongly " Galli- 
 can " in church views, being a member of the Cis- Alpine 
 Club estabUshed in 1792, and, at one time, on strained 
 terms with the Vicars-ApostoHc, especially Dr. Milner. 
 He was, all the same, a thorough Cathohc of the 
 school of Bossuet, and was a strong advocate in defence 
 of the Church and its doctrines, and had a controversy 
 upon these subjects with that bitter anti-Roman, the 
 writer Robert Southey, of the Lakes. Butler wrote 
 nearly fifty books and pamphlets on various legal and 
 religious-historical matters. He said that he got through 
 
 ^ Sir Henry Englefield, Bt., 1752-1822, wrote much on scientific and 
 other subjects, also in defence of the Church. Charles Fox said that he 
 " never left his company uninstructed." 
 
36 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 so much work in addition to his large conveyancing 
 practice by following these maxims — worth record : 
 
 " Very early rising, a systematic division of my time, 
 abstinence from all company, and from all diversions 
 not Ukely to amuse me liighly, and from reading, writing, 
 or even thinking on modern party politics, and above all, 
 never permitting a bit or scrap of time to be unemployed, 
 have supplied me with an abundance of literary hours. 
 My hterary acquisitions are principally owing to the 
 rigid observation of four rules, to direct my attention 
 to one literary object only at a time, to read the best 
 book on it, consulting others as little as possible ; when 
 the subject was contentious to read the best book on 
 each side ; to find out men of information, and, when in 
 their society, to listen, not to talk." 
 
 Charles Butler died in 1832, at the age of eighty-two. 
 No wonder that a mind so solidly fortified and stored 
 had its effect upon the impressionable boy, even though 
 the talk was not directly of religion, for thought can pass 
 without speech. 
 
 Thus Kenelm went to Cambridge, influenced already, 
 without knowing it, in the direction of the Centre, and 
 after he was established there he began to travel abroad 
 in Long Vacations. Never, he says, can he forget the 
 " visions in his soul " when he first entered a Catholic 
 church beyond the sea, for he had never entered one 
 in Ireland or England, and saw the hghted altars, the 
 kneeling figures. But when he wrote this in his old age 
 he perhaps over-estimated the effect which this first 
 impression had immediately made, although it was 
 considerable. In his first Long Vacation journey, 
 Digby, with some friends, landed at Ostend, whence 
 they travelled through Belgium up the Rhine, through 
 Switzerland to the Italian Lakes, and back by the 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 37 
 
 Simplon, Genoa, Lyons and Paris. A travel journal 
 of his, still extant in MS., and adorned with numerous 
 sketches, relates this voyage. It was at Ostend that 
 Kenelm Digby, then about eighteen or nineteen, entered 
 a CathoUc church for the first of thousands of times. 
 The journal says : 
 
 " On entering this Church we had our first view of 
 Popish superstition. There were persons at their devo- 
 tions and a dead silence reigned around. The effect was 
 imposing. The women, wearing black hoods, were 
 kneeling before the altars. The men opened their arms 
 and grasped their hands with fervour. One knelt by 
 himself in a corner praying very earnestly to some thin 
 wax candles on which his eyes were rivetted." 
 
 At Ghent he says : 
 
 " In all these churches one is particularly struck 
 mth the attention and propriety of the people present. 
 Indeed I do not believe that there is a man in 
 existence who would not be struck with reverence on 
 entering these solemn places, where, if we except the 
 service and operations of the priests, there is every- 
 thing in character with the awful purpose to which 
 the place is dedicated. Undoubtedly the attention of 
 the people is sometimes observed when an Englishman 
 of the most sober disposition can hardly refrain from 
 laughter. For instance, when the priests, like so many 
 conjurors, are going through their incomprehensible 
 operations before the altar. What can be more ridiculous 
 than to see these grave persons turning themselves 
 about like so many idiots, etc. . . . Yet during all this 
 time there is not a single individual to be observed 
 either inattentive or behaving irreverently. To a simple, 
 honest Englishman this seems quite a paradox. He is 
 told and he believes that the rehgion of his country is 
 infinitely more pure and sublime, and yet he knows that 
 the behaviour of the people in the English churches is 
 
38 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 as strongly characteristic of levity and inattention, as 
 that of these persons is of reverence and decorum. A 
 little philosophy will remove this mystery by teaching 
 him that there is a natural tendency in the human mind 
 to love error rather than truth." 
 
 This shallow philosophy was much affected by Enghsh 
 writers of a hundred and more years ago, even by a man 
 so distinguished as Archbishop Whateley, but Digby 
 was soon to learn to reason more correctly, from effect 
 to cause. At present, however, he was in the mental 
 condition of the usual Protestant youth who first comes 
 across the CathoHc religion. At Paris, in the same tour, 
 Digby inserts in his journal a plea for Voltaire and 
 Rousseau. 
 
 " No characters are more deserving of pity. They 
 were men of vast genius and of powerful understandings ; 
 they were disgusted with the cruelty, the injustice, and 
 cold-blooded corruption of their own Church, and 
 knowing no other Christianity but what was united with 
 Popedom, indulgences, and all the train of wickedness 
 and folUes attached to the system, in the warmth of 
 their zeal they were nearly renouncing it all. But let 
 no man judge them for what they thought ; but rather 
 let everybody be thankful who has been born under 
 different circumstances, and who cannot help seeing 
 things under a different point of view." 
 
 Kenelm forgot that Rousseau, at least, had not been 
 born and bred a Papist. He saw King Louis XVHI. at 
 Mass in the Tuileries Chapel in full state. " Never 
 was there a greater compUcation of folly." After Mass 
 he saw the old King " waddHng " before a rather chilly 
 pubhc across the Palace garden, and thought of the 
 different scene when Napoleon returned from Elba and 
 was literally borne into the Palace on the shoulders 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 39 
 
 of the people. " Where," asks Digby, " is the man who 
 would not gladly see the continuance of those days 
 [of Napoleon] rather than the return of that dark 
 empire when Priests held a dominion over the minds 
 and bodies of men, which kept all Europe in ignorance 
 and misery, which was the disgrace of Christianity, and 
 the scourge of human kind ? " Yet, notwithstanding 
 this condemnation by his young mind, those kneeling 
 figures had made an ineffaceable and operative impres- 
 sion. In his old-age poem, The Temple of Memory, he 
 says that he asked himself, " Is this what men mean 
 when they talk of prayer ? " In his travels during 
 the next few years this first impression of the reality of 
 the Catholic cult was deepened, especially by what he saw 
 in the monasteries of Austria and Switzerland and Italy, 
 while his ignorance was enlightened and prejudice re- 
 moved by reading and conversation, especially in France. 
 
 As to these first impressions made by the cult, the 
 novelty and the contrast was obviously far greater then 
 than it would be now to one accustomed - to modern 
 " high " ritual in Anglican churches. For this reason 
 modern conversions rest upon a deeper and sounder 
 and more permanent basis than some of the early ones. 
 A man must now feel — " I have all the cult in many 
 Anglican churches that I could have in Catholic churches, 
 and yet ..." 
 
 Kenelm was now led by impressions in further travels 
 a^broad, and by his reading, in the Catholic direction. 
 He was now writing his Broadstone of Honour, so that 
 his fine of reading can be easily traced. He studied 
 in Trinity College Library St. Augustine and Bossuet, 
 who teach as to the Church the same thing, yet, for a 
 space, he was still held enchanted by the spell of College 
 
40 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 chapels. The strength of the Church of England he& 
 in music. Could he ever resolve, he says, to cease to 
 hear at evening prayer the soft " Lighten our darkness," 
 or on chill Advent mornings the " Now in this our time 
 of mortal life " ? Nothing, certainly, is more beautiful 
 than sounds like these in some historic chapel like 
 King's at Cambridge, or St. Mary's at Eton, or St, 
 George's at Windsor. These services seem to suit such 
 buildings, built on the eve of the Renaissance, or 
 St. Paul's Cathedral in London, better than they suit 
 mediaeval cathedrals. Like the Renaissance archi- 
 tecture, the good old Anglican service is clear-cut, 
 distinct, reasonable, restrained and temperate — the 
 triumph of common sense over imagination. 
 
 " What," Digby now asked himself, " did the learned 
 men of Cambridge believe ? " The great teacher of 
 religious philosophy at Trinity was then Julius Hare. 
 He taught his young hearers to distrust the guidance of 
 reason, pure and simple, la raison raisonnante, to despise 
 Locke and Paley, and to deem Bishop Burnet, the 
 historian of the English Reformation, " a vulgar fool." 
 Foreign Catholic writers, it seemed, were, according 
 to Julius Hare, chiefly to be honoured, such as the 
 French authors de Bonald and the ultramontane Count 
 de Maistre, and the German authors Stolberg, F. Schlegel, 
 Goerres, Hurter, Vogt. Julius Hare lent to Kenelm 
 German books inspired by the Cathohc Faith in its new 
 romantic guise. Yet, to the dismay of the ardent 
 Kenelm, Julius Hare would to the last call Luther 
 " that god-like man." 
 
 " 1 
 
 ^ Hare used to say that it was from Luther he learned to " throw inkpots 
 at the Devil." An excellent account of him is given by Augustus Hare in 
 Memorials of a Quiet Life. 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 41 
 
 Kenelm Digby also read histories of the Reformation 
 which gave original documents, especially the voluminous 
 records of that honest old Protestant, Strype, who lived 
 not far from the period and shows things as they really 
 were. It seemed to Digby that the leading motives of 
 the men who broke with Rome and made essential 
 changes in the ancient doctrines and ritual of religion 
 in England were of the most material and secular kind, 
 and that they were a minority forcing their policy upon 
 a mostly reluctant people who had no real voice in the 
 matter, and lost by the changes then made. A most 
 learned and thorough English historian, not himself a 
 Catholic, Dr. Gardiner, has written : 
 
 " That Rome exercised her spiritual power by the 
 willing obedience of Englishmen in general, and that 
 they regarded it as a really wholesome power, even for 
 the control.it exercised over secular tyranny, is a fact 
 which it requires no very intimate knowledge of early 
 English literature to bring home to us. . . . It was only 
 after an able and despotic king had proved himself 
 stronger than the spiritual power of Rome that the 
 people of England were divorced from their Roman 
 allegiance, and there is abundant evidence that they 
 were divorced from it at first against their will." 
 
 First came the breach, the act of will, and then, to 
 justify it, theories arose about the Church. And these 
 theories have ever since been in a Protean process of 
 perpetual change and variation, in accordance with the 
 changing humours of various times. 
 
 In addition to the history there was the immense 
 attraction of Rome for a chivalrous spirit and a very 
 human heart. Kenelm Digby knew by instinct that 
 the ancient religion of his forefathers would give him 
 the something, at once divine and universally human, 
 
42 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 for which his soul craved. He loved all the rites of the 
 Catholic Church, as he had seen them abroad, and felt 
 at one with her true sons and daughters in all lands 
 and of all races and of all social orders. By the year 
 1823 he was already in heart a convinced Catholic. 
 
 At Paris— in the autumn of 1825 — he asked an aged 
 friend, M. Chevalier, to recommend him some priest 
 who would receive him. His friend advised him to go 
 to a learned divine of the Sorbonne, who met him, when 
 he learned his intention, " with blank dismay." Monsieur 
 was too young, said the priest ; what would his relatives 
 say ? He would like to know that first. Kenelm was 
 too young, imprudent and romantic ; besides, said the 
 priest, living at the Sorbonne, he did not wish to mix 
 himself in such affairs, and, enfin, he said, pointing 
 to a loaded table, he had a great deal of proof-correcting 
 to do, and no time, just then. Let his young friend 
 go home and consult his family. If he then should 
 wish to proceed with his design he would, no doubt, 
 find in England som.e one more skilled to deal -with things 
 of this kind. ''Adieu, Monsieur, au revoir." 
 
 Returning to England after this discouraging begin- 
 ning, Kenelm heard of a priest who lived in Castle 
 Street, in the depths of London, and, without delay, 
 went from Cambridge to find him. This priest received 
 him very drily, asked where he was staying in town, 
 and advised him to repair to another priest who lived 
 in the slums of Westminster. Kenelm sought him, but 
 found him not at home that day, nor the next. He 
 then called on the lawyer, Charles Butler, whom he had 
 known in Petersham days. Mr. Butler gave him a 
 letter to Father Scott, of the Society of Jesus, who, at 
 last, guided him, through the narrow door where one 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 43 
 
 must bend one's head, into the internal space and 
 freedom of the eternal and universal CathoHc Church. 
 Kenelm Digby, in his later book, Compitum, gives a 
 noble description of this Father : 
 
 " From his deep, practical knowledge of the world 
 statesmen might have learned wisdom of government, 
 while from his daily exercises of piety children could 
 learn the simpHcity which is their sweetest attribute. 
 Deficient in no branch of human learning, yielding to 
 no one in the depth of his admiration for all that belongs 
 to the highest mysticism, he retained what is most 
 difficult, as Tacitus says, and perhaps as the greatest of 
 Christian philosophers would also admit, ex sapientia 
 modum." 
 
 After this, Digby mostly Hved at Cambridge, when not 
 :abroad, for some years, reading in the Hbraries books 
 not often in modern days disturbed from their secular 
 repose, and decanting their contents into volumes of 
 his own making. The authorities of Trinity College 
 kindly allowed him for some time to have rooms in 
 Bishop's Hostel, just south of the Great Court. They 
 w^ere tolerant and wide-minded men. One day the 
 famous geologist, Adam Sedgwick, sent his " grave-faced 
 gjT^ " to ask Mr. Digby to step across to his rooms after 
 dinner. Kenelm went in some alarm, asking himself, 
 *' What can the great Sedgwick have to say to me ? " 
 Sedgwick had some books of divinity on his table, and 
 a.s Kenelm entered, was turning over the leaves of a 
 volume of Barrow. He laughed, and remarked that he 
 did not think that these Church of England writers 
 knew what they wished to say, and that Barrow only 
 seemed to irritate himself when writing on the power 
 of the keys. Sedgwick then replaced that learned 
 a-uthor on the shelf and said : 
 
44 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 " Perhaps you will laugh when you know for what 
 a small reason I have sent for you. You know that 
 some people blame me — I need not say who they are — 
 because I like to greet anyone I meet without any regard 
 to their creed. Well, I have been all this Long Vacation 
 in Styria and Carinthia, where I have seen CathoHc 
 populations, and I swear ! I don't care what our Don& 
 say, believe me, that never, never, did I see a people 
 I liked better or whom I would rather remember, as 
 the best of mankind. Of course I know very well what 
 you are now, and I thought you would like to hear me 
 tell you this, as it was sure to please you. So come 
 again, and soon." 
 
 This little episode must have been in the autumn 
 term of 1829, for the Life of Adam Sedgwick shows that 
 his geological tour in those regions was in the Long^ 
 Vacation of that year. In a letter to a friend, writteu 
 on September 14th, 1829, from Gmunden, near Salzburg, 
 Sedgwick says that Styria is " a most lovely country^ 
 peopled by a most beautiful race, who are simple and 
 kind-hearted beyond everything I have ever seen." 
 
 Not only Sedgwick, but all the Trinity Dons were 
 kind, it seems, to Digby, in spite of his strange lapse. 
 He says the real reason was that they looked on hiim 
 as an eccentric youth, and that such a change, hardly 
 ever heard of then, some years before the Oxford Move- 
 ment began, seemed to them " a kind of mad-cap- 
 trait " so strange and new that it was almost pleasing. 
 He would have few imitators, they said, if any. " Clearly 
 it was chivalry that led him, and there's not much to fear 
 now from that taste." AVhewell, he says, consistent 
 throughout, continued to be "a dear and constant 
 friend" till his death, the most indulgent of all. No 
 doubt, after the Oxford Tracts began to circulate, the 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 45 
 
 Cambridge authorities would not have been quite so 
 placid ; yet toleration has always been a note of Cam- 
 bridge. Sobered perhaps by the calm and abstract pur- 
 suit of mathematics and science, Cambridge has never 
 been so much under the influence of mirage as Oxford. 
 
 Then, again, men like Whewell, Sedgwick, Romilly, 
 Julius Hare, were all Liberals in religion and politics, 
 and all, in opposition to the Tory prejudice, still so strong 
 at both Universities, were supporters of the cause of 
 CathoHc Emancipation. Thirty years of arguments 
 in this cause had disposed the Whigs to find, at any rate, 
 harmless virtues in the Catholics whose cause, though 
 not at all for Catholic or religious reasons, they had 
 espoused. Digby, throughout life, preferred these kindly 
 and genuine Protestants to men of the Oxford Tractarian 
 School, whom he thought dangerous, though well- 
 meaning, mis-leaders, nor did he ever share the admira- 
 tion of his friend Ambrose Phillips de Lisle for these last, 
 or his enthusiastic hopes for " corporate reunion." He 
 thought that, as he says, 
 
 " Vessels out at sea are safe far more 
 Than those, steered wrong, left stranded on the shore ; " 
 
 and that the Liberal Cambridge Protestant, sailing 
 cheerfully on the unfathomed deep, was, on this prin- 
 ciple, safer than the Oxford Tractarian, driven by the 
 Catholic wind on to the rocks of the Roman shore. 
 Kenelm Digby had so few near kinsfolk, and saw so 
 little of these, since they lived in Ireland, that he was 
 not much troubled by family reprehension. A half- 
 brother of his, Benjamin Digby, a good deal older, 
 who was a Rector, and even an Archdeacon in the 
 Irish Church, a very pious clergyman of Calvinistic 
 views, who thought (he wrote) that " Romanism was 
 
46 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 nothing but Pelagianism," expressed vast surprise that 
 Kenelm could do a thing so obviously ridiculous and 
 erroneous and contrary to Scripture, but afterwards, as 
 before, maintained an affectionate correspondence with 
 his erring junior. 
 
 After October 1826 Kenelm Digby had for two years 
 one young Catholic friend " ensconced in Nevill's Court,'* 
 in Trinity, who had a store of precious books bound in 
 white vellum, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish. He was 
 nine years younger than Kenelm, of angelic character 
 and fervent rehgious zeal, and many were attracted 
 to resort to his rooms. A Trinity tutor, seeing them 
 together one day, said, " I wish I could make a third 
 with you two." This young friend was Ambrose Lisle 
 March Phillips, who afterwards took the name of 
 PhilUps de Lisle, of Garendon and Grace Dieu in 
 Leicestershire. He became a Catholic at fifteen, on 
 21st December, 1825, and went up to Cambridge at the 
 same time as Edward Fitzgerald in October 1826. He 
 and Kenelm Digby were then probably the only Catholics 
 at Cambridge. In a letter to Ambrose on 9th February, 
 1827, Bishop Poynter, then Vicar- ApostoUc of the 
 London district, wrote : "I am glad that you have 
 such an excellent companion in Trinity College as Mr. 
 Digby. He has been so good as to send me the second 
 edition of Morus, which I open when I have a leisure 
 moment, and read with pleasure." In another letter 
 the Bishop said : " Pray give my best compliments 
 and wishes to Mr. Digby, when you write to him. You 
 cannot cultivate a more valuable correspondence than 
 that which you hold with him." * 
 
 The conversion of another distinguished Cambridge 
 
 ^ Life of Ambrose Phillips de Lisle. 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 47 
 
 man, the Hon. and Rev. George Spencer, afterwards 
 known as Father Ignatius of St. Paul, the Passionist, 
 did not take place until 1830. " Holy Spencer," he is 
 called by Digby in The Temple of Memory. He was 
 the son of the second Earl Spencer. He was almost 
 exactly the same age as Digby, for he was born in 1799, 
 and after Eton, came up to Trinity College, Cambridge, 
 in 1817. Digby seems to have known him only slightly 
 at Cambridge, where Spencer belonged, though re- 
 proached for it by his own conscience, to the " smart 
 set." Afterwards, Spencer took orders in the Church 
 of England, and in 1830, under the influence partly of 
 foreign travel and partly of Ambrose de Lisle, if indeed 
 one can ascribe these things to such influences as 
 secondary causes, he became a Catholic. He became 
 a Passionist Father, and after a holy and laborious Ufe, 
 died in 1864, twelve years before the death of de Lisle in 
 1878, and sixteen before that of Kenelm Digby in 1880. 
 These three Cambridge men, Digby, de Lisle and 
 Spencer, a trinity of Trinity, all became Catholics before 
 the Oxford Movement had begun. Each of them 
 contributed his share to the return towards Catholic 
 principles which brought many to the Chair of St. 
 Peter, and brought far more to the half-way shelter 
 which began to arise within the Anghcan Church. 
 Kenelm Digby contributed to this by his writings, 
 Ambrose de Lisle by his enthusiastic propaganda in 
 action, and Spencer by his personal influence. Thus 
 the Catholic movement began, as a matter of fact, not 
 at Oxford, but in the more decidedly Protestant Univer- 
 sity of Cambridge. The reason, perhaps, is that 
 Cambridge was less isolated than Oxford then was in 
 narrow self-esteem, and more open to Continental 
 
48 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 influences. Thus it was sooner touched by the great 
 wave of the romantic return to the mediaeval spirit, 
 which was sweeping over Germany and even France, 
 as a reaction against the strictly classical spirit of the 
 French Revolution and the Napoleonic period. Chateau- 
 briand, in France, was the first to launch his gallant 
 boat upon the new tide. But the movement came 
 about chiefly from the revival of the ancient and 
 romantic national spirit of Germany against the classical 
 spirit of the French Revolution culminating in Napoleon, 
 and since England was for twenty years in a virtual 
 and often also fighting alliance with Germanic powers, 
 the English had for a time more sympathy with Teuton 
 ideas than they ever have had before, except, perhaps, 
 in Luther's time, or certainly since. One can see this 
 in the poems and ballads of Walter Scott, the writings 
 of Coleridge, and in the early writings of a near con- 
 temporary of Digby's, Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 Although the movement of return to Rome thus began 
 at Cambridge, it has not been so prolific in results at 
 that University as in the more emotional Oxford. Mr. 
 Gordon- Gorman, in his work called Converts to Rome, 
 reckons that in the sixty years ending in 1910 Oxford 
 had given 586 converts and Cambridge 346, not a large 
 number, certainly, out of the thousands who passed 
 through the two Universities in that period. Of the 
 346 Cambridge converts 102 were Trinity men, a larger 
 number than produced by any college in either Uni- 
 versity. As a nursery of converts to the Catholic Faith, 
 Trinity has held, among colleges, the same dominant 
 position as Eton among public schools. This is probably 
 due not only to the fact that Trinity is, in numbers, the 
 greatest of colleges and Eton of schools, but also to 
 
CONVEESION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 49 
 
 the fact that a larger, serener and more spacious moral 
 and intellectual atmosphere prevails in these two great 
 institutions than in any others, favourable to an open, 
 noble and generous view of history and religion. 
 
 When Digby became a Catholic, English Catholics 
 still were disqualified from sitting in Parliament. It 
 was not long since they had received more than the 
 barest toleration in the practice of their rehgion. Acts 
 of Parliament had been directed against them in every 
 reign, except that of James II., from Ehzabeth till 
 George II. As Charles Fox said in a speech in 1791 of 
 this system : 
 
 " Such persecution and oppression as existed in 
 England did not exist in any country. In all the King 
 of Prussia's dominions universal toleration prevailed, 
 in the united states of Holland, in the united states of 
 America, and in France there was likewise to be found 
 universal toleration. . . . Yet, although toleration fully 
 obtained in a monarchical and in an aristocratical 
 government, as well as in two democracies, under our 
 boasted constitution it was narrowed and confined in 
 shackles disgraceful to humanity." 
 
 The Act of 1791 provided {inter alia) that no person 
 who took a certain oath with regard to any papal claims 
 to temporal jurisdiction in England (which Catholics 
 could take, though not in the opinion of all of them) 
 should any longer be liable to prosecution, under a 
 number of previous Acts, for not attending the parish 
 church, or keeping servants who did not attend. It was 
 also enacted that no person who took the oath should 
 be liable to punishment, in some cases that of death, 
 strictly speaking, " for hearing or saying Mass," or for 
 performing or attending other ceremonies of the Church 
 
50 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 of Rome, or for " being a Papist," or for belonging to 
 an Order in that Church, or for " being educated in 
 the Popish religion." This Act also legalized Catholic 
 churches and schools, for the first time, though it made 
 it illegal for such a church to have a steeple or a bell, 
 a characteristic EngUsh compromise. An alien church 
 might be visible, now, but not too visible. 
 
 This Act, very easily passed by Pitt's Government, 
 contained a number of limitations and safeguards in 
 order to smooth its passage, but it was^ fair concession. 
 Not till many more years had passed were Catholics 
 allowed to sit in either House of Parliament, or hold 
 any national or local public office, or Commissions in 
 Army or Navy, or take degrees in the Universities. 
 Still, as Burke said in the debate, it was no longer to 
 be the law of England that " a man who had worshipped 
 God in his own way was liable to be condemned for 
 high treason." * 
 
 The concession to Catholics by this Act certainly was 
 not excessive, but it raised their spirit from the weight 
 of degradation, and relieved them from the sense of 
 existing, as they had hitherto done, merely on sufferance 
 
 ^ The following story shows how obsolete these penal laws had become. 
 Some informers brought an action in 1765 against a Vicar- Apostolic, 
 Monsignor Talbot, for saying Mass, and the case came on before Lord 
 Mansfield. If the fact were proved, the Judge had no option but to direct 
 the Jury to find the accused guilty, and then had, strictly speaking, to 
 condemn him to be hung, dra\vn, and quartered. Lord Mansfield was 
 determined not to do this. He asked the first witness how he heard the 
 priest saying Mass. " Through a door, my Lord." " What did you 
 hear him say?" "I heard him beginning with '' Confiteo,^ my Lord." 
 Lord Mansfield turned to the Jury and said, " This witness is a liar, we all 
 know that the Mass is in Latin. Confiteo is not Latin. This case must be 
 dismissed." 
 
 He did not think it necessary to tell the Jury that Confiteor was a Latin 
 word. 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 51 
 
 and non-enforcement of law. Soon afterwards Bishop 
 Douglas, Vicar- Apostolic of the London district from 
 1790 to 1812, wrote, " The Catholic Rehgion is now 
 beginning to flourish, and, as public services and sermons 
 in the chapels are now permitted, many conversions 
 are the result." 
 
 Before 1791 the Established Church, or rather, the 
 Protestant Religion, had been strictly protected in 
 England, so much so that even foreign books of devotion, 
 rosaries, crucifixes and so forth could be, and often were, 
 seized and confiscated at the ports as contraband and 
 prohibited goods. They had to be smuggled in like 
 foreign lace or spirits. But now began to dawn the 
 era of free-trade in religion at the same moment that 
 saw the first beginnings of free-trade in commerce. In 
 both cases there was a reaction against the exclusive 
 and protective policy of the Whig aristocracy dominant 
 in the eighteenth century, who, after 1800, when they 
 had become a minority in opposition, went in for 
 Catholic Emancipation, leaving to the Tories their 
 discarded principles of protection in religion and trade. 
 The long oppressive and suppressive period had all but 
 destroyed CathoHcism in every part of England except 
 Lancashire, and nowhere was it weaker than in the 
 eastern and south-eastern counties, although London, 
 as the common resort from all parts, had a certain pro- 
 portion of Irish and other Catholics in its miscellaneous 
 population. The poet Crabbe, drawing his experience 
 from Suffolk in his poem The Borough, written in 1809, 
 thus depicts the remnant of the faithful in that region, 
 only a few years before Digby went to Cambridge. 
 
 " Among her sons, with us a quiet few 
 Obscure themselves, her ancient state review, 
 
52 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 And fond and melanclioly glances cast 
 
 On power insulted, and on triumpli past. 
 
 They look, they can but look, with many a sigh 
 
 On sacred buildings doomed in dust to lie ; 
 
 Of seats, they tell, where priests 'mid tapers dim 
 
 Breathed the warm prayer, or tuned the midnight hynm, 
 
 Where trembling penitents their guilt confessed. 
 
 Where want had succour, and contrition rest." 
 
 " Such is the change they mourn ; but they restrain 
 The rage of grief, and passively complain." 
 
 After 1791 the horrors of the French Revolution and 
 the war of England against the atheistical Government 
 of France led to a still kinder view and better under- 
 standing of the Catholic and Roman Church, especially 
 since England was now filled with Catholic refugees, 
 as she had once been by French Protestant refugees, 
 and French priests became teachers in many English 
 families. But the result of the long suppression in 
 England was that, unless in Lancashire and London, 
 and here and there attached to the house of some 
 Catholic squire, there were very few Catholic places of 
 worship in England. In 1825, when Digby became 
 a Catholic, there was no Catholic church or chapel in 
 Cambridge. Twenty-six miles away, in Hertfordshire, 
 at Old Hall, was a house of Enghsh Seculars established 
 in 1568 at Douai, and driven back to England in 1793 
 by the French Revolution. St. Edmund's College had 
 been founded here in 1795. It was a seminary for 
 theologic students and a school for boys. 
 
 Digby, with Ambrose de Lisle, while the latter v/as at 
 Cambridge, rode over there, fasting, on many Sundays 
 to early Communion, High Mass, Vespers. He rode 
 back in the evening, through darkness in winter, usually 
 arriving in Cambridge as St. Mary's bell chimed nine 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 53 
 
 o'clock and, according to its invariable custom at that 
 hour, repeated the number of days in the month till 
 then. He rode the twenty-six miles each way in two 
 hours and a half, so that his horse " Cannon-Bail " must 
 have been, as he says, a stout trotter. The authorities 
 kindly dispensed in favour of Digby and de Lisle with 
 the then prevailing rule, that no University man might 
 ride a horse on Sunday. 
 
 He loved the " still, fair chapel " of Old Hall and the 
 solemn strains, so unlike, he says, in depth and sincerity 
 of feehng to the beautiful but soul-less chantings of a 
 mercenary choir. He used to dine with the fathers, and 
 loved the conversation of these soHd men of good- will. 
 " The type of college dons was here unknown." He 
 was much struck by the difference of their talk from 
 that of college high tables ; no studied airs at Old Hall, 
 or intellectual pose, or desire to " show off," or intima- 
 tions of a secret knowledge of high life, or wish to seem 
 acquainted with the world. They were content to be 
 and seem what they were, than which nothing is more 
 restful, or charming in intercourse, with a certain 
 homely air about their real learning. In all his travels 
 Kenelm Digby visited monasteries in divers lands, many, 
 or most of which, alas ! have now been destroyed by 
 Liberal Governments. No layman has seen more of 
 this kind of life, or written more beautifully or instruc- 
 tively about it. 
 
 Digby could, however, also go, and often did go, to the 
 domestic chapel in the ancient CathoHc house of Sauston 
 Hall, near the slopes which are humorously named the 
 Gog Magog hills. He gives an account of this place 
 in an old-age volume of verse called Little Low Bushes. 
 The house belonged to a family named Huddleston. 
 
54 KENELM HENKY DIGBY 
 
 Sir John Huddleston had, for one night, entertained 
 Tudor Queen Mary, and, the day after she left, his 
 house had therefore been burnt down by a fanatic mob 
 issuing out of Puritan Cambridge. The Queen ordered 
 Cambridge Town to pay the cost of rebuilding, but this 
 had not been finished when she died, and never was ; and 
 as, until the reign of George III., the family had to 
 pay £20 a month for not attending parish church, they 
 had been kept poor. It was a weird old house, with a 
 chapel and priest's hiding-hole on the top floor, and a 
 few Spanish pictures. Its then owner, who had been 
 educated abroad by Dominicans, was a man of character 
 and deep learning, Major Huddleston. Young Kenelm 
 made his friendship, and his metrical description of him, 
 though long, is a picture worth quoting. After describ- 
 ing the house at length, and the appearance of the old 
 Catholic gentleman, he says of him : 
 " Humanity, that great and holy word 
 
 Without which all is false and vain, absurd, 
 
 Did stamp its character upon his mind 
 
 Where all soft, tender things you ever find, 
 
 Versed from his boyhood in patristic lore. 
 
 Enriched with maxims from the schoolmen's store, 
 
 Accustomed to behold the darts of those 
 
 Who, hostile to his faith, would still propose 
 
 That ' foolish babbling ' which our martyrs thought 
 
 More painful than the wounds the rack had wrought.^ 
 
 Familiar with the ancient good and wise, 
 
 He still was modern, which can some surprise. 
 
 His ways were gentle, to all others sweet 
 
 And simple as the lads that fill the street. 
 
 No harshness or severity was there ; 
 
 His learning he would daily bring to bear 
 
 On all the passing matters of the day 
 
 In such a mild and unpedantic way, 
 
 ^ I.e. the " foolish babbling " of Protestant chaplains or ministers which 
 the martyrs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had to endure in 
 prison, and even at the gallows. 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 55 
 
 You knew not which to wonder at the most, 
 His sense, or inability to boast. 
 
 And then, in fine, his studied moderation 
 Presents a theme, indeed, for contemplation : 
 Since it would seem at present as if we 
 Did want, what it demands, much energy ; 
 For weakness rushes on to find the end. 
 But strength on each small item time will spend. 
 To leave at rest was, sooth, his constant rule 
 Intricate questions, fitted for the school. 
 
 Though subtle and most learned, still was he 
 
 Inclined to what you'd call Faith's poetry. 
 
 The genius of Religion was for him 
 
 Not a web-woven, theologic whim, 
 
 A dusty, dry expansion, by some brain 
 
 Acute, but narrow, all truth to contain ; 
 
 He rather, like Chateaubriand, comprised 
 
 In that expression what all hearts have prized 
 
 Not as poetical to them first known 
 
 But as old custom, and familiar grown. 
 
 As for the men who vilified his Creed, 
 
 Of facts alone he said they stood in need ; 
 
 He foimd that their objections spring at first 
 
 From pure mis-statements, whence their anger-burst ; 
 
 From men's confounding errors of an age 
 
 With what at all times knew and taught the Sage. 
 
 Mere pagan gloom, and all dark superstition 
 
 Were objects of his own old Faith's aversion. 
 
 He said no pleasure ever with her dies 
 
 Unless through her consuming ecstasies. 
 
 Humanity and Faith for him were one. 
 
 The horrid phantoms conjured up were gone ; 
 
 He gave you but a plain unvarnished view. 
 
 The darkness vanished, and the light was new 
 
 To those who long had been led far astray 
 
 By wandering fires that danced across their way. 
 
 Right strict in each observance as of old. 
 
 He said that each did some wise end enfold, 
 
 Just in the least as in the greatest things, 
 
 Impartial sentence on himself he brings 
 
 Uncompromising where he is the man, 
 
 Yet find excuse for others still he can ; 
 
56 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Extenuations fertile to invent 
 
 You'd tliink to plead for all men he was sent. 
 
 Patient and tolerant, forgiving, he 
 
 Displayed the type of all true sanctity. 
 
 No views immoderate did darken there 
 
 The pure bright light of this wise man of prayer. 
 
 He'd smile at times, and say some went too far, 
 
 But as to praising them he knew no bar, 
 
 Because, opinions still dividing schools. 
 
 No mind that's absolute e'er wholly rules. 
 
 He saw no reason to correct the phrase 
 
 Of Vincent, in those very ancient days. 
 
 That unity in faith must still abound. 
 
 With liberty in dubious things around. 
 
 While still in all things charity must be, 
 
 Or else the whole deserves our mockery. 
 
 Exaggeration, finally, to him 
 
 Seemed nought, unless some one man's foolish whim. 
 
 The best things, once thus pushed as to extreme 
 
 'He thought a fitful and distempered dream. 
 
 So now you have his portrait standing there 
 
 As if to that old house you did repair ; 
 
 It was a face Velasquez' hand should paint. 
 
 The English gentleman, the scholar, saint." 
 
 Is there not something rather refreshing in this plain 
 and Crabbe-like verse, in these days when poetry has 
 become so very subtle and clever and misty ? Edward 
 Fitzgerald would have thought so, but he never came 
 across the old-age verse of the Kenelm Digby whom he 
 saw and admired in undergraduate days at Cambridge. 
 
 Ambrose de Lisle always remained an affectionate 
 friend of Kenelm Digby' s and maintained a long corre- 
 spondence with him. In one letter, written in 1842, 
 De Lisle reminds him of the 
 
 " excursions of which we made so many together in 
 those happy days at Cambridge. For happy days I 
 must call them, and a very sweet memory they left to 
 me, though indeed God has given me so many sub- 
 stantial blessings since that I might be tempted to 
 
CONVERSION TO CATHOLIC CHURCH 57 
 
 forget those others. And yet why should I ? Has not 
 each period of human life its appropriate blessings, as 
 each season of the year its peculiar charm ? So it 
 is, and therefore I never look back upon those happy 
 days of my early youth, in which my chief happiness is 
 associated with the remembrance of you — I say I never 
 look back upon them without a sigh, for they are gone, 
 and when one says that, one says enough to call forth 
 deep melancholy." 
 
 This chapter may fitly end with a passage in the 
 Broadstone of Honour, breathing all the fresh enthusiasm 
 of youth : 
 
 ■' thou, my spirit's guide, on the depth of whose 
 deep mysteries my heart would ever gaze ! thou 
 Church most holy of immortal Rome, whose solemn 
 prayers first taught my reason that there was a bright, 
 blessed place hereafter, a heaven beyond the dark foul 
 grave, cheering me every night with dulcet breath and 
 the vision of that peace which the world cannot give, 
 calling me to thy bosom by signs and accents, by smiles 
 and tears, ' a voice like the voice of my own soul,' heard 
 in the stillness of thought in which childhood knew and 
 felt its mother, ' calming me as the loveUness of heaven 
 soothes the unquiet sea,' thou that lovest and sanctifiest 
 all that of which the image will delight my heart. 
 
 Dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus. 
 
 Youth and innocence and simpUcity, and the reverence 
 of early days, all that in this beautiful world is fair and 
 lovely, mountains, woods, rivers, and Ausonian skies, all 
 sweet sounds and gracious harmonies that give a glimpse 
 at nameless joys, such as make an infant smile, or, if 
 eyes needs must weep, as can make ' our tears all wonder 
 and delight ' — thou, whose wisdom is as the ocean, 
 from which flowed in narrow streams all that is profound 
 in Plato, all that inspired ' the kings of old philosophy,' 
 whose angelic strains I pray may sound to me in my 
 
58 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 last hour — within whose holy walls at eventide priests 
 and innocent children, after their pretty little stately 
 walk in timid order to the sound of richest melody, 
 kneel down in adoration before Hghted altars that are 
 decked with flowers and fragrant with sweet incense, 
 where all appear to be ' Hke forms and sounds of a 
 diviner world, hke the bright procession of sldey visions 
 in a solemn dream, from which men wake as from a 
 paradise, and draw new strength to tread the thorns 
 of life ' — thou, whose wrongs have roused the weakest 
 and most worthless of thy sons — thou much injured, 
 calumniated guide that wouldest make me all I dream 
 of, happy, high, majestical, that wouldest have me ' love 
 and pity all things,' that wouldest have me cast away 
 all human passions, all revenge, all pride, and think, 
 speak and act no ill — that wouldest ' quench the earth- 
 consuming rage of gold and blood, till men should live 
 and move harmonious as the sacred stars above,' thou 
 that art pure as light, lasting as the world, I salute thee, 
 immortal Mother of learning and grace and sanctity ! 
 Salve magna Parens ! " 
 
 Poetry, men will say who trade in mere prose ; but it 
 is poetic truth, that is to say. Reality expressed in 
 poetic language, a variation on the theme of David, 
 " If I forget thee, Jerusalem." The Christian religion 
 is a love afiair, and the complete consummation so far 
 as it can be on earth is in or through the Catholic Church. 
 Between mere friendship and love completed there is 
 for him who has once felt the attraction no firm standing 
 ground any more than for the earthly lover in the 
 conception of " Platonic love." Those who have never 
 been real lovers can be friends, but those who have been 
 can hardly fall back upon the line of friendship. If they 
 retreat at all they must retreat much further into the 
 wilderness of uncertainty and doubt. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 " THE BROADSTONE OF HONOUR " 
 
 " Our Saviour, Jesus Christ, is become the chief and eternal king 
 of all the really free, generous, and heroic spirits that exist upon 
 the earth. Vidimus et venimus is henceforth the cry of generous 
 chivalry. Procidentes adoraverunt eum." 
 
 Kenelm Digby, Br oadstone of Honour, " Godefridus." 
 
 " ' Where do you wish that we should sit down and read 
 this tale of ancient chivalry ? ' said one of our company 
 as we walked on a spring morning through the delicious 
 groves that clothe those mountains of Dauphiny which 
 surround the old castle of the family of Bayard. We 
 proposed to turn aside along the banks of the stream, 
 and there sit down in peace. We were all familiar 
 with Plato, and that spot reminded us forcibly of that 
 charming episode where Phaedrus and Socrates are 
 described as congratulating each other on being bare- 
 footed, that they may walk through the water ; and our 
 Ught and careless livery was no impediment to our 
 march to the opposite shore, though the stream was 
 rapid and of considerable depth. Upon the opposite 
 bank we found a lofty chestnut with wide-spreading 
 branches, and beneath it was soft grass and a gentle 
 breeze ; and there we sat down ; near it were shrubs 
 which formed a dense and lovely thicket ; and many 
 of them bearing now a full blossom, the whole place was 
 most fragrant ; there was a fountain also under the 
 chestnut, clear and cold, as our feet bore witness ; and 
 that nothing might be wanting to remind us of those 
 banks of the Ihssus described by Plato, there were some 
 
 59 
 
60 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 statues from which the ancients would have supposed 
 that here too was a spot sacred to the Nymphs and to- 
 Achelaus. But our Ihssus possessed objects of a higher 
 interest than the memorials of Boreas and Orithyia ; for 
 within a few hundred yards of the spot where we sat, 
 lower down the bank, there was an altar and a rustic 
 chapel, embowered in arbutus, where, in the summer 
 season, a priest from the neighbouring monastery used 
 to repair to say the holy mass, and to instruct the 
 shepherd youth who had to watch the flocks during 
 these months in places remote from any habitations of 
 men. Who could describe with what refreshing and 
 delicious sweetness the gentle breeze cooled our temples ! 
 The summer song of the cicadae had already begun to 
 resound in sweet chorus ; the grass was most beautiful 
 and rich with varied flowers. Chaucer used to say, at 
 dawn of day walldng in the meadow to see these blossoms 
 spread against the sun was a bUssful sight, which 
 softened all his sorrow. From this enamelled bank, 
 proinising to receive so gently the reclining head, we 
 could discern across the river the grey ruins of that 
 majestic castle which recalled so many images of the 
 older time, and which was distinguished by a name so 
 peculiarly dear to chivalry that it seemed s}Tnbolical 
 of the very bent of honour. It was here, then, that we 
 began to read aloud from a certain romantic volume 
 which first inspired me with the desire to study the 
 counsels and to retrace the deeds of chivalry." ^ 
 
 If the inspiring conception of Kenelm Digby's first 
 book took place in pastoral Dauphiny, its title flashed 
 upon him, he says, when he saw the ruined castle of 
 Ehrenbreitstein, on the opposite bank of the Rhine to 
 the ancient city of Coblentz. Ehrenbreitstein means, in 
 English, " Broadstone of Honour." 
 
 Digby wrote at Cambridge, and published in 1822, two 
 
 ^ The Broadstone of Honour, " Godefridus," chapter i. 
 
" THE BKOADSTONE OF HONOUR " 61 
 
 parts of tlie book to which he gave this fine name, those 
 called Godefridus and Tancredus, after the crusading 
 chiefs. He describes in the Temple of Memory how 
 eagerly he used to await in Trumpington Street the 
 advent of the mail-coach bringing down his proof-sheets 
 from the printers in London. The youthful work was 
 well received, and a. second edition came out in 1823. 
 
 The Broadstone of Honour, or " the true sense and 
 practice of Chivalry," was a book like Newman's Essay 
 on Development, or Hugh Benson's By What Authority, 
 which completed or accompanied the conversion of the 
 -author to the Catholic Church. After his conversion in 
 1825 Kenelm Digby was dissatisfied with his book, 
 bought up all the copies he could, and in 1826 pubhshed 
 a new Broadstone, much enlarged. His old Cambridge 
 teacher, Julius Hare, wrote in his Guesses at Truth, 
 shortly before the appearance of the 1826 edition, some 
 high praise, not too high, of the original Broadstone. 
 He is speaking of — 
 
 ^' that wisdom of the heart, that esprit du cceur, or mens 
 cordis, which the Broadstone of Honour inculcates so 
 eloquently, and so fervently, and which, if it be severed 
 from the wisdom of the head, is far the more precious 
 of the two ; while, in their union it is like the odour 
 which in some indescribable way ixdngles with the hues 
 of the flower, softening its beauty into loveliness. No 
 truly wise man has ever been without it ; but in few 
 has it ever been found in such purity and perfection, 
 as in the author of that noble manual for gentlemen, 
 that volume which, had I a son, I would place in his 
 hands, charging him, though such prompting would be 
 needless, to love it next to his Bible." 
 
 Could there be higher compliment ? But after Digby 
 liad published the revised and enlarged edition in 1826, 
 
62 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 the Rector, as Hare had become, of Hurstmonceaux 
 could not express such unqualified admiration. He 
 wrote, in a later criticism : ^ 
 
 " To this new edition, I regret to say, I cannot apply 
 the same terms. Not that it is inferior to the former 
 in its peculiar excellences. On the contrary, the 
 author's style, both in language and thought, has become 
 more mature, and still more beautiful ; his reading has 
 been continually widening its range ; and he pours 
 forth its precious stores still more prodigally ; and the 
 religious spirit which permeated the former work, 
 hallows every page of the latter. The new Broadsto7ie 
 is still richer than the old one in magnanimous and holy 
 thoughts, and in tales of honour and piety. If one 
 sometimes thinks that the author loses himself amid the 
 throng of knightly and saintly personages whom he 
 calls up before us, it is with the feeling with which 
 Milton must have regarded the moon, when he likened 
 her to ' one that had been led astray through the heaven's 
 wide pathless way.' If he strays it is ' through the 
 heaven's wide pathless way ' ; if he loses himself it is 
 among the stars. In truth this is an essential and a 
 very remarkable feature of his catholic spirit. He 
 identifies himself, as few have ever done, with the good, 
 and great, and heroic, and holy, in former times, and 
 ever rejoices in passing out of himself into them ; he 
 loves to utter his thoughts and feehngs in their words 
 rather than in his own ; and the saints and philosophers 
 and warriors of old join in swelling the sacred concert 
 which rises heavenward from his pages." 
 
 Who, after reading these glowing words, would not 
 wish to plunge into the pages of the Broadstone ? But 
 the cautious and responsible Archdeacon and Rector of 
 Hurstmonceaux, fighting against himself, adds : 
 
 ^ Guesses at Truth, 15th series, p. 233. 
 
" THE BROADSTONE OF HONOUR " 6a 
 
 " Nevertheless the new Broadstone of Honour is not 
 a book which can be recommended without hesitation 
 to the yomig. The very charm, which it is sure to 
 exercise over them, heightens one's scruples about doing 
 so. For in it the author has come forward as a convert 
 and champion of the Roman Church, and as the impla- 
 cable enemy of Protestantism." 
 
 Hare goes on to make the criticism that Digby, while 
 gloriously producing the noblest and most beautiful side 
 of the mediaeval period, has dwelt Httle on the darker 
 side, while on the other hand he has depicted, for choice, 
 the indefensible aspects of the Protestant Reformation, 
 and the most unpleasing aspect of its consequences 
 in modern times. This process, JuHus Hare said, was 
 pursued still further in Digby's later work, the Mores 
 Catholici, or Ages of Faith. 
 
 " I trust," he concludes, " that nothing I have said 
 will hurt the feehngs of one, who fulfils, as very few 
 men have fulfilled, the idea his writings give of their 
 author, and whom I esteem it a blessed privilege to be 
 allowed to number among my friends." 
 
 This " guess at truth " was written in 1837, before the 
 full efflorescence of the Oxford Movement. Ten years 
 later, in 1847, Julius Hare, alarmed by the Rome- ward 
 progress, wrote, in a further series of Guesses, a note 
 on Digby's works in a much more hostile and damnatory 
 spirit. 
 
 Five years earlier, in 1842, Julius Hare had written 
 two painful private letters to Digby, with reference to 
 the last published volumes of Mores Catholici. He 
 charged Digby with what he called, most incorrectly, 
 " virulent bigotry." 
 
€4 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 "I do not," he ^vrote, " complain much of any 
 exaggeration that there may be in your praises of 
 your favourites ; I love to see admiration and love, 
 even in their excess. But when you come to speak 
 of still greater and wiser, and as holy and godly, men, 
 of men raised up by God for the grandest work which 
 has been performed since the first diffusion of Chris- 
 tianity, the greatest benefactors of manldnd since the 
 holy Apostles — alas ! I can only feel deep sorrow and 
 indignation at the manner in which you calumniate 
 them. My own earnest desire and prayer always is 
 that I may never speak ill unjustly of any man. I 
 should rejoice to recognise all that is good and great in 
 Hildebrand, in Innocent, in Becket. But at the same 
 time I would claim that Luther and Calvin shall not 
 be slandered and belied, that single expressions shall 
 not be picked out and often greatly misrepresented and 
 distorted into heinous offences, Luther is the man to 
 whom I feel that I myself, and that the whole world 
 owes more than to any man since St. Paul. And such 
 a man, my own great and beloved benefactor, I cannot 
 patiently allow to be traduced." 
 
 JuHus Hare's criticism that, in the Broadstone of 
 Honour and the Mores Catholici, Kenelm Digby depicts 
 the beautiful and passes over the reverse side of mediaeval 
 life and religion, has a certain justification. But a 
 writer should be judged according to his professed aims. 
 Kenelm Digby never pretended to be a judicial, scientific 
 historian like the German Ranke, or the French Guizot, 
 exactly weighing with cold deliberation the merits and 
 demerits of men and times, but rather as an advocate 
 who wished to set forth the good of his cause. For 
 nearly three centuries in England nothing had been 
 written, except timidly, though rather effectively, by 
 some cautious antiquaries, nothing at least had been 
 
" THE BROADSTONE OF HONOUR " 65 
 
 written by any dominant guide of opinion, which did 
 not treat the Middle Ages as barbarous and hold up in 
 an odious light the Church which has everywhere its 
 circumference but its visible centre in Rome. Except 
 by a few obscure and unheeded writers, all that was in 
 the nature of abuses had been exhibited with monstrous 
 distortion and exaggeration to the Enghsh, and all that 
 was good had been almost entirely suppressed .* It 
 was full time that the other side of things should be 
 represented by some one who was deeply instructed 
 and knew how to write. 
 
 Digby, then, dwells, and rightly, far more upon the 
 heroic virtues of the " ages of faith " than upon the 
 vices which have no doubt existed, more or less, in the 
 Cathohc Church from the days in which TertuUian 
 denounced them two centuries after Christ, but it is 
 not true to say that he ignored them altogether. Look, 
 for instance, at this passage, and many others might 
 be quoted, in the volume of Mores Catholici which was 
 pubHshed in 1835. It was read by JuHus Hare before 
 he published his criticism of 1837. Digby says : 
 
 " Much, I am aware, remains to be said respecting 
 the vices which desolated society during the Ages of 
 Faith. Great and beyond all description were the 
 calamities of the city of God, when those two luminaries 
 and immortal columns of the Church, Dominick and 
 Francis, came into the world. As the historian of the 
 Minors observes, ' the demon having persecuted the 
 infant Church by tyrants, and the more advanced by 
 heretics, endeavoured now to oppress with both the 
 joyful and flourishing Church, afflicting it with horrors 
 
 ^ One might perhaps add Walter Scott as a pro- Catholic influence but 
 that he was always so very careful to dilute his wine of Catholic sentiment 
 with cold Protestant water. 
 
 K.D. E 
 
66 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 on all sides, perils of the sword without, heresies within,, 
 and the iniquity of corrupt manners.' But then," says 
 Digby, " historians of all ages, like modern newspapers, 
 are more inchned to record deeds of violence and sin 
 than to record quiet virtues, of which yet we can know 
 if we search the humble and not the most ostentatiously 
 striking of popular records. 
 
 " Who can estimate the multitude of the golden 
 angelic souls, candid, puerile, and at the same time 
 profound, to which the Middle Ages gave birth, and 
 which passed without observation, or leaving behind 
 in history any vestige or memorial of their transit ? It 
 was enough for the just that their death was precious 
 in the sight of God, and that their lot was amongst the 
 saints." 
 
 In the volume of Mores Catholici which was pubHshed 
 in 1842 Kenelm Digby repUes at some length to the 
 criticisms made by JuHus Hare on the earlier part of 
 that book and on The Broadstone of Honour. 
 
 " In answer," he says, " to this accompUshed scholar 
 who would convict me of being a false spy, I must 
 declare that in no part of these books have I set up 
 noblest stories culled out of fifteen centuries, as the 
 whole picture of what the Ages of Faith actually were. 
 Their faults and crimes were not concealed or palUated, 
 though their devotion led me to the conclusion at which 
 a French historian (Ozanam) has arrived, that much 
 will be forgiven them on account of their having loved 
 much, a conviction which mil not be treated with 
 disdain by those who remember that, as St. Augustine 
 says, ' The Apostles were defeated by the robber who 
 then beUeved when they failed.' If their iniquities 
 were great, great also was their reparation, great their 
 struggle to correct themselves, great their repentance. 
 Yet with all their defects, such is the contrast they 
 present to heathen times, that the anticipations of the 
 
" THE BKOADSTONE OF HONOUR " 67 
 
 first apologists seem so far verified as to force the 
 ridicule of Gibbon to recoil upon himself, for what 
 Lactantius expected, and almost ventured to promise, 
 did arrive. Ages of comparative innocence and fehcity 
 did return ; the worship of the true God did moderate 
 war and dissension among those who mutually considered 
 themselves as children of a common parent. Impure 
 desires, angry and selfish passions, were restrained 
 by the knowledge of the gospel, and in many places 
 the magistrates might sheathe the sword of justice among 
 a people actuated by the sentiments of truth and piety, 
 of equity and moderation, of harmony and universal 
 love. 
 
 "... Neither is it just to say that I have culled these 
 stories as if rare passages from ancient books ; for 
 whoever has pursued studies of this kind must be aware 
 that the difficulty arises from the infinite multiplicity 
 rather than from the deficiency of such evidence." 
 
 He denies also that he has failed to see what is good 
 in the modern age, although he never ceases to desire 
 that to this goodness might be added the happiness and 
 peace and mental security given by the CathoHc Church, 
 and given by it to many even here in England where 
 conditions are so adverse. And he adds — 
 
 " there are, besides, other lands where still faith is 
 found fruitful. Beneath Ausonian skies all these deeds 
 of love are practised, and CathoHc manners as of old ; 
 and this I know to be so true, from what I saw and 
 heard, that, in this distance of years, long separated, I 
 feel that there is danger of mistaking Italy for heaven." 
 
 Those who point rather to the crimes and barbarities 
 of the Middle Ages than to the virtues, are apt to forget 
 what a fearful task it was to bring order out of chaos, 
 and to subdue to the yoke of Christ, even in some degree, 
 
68 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 the wild passions of tlie youthful vigorous tribes who 
 invaded and conquered the decadent Roman Empire. 
 It is far more surprising that the Catholic Church 
 effected so much than that it effected so Httle. The 
 immense mass of quoted evidence which Digby brought 
 together in his three chief works, The Broadstone of 
 Honour, Mores Catholici, and Compitum, to prove the 
 good side of the Cathohc Church throughout its history, 
 is certainly, at least, sufficient to rebut the charge that 
 he made up a case with straining endeavour. There 
 can be no doubt that his work was needed. Consider 
 the education which the English people had received 
 in these matters for three hundred years — the positive 
 teaching, as well as the negative teaching given by the 
 destruction of all the signs and symbols of the old 
 religion. One of the sixteenth-century " Homilies " 
 which were authorised documents of the national re- 
 formed Church says (and it is quite " the limit ") : ^ 
 
 " In this pit of damnable idolatry all the world, as it 
 were, drowned, continued until our age by the space of 
 above eight hundred years ... so that laity and clergy, 
 learned and unlearned, all ages, sects, and degrees of 
 men, women and children of whole Christendom (an 
 horrible and most dreadful thing to think) have been 
 at once drowned in abominable idolatry, of all other vices 
 most detested of God, and most damnable to man." 
 
 This strange teaching, " a horrible and dreadful thing 
 to think," indeed, was enforced and carried out in 
 
 1 The Elizabethan article 35 directs that the Homilies, which, it says, 
 " contain a godly and wholesome doctrine and necessary for these times," 
 should be " read in Churches by the miuisters, diligently and distinctly, 
 that they may be understanded of the people." It was a Gk)vernment 
 operation through the pulpit, the ' Press ' of those times. 
 
" THE BKOADSTONE OF HONOUR " 69 
 
 practice, and in England and other reformed countries 
 a devastating assault was made, not only upon the 
 unity of the Church, but upon the joy and grace and 
 tenderness of religion. 
 
 " Only just think," \vrote John Ruskin, " of the 
 sudden abrogation of all beloved custom and beUeved 
 tradition, all that had been closest to the hearts of 
 men or most precious for their help, faiths that had 
 ruled the destiny and sealed the departure of souls 
 that could not be told or numbered for multitude ; 
 prayers that from the lips of mothers to those of children 
 had distilled like sweet waterfalls, sounding through 
 the silence of ages ; hopes that had pointed the purposes 
 and ministered the strength of life, brightened the last 
 glances and shaped the last syllables of death ; charities 
 that had woven chains of pitying or aspiring communion 
 between the world and the unfathomable beneath and 
 above ; and, more than these, the spirits of all the 
 innumerable, undoubting dead, beckoning to the one 
 way by which they had been content to follow the things 
 that belonged to their peace." 
 
 Finely said — although this great sensitive writer, 
 swayed by contending influences, did not, as Digby 
 remarks, draw " the natural conclusion." * Perhaps, 
 indeed, the " abrogation " was not so sudden as ail 
 that, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century 
 
 ^ Ruskin, it is fair to note, says in Modern Painters (part v. ch. 19) that 
 '■ Modern Romanism is as different from thirteenth-century Romanism as 
 a prison from a prince's chamber," and he often throws out observations 
 of tliis bitter land. He seems to base his judgments too much upon the 
 infideUties and transformations of the Fine Arts and intellectuaUsts, and 
 to have inadequate knowledge of the actual men and women of the Catholic 
 v\'orld in modern times. He was brought up in a narrow sect of Pro- 
 testantism, and then fell under the dominion of a stronger and more mascu- 
 line intellect, the Calvinist-bred Thomas Carlyle. 
 
70 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 it was very complete, except where the old religion 
 lingered here and there in its integrity. It has now, 
 happily, become almost incredible how the damnatory 
 view was rammed into the popular mind by the Scribes 
 and Pharisees. This was the tone of the popular Press 
 and far the greater part of the Keformed Pulpit. 
 Even " High Churchmen " joined in the chorus. The 
 non-juror, Dr. Brett, in Anne's reign, informed his 
 readers that the rubrics of the Roman Missal were 
 " corrupt, dangerous, idolatrous, and utterly unworthy 
 of the gravity of so sacred an Institution." The total 
 exclusion of Cathohcs from all national services unless 
 they would publicly deny the distinctive doctrines 
 of their religion, much enforced this teaching in the 
 popular imagination. It was felt that men could not 
 possibly be treated Uke this unless they deserved it. 
 
 The voice of Catholic writers and apologists was 
 hardly heard at all. In the earher half of the eighteenth 
 century Cathohcs had been so thoroughly oppressed 
 and cowed that their attitude was timid in the extreme. 
 So Challoner, in his book about the heroic Enghsh 
 Cathohc martyrs, prefaced that he pubhshed it " only 
 as a supplement to Enghsh history, that might give 
 pleasure to men of all persuasions who desire to read 
 of the Hves and the deaths even of the most notorious 
 malefactors, presenting it without any pretension to 
 make panegyrics of any of them, or to act the apologist, 
 but only narrating them as a historian." Probably 
 unless he had given this explanation no one would have 
 ventured to print his volume. 
 
 It is precisely because the invincibly ignorant, anti- 
 Catholic prejudice largely dechned in the nineteenth 
 century, partly through the labours of Kenelm Digby, 
 
" THE BROADSTONE OF HONOUR " 71 
 
 that these labours now seem less necessary. Yet the 
 feeling still smoulders in many corners, and perhaps, on 
 the whole, has not so much disappeared as subsided into 
 silent and latent antipathy. 
 
 The truest view seems to be that this long period to 
 which is given the name of " Middle Ages," extending 
 for a thousand years from the fall of the Roman Empire 
 to the fifteenth century or thereabouts, was a blend in 
 faith and morals of that which is good and true from the 
 beginning, now, and for ever, and that, also, which was 
 part of the intellectual and moral childhood of the new 
 European races. Those erred, perhaps, a little, who 
 would not sift the eternal from the temporary, but those 
 erred far more who would not leave both together to 
 grow till the coming of the Lord of the harvest, and 
 violently rooted up the wheat with the weeds and wild 
 flowers. Digby never dwells upon, though he never 
 assails, miraculous incidents rather deficient in evidence, 
 or more or less mythical stories of the Lives of Saints, 
 stories that were, as de Maistre says, rather dramatized 
 truth than verified facts. What he does is to show by 
 most ample evidence the deeper and holier and essential 
 thought of the Mediaevals, and its incarnation in their 
 practice ; to trace the lines which connected this thought, 
 or " ethos," with that of the best pre-Christian thinkers 
 and poets, and the best of the Catholic, or even non- 
 Catholic, Moderns, and to show how the Catholic 
 religion flowering, with whatever incidental faults, 
 most freely, visibly and beautifully in the " Ages of 
 Faith," was, and is, and ever will be in harmony, if 
 rightly understood, with all purest joys, and profoundest 
 instincts, and noblest activities of life. Like Milton's 
 philosophy, and far more truly, the Catholic Church is 
 
72 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 " not harsh or crabbed as dull fools suppose, but musical 
 as is Apollo's lute." ^ 
 
 Chateaubriand, when he wrote the Genius of Chris- 
 tianity, held, Hke Digby, the behef that the time had 
 come when the old scholastic methods, however sound 
 in themselves, were no longer of practical avail against 
 antagonists who refused to accept the elementary 
 assumptions of the faith and the sacred texts from which 
 they were deduced, and that the Christian rehgion and 
 the Catholic Church must now be justified by its good 
 fruits in making men better and happier, and inspiring 
 life in all its provinces with the spirit of sincerity, 
 generosity, chivalry, justice, beauty and charity. The 
 defenders of religion of the eighteenth-century school 
 did not perceive, he says, that " it was no longer a 
 question of discussing this or that doctrine, since the 
 foundations were absolutely rejected. Speaking of 
 the mission of Jesus, and proceeding from consequence 
 to consequence, they established no doubt very solidly 
 the truths of the faith, but this way of arguing, good 
 for the seventeenth century, when the foundation was 
 not contested, was no longer of any use in our days. 
 It was necessary to take the contrary road, to pass 
 from the effect to the cause ; not to prove that Christi- 
 anity was excellent because it comes from God, but that 
 it comes from God because it is excellent." 
 
 The Genie and Digby' s works were good answer to 
 Voltaire and Gibbon and their company, w^ho alleged 
 
 ^ Montalembert says {Monks of the West, Book xii.) : " The fact is that 
 in true history there is no ' golden age.' All ages, without exception, are 
 infected by the evil which proceeds from man's natural corruption. All 
 bear witness to his incurable weakness, but at the same time all proclaim 
 his greatness and freedom, as well as the justice and mercy of God, his 
 maker and redeemer." 
 
" THE BEOADSTONE OF HONOUR " 73 
 
 or suggested that the Christian and Catholic Religion 
 was a decadence and product of darkness and bar- 
 barism, but the more modern attack is different. It 
 is said that Christianity is a stage in evolution, and 
 Catholicism a stage in the evolution of Christianity ; 
 that the phase of things denoted by these words was 
 inevitable but transient, and has passed, or is passing, 
 away. What is the reply ? The distinction between 
 the eternal and the transitory, the admission that in 
 the religion itself there are some things which, gently 
 and slowly, pass away with the flowing stream of 
 time, and others that stand fast like the walls and 
 towers of Zion. 
 
 This truth was known to the men of old. Vincent 
 de Lerins, before a.d. 450, asks : 
 
 '* Shall there then be no progress {p'ofectus) in the 
 Church of Christ ? " and answers, " There shall be 
 progress, and even the greatest progress, for who would 
 be so envious of the good of men, or so cursed of God, as 
 to prevent it ? But it will be progress and not change. 
 With the growth of the ages and centuries, there must 
 necessarily be a growth of understanding, of wisdom, 
 and of knowledge, for each man as for all the Church. 
 But the rehgion of souls must imitate the progress of 
 the human form, which in developing and growing 
 with years, never ceases to be the same in the maturity 
 of age as in the flower of youth." 
 
 It must be repeated — for this is important — that, 
 when Digby began to write, the Enghsh public had hardly 
 heard anything except attacks for near three centuries 
 upon papistry, superstition and monasticism, and had 
 been fed with every story upon that side of the account. 
 There were as yet none of those later attempts to restore, 
 
74 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 without submission to tlie Apostolic See, tlie Catholic 
 cult and spirit. For a hundred years and more, since 
 the fall of the seventeenth-century High Churchmen, 
 the tide had been flowing entirely in the opposite 
 direction. Additional criticism of the Catholic Church, 
 either in the past or the present, was at that date quite 
 superfluous. What was needed, to restore the balance, 
 was a strong defence of CathoHc principles, and a record 
 of innumerable and forgotten good fruits of them, 
 supported by solid evidence, and by a very great deal 
 of it. This work was done by Kenelm Digby with 
 results in the way of modification of English opinion, 
 and correction of EngHsh ignorance upon this subject, 
 which have rarely been credited to this almost forgotten 
 author. 
 
 In his much later book. Evenings on the Thames, 
 published in 1864, Kenelm Digby has some observations 
 upon the danger of too zealous pursuit of " systems." 
 He quotes the French writer, de Sacy, who says, mth 
 regard to the fall of the once ultramontane Lamennais, 
 " Beware of systems," and who adds : "It would have 
 been eventually better for Lamennais had he from the 
 first been one of those poor Galileans whom he pursued 
 so fiercely and so unmercifully, and who, for all their 
 views, were ready, as events proved, to sufier death 
 any day rather than violate their fidehty to the Holy 
 See." Digby agrees, although he was himself more in 
 sympathy with ultramontane than with Galilean ideals, 
 and remarks : 
 
 " In questions of history, too, there is the same 
 necessity for avoiding systems, though some that I need 
 not name [himself he means] may have been rather 
 hastily accused of having fallen into that pit, as if they 
 
" THE BROADSTONE OF HONOUR " 75 
 
 liad given out the Middle Ages for the uninterrupted 
 reign of peace and charity upon earth, which they 
 really never did, or at least meant to do, having in 
 fact at no time any system in their heads which re- 
 quired for its support such an idle sacrifice of historical 
 truth." 1 
 
 One can readily believe this, for surely no writer was 
 ever more the reverse of systematic than Kenelm Digby. 
 The Catholic Church, as Pascal says of ' Nature,' " has 
 perfections to show that she is the image of God, and 
 defects, in order to show that she is only his image." 
 One can lay more stress upon the perfections without 
 being a system-maker. 
 
 The Broadstone of Honour (to return from this digres- 
 sion), as revised, extended, and pubhshed in 1826, 
 appeared in a new edition in 1828, and in another, 
 appearing in four separate parts, between 1844 and 
 1848. A handsome edition in five volumes of 550 copies 
 was printed by Mr. Quaritch, on his own initiative, in 
 1877, three years before Kenelm Digby died, and then 
 sold very slowly. The romantic movement of the 
 age-spirit, strong in England, France and Germany 
 during the first half of the nineteenth century, had died 
 away, and natural science and the idea of evolution 
 and continual automatic progress from the worse to the 
 better were now dominant. But this scientific tide 
 touched high-water mark towards the close of the nine- 
 teenth century, and has since been ebbing, and men 
 may be more wilhng to turn again now, with a difference, 
 to the side of life of which Kenelm Digby was an 
 •erponent. Generosity, sweetness, humility, peace of 
 heart and mind, unambitious simplicity, obedience and 
 
 ^ Chap. xvii. 
 
76 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 loyalty in religion and social life, beauty and reverence 
 in manners and in worship, chivalrous treatment of 
 opponents, realized unity through membership of a 
 visible and organic Church common to all and diffused 
 throughout all nations — it is possible that before long 
 ideas of this kind will appeal far more strongly to men 
 and women than they did in the nineteenth century. 
 
 The Broadstone of Honour consists of four parts, 
 named respectively Godefridus, Tancredus, Moms, and 
 Orlandus. The first two are so named after the heroes 
 of the Crusades, the third after the Catholic martyr. 
 Sir Thomas More. The main object of the book is ta 
 describe the heroic and chivalrous spirit, intimately 
 bound up with the rehgious faith, as it appeared in the 
 Middle Ages. But in Morus and in part of Orlandus 
 are stated those undeniable facts about the Protestant 
 Revolution in England, and on the Continent, the public 
 exhibition of which gave so much offence to the excellent 
 Rector of Hurstmonceaux. In one of his latest works,, 
 written when he was over seventy, Digby admits that 
 in his youth he wrote things in religious controversy 
 possibly too wounding to others, and expressed more 
 strongly than he would have expressed them in old age. 
 This is a very common reflection in old age concerning 
 ardent and intolerant youth, which has the defects of 
 its qualities. All the same, in England, in these days, 
 it is well to be definite and lucid in order to avoid 
 misinterpretation. From his early youth till the end 
 of his very long life Kenelm Digby never wavered for 
 one moment in his definition of the CathoKc Church. 
 It is, for him, that religious society existing throughout 
 the world, of unbroken historic continuity, and consisting 
 of people of all nations and languages, which is visibly,. 
 
" THE BROADSTONE OF HONOUR " 77 
 
 avowedly, and organically connected with the central 
 Apostohc See at Rome, and it is nothing either more or 
 less than this. In his eyes this society was identical 
 with the Catholic Church to which his favourite author 
 St. Augustine of Africa was converted, or re-converted. 
 Digby was as willing as St. Augustine to admit and 
 praise that which was good in individual character 
 outside this one CathoHc Church, nor for a moment would 
 he have said that the moral division between good and 
 bad coincided, or had ever anything like coincided, 
 with the division between Cathohc and non-Catholic 
 people, although he did believe that the former, however 
 imperfectly, followed true central principles, and that 
 the latter were good notwithstanding that they followed 
 untrue, or only partially true, principles. He never 
 admitted the assertion made by some moderns that the 
 Cathohc Church consists of " all who profess and call 
 themselves Christians," or the more exclusive assertion 
 made by other moderns that it consists of an imagined 
 combination of certain Churches having properly de- 
 scended episcopal institutions. 
 
 Tlie Broadstone of Honour is a book aUve with all the 
 noble virtues of youth. It might, perhaps, even now, 
 if repubhshed, be more popular than Digby's other 
 works, for it is written in a style which is more vigorous 
 and concentrated and has more movement in it. He 
 had not yet fully developed the use, not constant indeed 
 but frequent, of those very long and parenthetic sentences 
 which, though common in the great writers of Christian 
 antiquity, and in those of the seventeenth century 
 such as Milton, and Clarendon, and Hooker, and Jeremy 
 Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, had been abandoned 
 in the nineteenth century by almost every writer except 
 
78 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 John Ruskin in his earlier works, who undoubtedly 
 modelled his flowing style on Hooker. There is a 
 certain affinity between the earher Digby and the 
 earlier Ruskin, although Ruskin is the greater stylist. 
 Neither of them could write verse really well, although 
 both copiously essayed to do so. The reason is that 
 poetry is the opposite to oratorical eloquence. Its 
 essence is concentration and speed, the saying as much 
 as possible in the fewest words, and both Ruskin and 
 Digby were naturally diffuse. They both were writers 
 of poetic prose, and ardent handlers of the pencil and 
 paint-brush. In their way of looking at things there 
 was also, with all their differences, much resemblance 
 between them, and no doubt the thoughts and books of 
 Digby, who was the older by twenty years, influenced 
 Ruskin. 
 
 Digby much admired and very often quotes Ruskin 
 in his later works, and Ruskin in all his voluminous 
 writings makes one single but remarkable reference ta 
 Digby. It is in Modern Painters, in the section, entitled 
 " Vulgarity," in which he very finely analyses the 
 character of the " gentleman," and distinguishes it 
 from that of the " vulgar " man.* He says in a footnote, 
 " the reader will find every phase of nobleness illustrated 
 in Kenelm Digby' s Broadstone of Honour. The best 
 help I have ever had — so far as help depended on the 
 sympathy or praise of others in work which, year after 
 year, it was necessary to pursue through the abuse of 
 the brutal and the base — was given me, when this 
 author, from whom I had first learned to love nobleness, 
 introduced frequent reference to my own writings in 
 his Children's Bower.'' 
 
 ^ Modern Painters, vol. v. chap. ix. 
 
" THE BROADSTONE OF HONOUR " 79 
 
 Perhaps Digby's titles, the Lover's Seat, the Chapel 
 of St. John, the Children's Bower, suggested to Ruskin 
 the charming titles of his own later minor pubUcations. 
 The Children's Boiver and the Chapel of St. John should 
 have been enough to convince Ruskin that the religion 
 which had inspired Dante and Era Angehco and Giotto 
 and Bellini was not, as he and Carlyle seem to suppose, 
 dead long ago, but, although older and therefore not the 
 same superficially, was still ahve, true to type, and 
 producing its good and noble fruit as ever in the Uves 
 of men and women and children. Ruskin says, in one 
 passage, that after the Reformation " it was no longer 
 possible to attain entire peace of mind, to live calmly 
 and die hopefully." Hundreds of modern instances 
 quoted by Digby should have shown him the exaggera- 
 tion of this statement .1 Meanwhile it is much that 
 Kenelm Digby taught Ruskin to " love nobleness," a 
 lesson which this disciple taught again in his excellent 
 writings to the Enghsh-speaking world, of whom some 
 received the word gladly, while in others the seed went 
 the divers ways of the seed in the Parable. 
 
 The Broadstone of Honour shows a range of reading 
 astonishing in one who was so young as Kenelm Digby 
 when he wrote it. It is true that he had neglected the 
 regular school and university course of education, and 
 such neglect is an immense economy of time, provided 
 that the time so saved is well employed. The Broadstone 
 is not, though perhaps his most charming, Kenelm 
 Digby's greatest work. It is his Mores Catholici that 
 deserves this name. The Broadstone of Honour was, 
 however, for reasons peculiar to the time, more popular 
 
 ^ In a passage of Modem Painters, vol. v. p. 209, Ruskin admits that there 
 are exceptions to his assertion. 
 
so KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 when it first appeared than were any of Digby's later 
 works, and for this reason — just as William Law is 
 always connected with his Serious Call and not with his 
 later more profound and important writings — so Digby 
 is inseparably connected with the words Broadstone of 
 Honour. Few, I am afraid, now living have read this 
 book, but many who have not even heard of any of his 
 later and riper writings vaguely connect its title with 
 the name of Kenelm Digby. 
 
 One tribute to The Broadstone of Honour must have 
 given special pleasure to Digby. Father Scott, the 
 Jesuit who had received him into the Church three years 
 earlier, wrote to him about the volume called Morus, 
 the volume which so much displeased Julius Hare. 
 " I assure you that I never perused a book with so much 
 pleasure as I did yours, and was quite astonished at the 
 immense learning displayed in almost every page." 
 
 Charles Butler, the lawyer, wrote to Digby that 
 the Broadstone was " excellently calculated to serve 
 the cause of honour, Christianity and the Catholic 
 religion," and added : "I desired Colonel Stonor, my 
 son-in-law, to give it to Alban, his son, as the very best 
 book he could possibly place in his hands. Such I really 
 consider it." This praise from a man of sound and solid 
 learning, practical knowledge of the world, and very 
 moderate temper, and unprejudiced way of thinking, was 
 really worth much. 
 
CHAPTEE V 
 
 ENGLISH AND FRENCH SOCIETY 
 
 " 0, SUN and dulcet air of brilliant France, 
 What heart will beat that thou canst not entrance ? 
 Oh yes ! thou dost possess a potent spell ; 
 Though what it is exactly, I can't tell." 
 
 Kenelm Digby, Temple of Memory. 
 
 The Broadstone of Honour achieved a certain fame at 
 the time of its appearance. It was even seen by a 
 friend of Digby lying upon the table of the dignified 
 Dr. Coplestone, Head of Oriel College, Oxford, who, 
 questioned as to its contents, replied, " The design of the 
 author appears to be to revive the principles of loyalty 
 and generosity which are almost extinct among man- 
 kind." The book suited the mood of the time better 
 than his later works suited the mood of Victorian 
 England. It caught the rising tide of romantic reaction 
 which was soon to culminate in the Oxford Movement. 
 Thus Digby's name became known, and, though he 
 did not move, or wish to move, in London intellectual 
 circles, he came across two or three men of note. One 
 was Walter Savage Landor, who lived at Bath from 
 1836 to 1857. Digby calls Landor an " eloquent and 
 truly fearless Sire , " * " thoughtful ' ' and ' ' full of unfeigned 
 and infinite respect for the old CathoUc and Roman 
 Church." Landor, says Digby, often contrasted the 
 
 1 Temple of Memory, Canto VI. 
 
 K.D. 81 V 
 
82 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 easy and unaffected " honte " — we have not exactly 
 that word in English — of Catholic priests and bishops 
 with the character of " ministers who followed the new 
 law," and illustrated his contention by tales of his own 
 experiences in Spain and Italy. Landor would some- 
 times say, with a sigh, that it would be well for himself 
 if he could die like a good Catholic. 
 
 Certainly one would not have imagined this vein 
 of sentiment from Landor's writings, the beauty of which 
 is marred by his numerous and bitter attacks on the 
 Catholic priesthood and religion. But men do not 
 always think exactly as they write. 
 
 Much as Digby differed in opinions from old Landor, 
 the two men really had something in common. Both 
 were quite fearless and independent in their views, both 
 wrote like gentlemen to please themselves and any one 
 else who might like the results, and not to gratify the 
 tastes or serve the prejudices of the " reading public," 
 and, in consequence, the readers of both were few, 
 though select. Each had an immense range of know- 
 ledge in history and Uterature, so that their books are 
 delightful to those whose tastes lie in those regions. 
 Landor was the greater artist, and wrote with a 
 self-control which did not appear in the management 
 of his own affairs. Digby had an Irish discursiveness 
 and loose texture of style, and wrote as the spirit led 
 him, never able to resist a divagation from the high 
 road of his theme. 
 
 Digby also met Wordsworth, " playful though grave," 
 he says, who '' when quoting verses almost seemed to 
 rave, so deeply did he feel the truths he sung." ^ Digby 
 found that Wordsworth also was not really averse to 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto VI. 
 
ENGLISH AND FRENCH SOCIETY 83 
 
 tlie old religion of England. The poet told him that had 
 he lived in an earlier age he himself would have felt the 
 need of and obeyed " that scorned, most ancient creed." 
 Among English Catholics whom he well knew, Digby 
 mentions his own guide, "the holy saint, revered, wise, 
 Father Scott " ; Charles Butler, " skilled in both law 
 and school divinity " ; Bishops Poynter and Bramstone ; 
 Maguire, whose deep, invincible and strong reasoning, 
 skilled to reply to every question, served to make him 
 rise, " quite far from earth, conversant with the skies." 
 Nicholas Wiseman he also knew, the future Cardinal, 
 and restorer of the Catholic hierarchy in England. 
 
 " Musician, artist, poet, sage, and saint, 
 Whom no skilled human hand could justly paint ; 
 Yielding to none in theologic lore, 
 Yet than all schools prosaic knowing more 
 Sweet Heaven's great secrets and the heart of man, 
 Whose depths mysterious he would ever scan." ^ 
 
 In Paris, Kenelm Digby was in touch with a wider 
 and more brilUant circle than in London. There never 
 was better society in Paris than during the thirty years 
 which followed the fall of the first Napoleon. The 
 first half of this period, the fifteen years before the 
 society-dividing Revolution of 1830, was the most 
 pleasing. Under Napoleon there was no free expression 
 of thought. The Restoration of 1814 was a restoration 
 of liberty in thought and action, and it was followed 
 by an outburst of intellectual production. 
 
 In his Temple of Memory Kenelm Digby enumerates 
 some out of the great number of men who at that time 
 adorned literature, science and art : Chateaubriand, 
 Ozanam, de Bonald, de Maistre, Segur, Daru, Custine, 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto VI. 
 
84 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Michelet, Guizot, jVIigny, Thierry, Thiers, were names 
 well known in history and poHtical philosophy. There 
 were excellent scholars in Digby's own mediaeval sub- 
 jects, such as Rochejaquelin, Gallais, Mazas, St. Victor, 
 Gueranger, Fauriel, Marchangy, and others. Bournoulf 
 and Boissonade were mighty scholars in Oriental and 
 Grecian lore. Albert, Prince de BrogUe, was both 
 orator and historian. Ballanche and Victor Cousin, 
 Ste. Beuve, Villemain, De Haller and Jules Janin, shone 
 as critics and philosophers. Joubert was a critic of 
 supreme taste. Among the poets were Lamartine, 
 Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny, 
 Beranger ; among the novehsts Dumas, Karr, the young 
 Balzac — 
 
 " Balzac himself had breathed that epoch's air, 
 With whom, though later, no one could compare." ^ 
 
 Girodet and Gros, Gerard and Ingres, Horace Vernet, 
 Eugene Delacroix, Paul de la Roche were distinguished 
 painters. Never has there been in France, not even 
 under Louis XIV., a more lively and energetic con- 
 stellation of intellect. 
 
 Digby describes some of his own French friends in 
 the Temple of Memory. One was the " white-haired " 
 M. Chevalier, who had been secretary to Talleyrand 
 in the days of the Directorate, and had tales of the 
 Revolution, curious or horrible, one of them singularly 
 horrible. Digby knew well the Comte de Montalembert, 
 and Lacordaire, the Dominican, of whom he says, 
 remembering his Conferences at Notre Dame : 
 
 " It is the holy, gentle Lacordaire, 
 Whose words of flame did fire my youthful breast, 
 In whose remembrance fond my age would rest. 
 
 ^Temple of Manor y, Canto VII. 
 
ENGLISH AND FRENCH SOCIETY 85 
 
 For where, oh where else could you ever find 
 Such neutral tints of thought, so deep and kind, 
 That while the holy Christians would admire 
 To hear him speak no sinners e'er would tire, 
 As if 'twas them he loved on earth the best 
 And hoped they'd be for ever with the blest." ^ 
 
 Among bishops and priests of his acquaintance he 
 mentions Forbin de Janson, the nobly-born and saintly- 
 souled Bishop of Nancy ; Olivier, cure of St. Roch, and 
 afterwards Bishop of Evreux, and Affre, who in 1848 
 was to be the martyred Archbishop of Paris. With 
 him Kenelm Digby often walked conversing through 
 the old forest of St. Germain. Another great friend of 
 Digby in Paris was Coimt Peter Yermoloff, a convert 
 to the Catholic from the Russian Church, who told him 
 stories of the persecution of converts by the Russian 
 Government. 
 
 Digby frequented the salon of another Russian 
 convert, that woman of strong and sohd mind, Madame 
 Swetchine. Here he met men Hke Lacordaire, Lamartine, 
 Bonetty, Ozanam. One friend of his was Jules Janin, 
 of the French Academy, an excellent writer and student 
 of the eighteenth century. He knew also the historian 
 Michelet, much of whose history he admired, while 
 deploring his bitter anti-Cathohc spirit. Michelet indeed 
 felt the charm of Catholicism, though his reasoning 
 condemned it. It gave pleasure to Digby that Michelet 
 once quoted and praised the Mores Catholici in a lecture 
 to a great class of students at Paris. Ste. Beuve, Victor 
 Cousin, Guizot and Thierry were also moving in these 
 circles. Kenelm Digby knew also the old Chateaubriand, 
 whom he first beheld at earhest mass at six o'clock in 
 a church of Paris, on the day of St. Ignatius. Afterwards 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto VTI. 
 
86 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 he used sometimes to meet him. Chateaubriand saw 
 in the young Enghshman a saddening rejlection of his 
 own earher enthusiasm for the romantic and chivalric 
 side of CathoHc hfe. He told Digby dejectedly that 
 the Broadstone of Honour seemed to be a " mere ana- 
 chronism," only suited to dreaming youth. Words 
 of a man disillusioned by age, firmly though he held 
 to the central faith. He told Digby that he mistook his 
 own Age, and that now it was not possible to paint 
 Faith and Honour, the theme agreed so little with its 
 demands, and so little he feared with that which a later 
 generation would require. Chateaubriand, at last so 
 infirm that he had to be daily carried up into the 
 salon of the now bhnd Madame de Recamier, lived just 
 long enough to hear the cannon of June, 1848, and then 
 ended his insatiable and never-satisfied life. Forty 
 years earher he had been the most brilhant Genius 
 and she the chief Beauty of France. Chateaubriand 
 in his later years was overwhelmed by the ennui and 
 melancholy which had always been the foundation of 
 his character. He saw the romantic movement which 
 he had led under the Empire fading away in the utili- 
 tarian age of common sense. When he was ambassador 
 in London in 1822 he wrote : 
 
 '' Burke retint la politique de I'Angleterre dans le 
 passe ; Walter Scott refoula les Anglais jusqu'au 
 moyen age ; tout ce qu'on ecrivit, fabriqua, batit, 
 fut gothique ; hvres, meubles, maisons, eglises, cha- 
 teaux. Mais les lords de la Grande Charte sont 
 aujourd'hui les fashionables de Bond street, race frivole 
 qui campe dans les manoirs antiques, en attendant 
 I'arrivee des generations nouvelles qui s'appretent a les 
 en chasser." ^ 
 
 ^ If /moires cPOutre-Tombe. 
 
ENGLISH AND FRENCH SOCIETY 87 
 
 Christian and Catholic — this Chateaubriand became 
 more and more profoundly, but from all enthusiasms, 
 to attempt to revive the Past among them, he returned. 
 " Voici ce qui m'est arrive," he wrote in 1841, in his 
 old age. " Voici ce qui m'est arrive ; de mes projets, 
 de mes etudes, de mes experiences, il ne m'est reste 
 qu'un detromper complet de toutes les choses que pour- 
 suit le monde. Ma conviction religieuse, en grandissant, 
 a devore mes autres convictions ; il n'est ici-bas Chretien 
 plus croyant et homme plus incredule que moi." ^ At this 
 stage Chateaubriand was when Kenelm Digby talked 
 to him in Paris, and one can well understand the feeling 
 with which he saw the enthusiastic young Englishman 
 who stood where he himself had been for a brief space. 
 No race is more free from illusions than the French, and 
 no Frenchman was ever more free from illusions than 
 the sincere and noble-minded Chateaubriand. Kenelm 
 Digby himself, as he grew older, was, like most of us, 
 a little disenchanted, and he certainly learned, since 
 few people would read or notice his later books, that, as 
 Chateaubriand had warned him, he was writing for an 
 Age almost deaf to his appeal. Tasso says in one of his 
 wonderful sonnets : 
 
 " The Chief I sang and the arms which, moved by 
 piety, tore away from impious folk the sacred land in 
 which Christ suffered death and made immortal our 
 humanity ; and so clear was the sound that this Age 
 returned to admire the ancient honour, but my song 
 drove neither foot nor horse to camp beyond the Taurus, 
 beyond the Euphrates. Nor know I whether it caught 
 up to heaven beautiful spirits, but often he who heard 
 my notes coloured with pious affection. Me then 
 
 ^ M^moires d'Outre-Tombe. 
 
88 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 certainly my song bore away, and some word from 
 heaven inspired me, or a muse, or other goddess ; 
 Ah ! may it ever inspire me, and fill my breast with 
 itself." 
 
 So Chateaubriand for a brief space had made France 
 return to the thought of religion and chivalry, and so, 
 in a less degree, had Digby touched some hearts in 
 England, but the influence died away before the modern 
 rush of other ideas and aims. And yet the influence 
 did not die, but streamed on in a narrower channel, and 
 will, we may trust, yet again, confined between less 
 steep and rocky banks, expand into a wide and noble 
 river. 
 
 Ste. Beuve remarks that the great literary movement 
 which followed the restoration of the French Monarchy 
 in 1815 was the result of a CathoHc and Chivalrous 
 reaction. 
 
 " It has often been observed," he says, " that a striking 
 disaccordance exists between the advanced political 
 principles of certain men and their literary principles 
 obstinately fixed. The Liberals and RepubHcans have 
 always shown themselves as strictly classic in literary 
 theory, while from their opponents have come the 
 poetical innovations and the brilUant and successful 
 audacity." 
 
 Perhaps man instinctively feels that he cannot let 
 himself go free in all directions at once. Thus those 
 who hold the ancient faith may be the most adven- 
 turous in other directions. 
 
 The Comte de Montalembert was a true friend 
 of Digby. When the fifth volume of Mores Catholici 
 appeared in 1834, he wrote, on Christmas Eve, in 
 EngUsh : 
 
ENGLISH AND FRENCH SOCIETY 89 
 
 " I have been reading your fifth Book with the most 
 heartfelt dehght in a place well worthy of such a lecture, 
 in the newly established Monastery of Solesmes. Accept 
 my best thanks for such a noble homage to our faith 
 and our glories." 
 
 When Montalembert was kept in Paris by his last 
 illness Digby, visiting him, said that he hoped next 
 time to find him in the country. " Dites dans ma vraie 
 patrie — 'tis there alone I wish to go," said Montalembert. 
 Another friend throughout hfe was the Comte d'Esgrigny, 
 at whose Breton chateau Digby often stayed. Another 
 was the Marquis de Montaigu of La Bretesche, in the 
 same region. 
 
 " In whose proud castle he could often feel 
 At home, as perfect ease would quite reveal, 
 Amidst a circle beautiful and gay 
 In which a month would seem a summer's day, 
 While to them both alike he then did owe 
 His thorough knowledge of the French chateau, 
 Most sweet remembrance, like a potent charm 
 To chase all foolish thoughts which mortals harm ; 
 In fact a kind of close initiation 
 Into the noble manners of a nation, 
 That, while to all the graces ever given, 
 Has never lost in fine the thought of Heaven." ^ 
 
 Digby says elsewhere that in this Restoration period 
 one could see in France the Christian family in its per- 
 fection, free from domestic quarrels, dignified, cheerful 
 and peaceful, entirely devoid of affectation, pride and 
 ambition. 
 
 " Such were the manners of the French chateau, 
 Provincial nobles to the last were so, 
 As when at Klin near Guerand he once knew 
 The kind Du Minchys, and their portraits drew. 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto Yl. 
 
90 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 For many were tlie types it offered there, 
 The sons so courteous, and the daughters fair, 
 And fair with that inimitable grace 
 In which no consciousness of art you trace ; 
 The matrons worthy of your veneration, 
 And yet so gay you felt but admiration ; 
 The father loving country life so well, 
 Content with goodness ever there to dwell," ^ 
 
 Nothing, perhaps, is better in the way of mankind 
 than a French gentleman who is also a true Christian. 
 
 Kenelm Digby married in 1834 (as will be told in a 
 future chapter) a wife intimately connected, although 
 not French but Irish, with the Catholic and Royalist 
 Society of France. She spoke French with perfection 
 and grace. The rooms which they had at different 
 times in Paris, down to the year 1848, at 22 Rue de la 
 Ville L'Eveque, at the Rond Point of the Champs 
 Elysees, in the Place Vendome, and in the Rue Tronchet, 
 became a resort of many friends. His wife would not 
 have thought of herself as having a " salon," and yet 
 says Kenelm Digby : 
 
 " She could not, while in Paris, prevent people from 
 being attracted by goodness of heart and nobleness 
 of soul. There was then the natural foundation of a 
 true salon, which springs up of itself, and is the result 
 of habit, and not of premeditation. Though she did 
 not seek the pleasure of great receptions, no one, in an 
 innocent way, enjoyed them more. Her mind and 
 manners, though perfectly natural as belonged to her 
 condition, had a certain vivacity which was ever 
 restrained by an exquisite politeness always negligent 
 and always distinguished. Her drawing-room was 
 neither a narrow conventicle, nor a literary coterie, nor 
 a, philosophical school, nor a political circle, nor a worldly 
 
 ^ Temple of Memory, Canto VII. 
 
ENGLISH AND FRENCH SOCIETY 91 
 
 assembly. Excepting as far as politeness required she 
 seemed anxious to be unregarded herself, and to draw 
 out others. It was her object, through kindness to 
 her guests, always in her own house to have the con- 
 versation kept up, but never to engross it. She was 
 the soul of the company, not their doctor or their 
 patroness. Her house, at other times, solely in conse- 
 quence of her own influence, was leisure, recovery of 
 health, freedom for all, gaiety for some, reverie and 
 calm study for others. Her evening receptions did not 
 differ much from those of a protracted visit of days ; 
 for every one felt quite at home, and at ease, and com- 
 fortable and secure, where she presided. She would 
 always have her table elegantly, but not expensively 
 maintained, and she liked to have her rooms brilliant 
 with lamps and tapers." ^ 
 
 Enghsh women are often too shy and self-conscious 
 to be the best kind of hostess, and French women are 
 sometimes too sparkling and clever. Perhaps no one 
 €an be the soul of a pleasant and easy social circle so well 
 as an Irish woman with a French education. 
 
 " Disputes in her society," says Digby, " were left 
 to die out of themselves, and that was quickly. . . . 
 Hers was the tone of that kind of society in which there 
 is nothing sharp or cutting ; no colUsions, no noise. . . . 
 However there were shades to come over even her 
 innocent brightness ; so true it is that to whatever 
 shelter one fhes, no one here below can pass his life in 
 absolute peace and repose. PoHtical debates would creep 
 in imperceptibly. Accustomed and wilhng to hear 
 discussed the dearest prospects of England along with 
 those of Christianity, she recoiled from the vain turmoil 
 of mere earthly comphcations, and in Paris she was to 
 be fatigued by the conflict, when her best friends were 
 
 1 Chapel of St. John, p. 137. 
 
92 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 defending, step by step, that alluvial soil regained hy 
 the house of Bourbon from the revolution of 1789." 
 
 At that time Conservative people used to talk of la 
 Liberte as if agreeing with Jules Janin, who said of it, 
 " C'est un gros homme en tilbury." Mrs, Digby was 
 condemned to hear oftener than she liked of Chambers 
 and ministers, of journals and new pamphlets. Even 
 in those quiet salons people at that time used to feel 
 uneasy about the emeute. 
 
 " They used to ask, ' What day will be the next 
 revolution ? Will there be scaffolds, or will pillage 
 content them ? ' At last events arrived to verify many 
 fears, but of these disasters, which profoundly affected 
 her, for she shed tears when she heard the Republic 
 proclaimed beneath her window, it is not necessary for 
 me to speak. But while all the divisions, all the struggles 
 which preceded the revolution of '48, had Uving echoes 
 in her drawing-room, where the graver events of 1830 
 had left a poignant memory, her society presented an 
 asylum of comparative peace and cheerfulness which 
 was not easily found elsewhere. She could accommodate 
 herself to the most opposite characters, detect the good 
 side in each, and excuse what was weak. People that 
 would never have met elsewhere found a point of union 
 with her company, and she would never suffer any one, 
 however less agreeable to others, to leave her presence 
 sHghted or discouraged." * 
 
 This could not easily be achieved in Paris between 
 1830 and 1848, because the unfortunate and unchivalrous 
 acceptance by Louis-Philippe of the throne of which 
 the elder branch of his house had been violently dis- 
 possessed, introduced a schism into the royalist and 
 
 * Chapel of St. John. 
 
ENGLISH AND FRENCH SOCIETY 93 
 
 Catholic society in which the Digbys hved. Chateau- 
 briand, at the fatal moment in 1830, advised Louis- 
 PhiHppe not to accept the throne, but to act as Regent 
 for the child, Henry V., in whose favour Charles X. had 
 now abdicated ; but, he says, he saw " in the eyes of 
 Louis-Phihppe," as he spoke, " the desire to be king." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 " MORES CATHOLICI " 
 
 " They find themselves compelled to look around for some great 
 bond of fellowship which may embrace all who love order and free- 
 dom, light and justice ; all men of every climate, and language, and 
 people." 
 
 Kenelm Digby, Broadstone of Honour, " Godefridus." 
 
 I 
 
 In 1829, or 1830, while Kenelm Digby was living partly 
 at Cambridge and partly at St. Germain on the Seine, 
 he began to compose the longest and greatest work of 
 his hfe, the Mores Catholici, or " Ages of Faith," and was 
 engaged upon it for the next ten years. ^ He wrote it 
 between his thirtieth and fortieth year, in the age when 
 men best combine vigour with experience. From the 
 age of little over twenty to the age of nearly eighty 
 Digby wrote very continuously, besides painting or 
 copying in an amateur way a multitude of pictures, to 
 give to churches, so that he cannot be accused of the 
 mortal sin of sloth. It will be convenient here to give 
 a chronological list of his published works : 
 
 I. PROSE PERIOD 
 
 Published 
 
 Evidences of the Christian Religion, Norrisian Prize Essay - 1820 
 
 Broadstone of Honour — 1st edition ----- 1822 
 
 2ud edition, much revised and enlarged - - - 1826 
 
 3rd „ 1828 
 
 ^ The title was probably suggested by St. Augustine's treatise called 
 De Moribus Ecclesiae CathoUcae. 
 
 94 
 
MORES CATHOLICI " 95 
 
 es Catholici — 
 
 
 
 
 PublisLed 
 
 1st volume - 
 
 - 1831 
 
 7th volume 
 
 . 1836 
 
 2nd „ 
 
 - 1832 
 
 8th 
 
 >> 
 
 - 1837 
 
 3rd „ 
 
 - 1833 
 
 9th 
 
 >> 
 
 - 1839 
 
 4th „ 
 
 - 1833 
 
 10th 
 
 >> 
 
 - 1840 
 
 5th „ 
 
 - 1834 
 
 nth 
 
 )> 
 
 - 1842 
 
 6th „ 
 
 - 1835 
 
 
 
 
 Between 1844 and 1848 came out a new edition of 
 fifty-five copies of Mores Catholici, and also the revised 
 edition of the Broadstone of Honour in four volumes.^ 
 He then began 
 
 Compitum — 
 
 1st volume - - 1849 5th volume - - 1851 
 
 2nd „ - - 1849 6th „ - - 1852 
 
 3rd „ - - 1850 7th „ - - 1854 
 
 4th „ - - 1850 
 
 Lovers'. Seat, 2 vols. 1856 
 
 Children's Bower, 2 vols. - - 1858 
 
 Chapel of St. John, 1 vol. 1861 
 
 Evenings on the Thames, 2 vols. 1864 
 
 II. VERSE PERIOD 
 
 Short Poems ' - 1865 
 
 A Datj on the Muses' Hill - 1867 
 
 Little Loio Bushes 1869 
 
 Halcyon Hours 1870 
 
 Ouranogaia, 2 vols. 1872 
 
 Last Year's Leaves, including poems published in 1872 under 
 
 title Hours ivith the Falling Leaves . . . - 187S 
 
 Temple of Memory 1875 
 
 Epilogue to Previous Worhs in Prose and Verse - - - 1876 
 
 ^ The Mores Catholici and Compitum were printed by Rivingtona and 
 sold by Joseph Dolman of Bond Street, The Chapel of St. John by 
 T. Richardson of 'Paternoster Row. Messrs. Longman & Green published 
 the Lovers' Seat, Children's Bower, Evenings on the Thames, and Temple 
 of Memory. Edward Lumley, of Chancery Lane, published the 1844-48 
 edition of Broadstone of Honour, and Mr. Quaritch the edition of 1877. 
 
96 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Quaritcli's edition in five volumes of tlie Broadstone 
 of Honour was published in 1877, and Kenelm Digby 
 died in 1880. 
 
 Digby published all his works at his own risk and 
 cost. It is a melancholy reflection that while a smart 
 novel brings in large profits to authors and publishers, 
 and dull biographies of uninteresting political or ecclesi- 
 astical persons pay their way, a book like Mores Caiholici 
 can only get published if the author is rich enough 
 to meet most of the cost. Digby has had more honour 
 in the United States than in his own country, for an 
 edition of Mores Catholici was produced at Cincinnati 
 in the year 1905. 
 
 He frequently indicated at the beginning of a volume 
 some Catholic charity or purpose, to which all the money 
 produced by the sale, not only any profits, but the 
 total receipts, would be applied. The receipts would 
 probably in every case have failed to meet the cost of 
 pubHcation, had he chosen to use them for that purpose. 
 The buying public was not large. Digby 's books were 
 opposed to all the ideas and tastes of the rationalist 
 and utihtarian Liberals, so much in the ascendant 
 during the nineteenth century ; they were entirely 
 objectionable to thorough-going Protestants, and were 
 not in one main respect acceptable to the Oxford School, 
 since Digby denied their special theory, and book-buying 
 CathoHcs were neither numerous nor wealthy. Most 
 reviewing journals were silent as to his works. Many 
 less learned readers must have been deterred by the 
 numerous quotations in Latin and Greek, of which 
 Digby does not usually supply translations. His method 
 of bringing out Mores Catholici and Compitum by a 
 volume or two at a time was most unfavourable to 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 97 
 
 sales, and also has had the result of making it difficult 
 to procure complete copies of either work. This method 
 is also the best way in which to escape notice, for, after 
 the first volume or two, reviewers are naturally dis- 
 inclined to take up the topic afresh. 
 
 It would be excellent, if the eleven long volumes of 
 the Mores Catholici, at least, could now be republished 
 in England, but no pubHsher would undertake this at 
 his own risk, as a commercial venture, and so, unless a 
 patron intervenes, this immense storehouse of wisdom 
 and beauty and knowledge must remain in the possession 
 of the few who are lucky enough to possess complete 
 copies. The same may be said of Compitum, which is 
 really a continuation of the Mores. Republication is 
 the more needed, since neither of these works (except in 
 the scarce edition de luxe of 55 copies of the Mores 
 Catholici printed 1845-48) was printed in type large or 
 well-spaced enough to be agreeable to the eyes of men 
 and women in mature Hfe or old age, the readers, perhaps, 
 who would most appreciate them. A well-printed 
 edition would be almost sufficient literature for advanced 
 old age, so much do these works contain suitable to that 
 autumnal and meditative season. It is tantaUsing to 
 think how easily a wealthy man could republish the 
 Mores Catholici with money often applied to less useful 
 benevolent objects. Would that these words could 
 inspire some such benefactor with the idea ! It would 
 be a gift to the CathoHc Church and to all those who 
 love noble Hterature. 
 
 Digby's books are not in the form of continuous history 
 or reasoning, and may fairly be accused of being too 
 discursive, but one advantage of this is that one can 
 take them up at any time, and open them on any page, 
 
98 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 and read in them for a short time or a long equally. 
 In this way I have read them for twenty years or 
 more, with refreshment and consolation, and never have 
 fomid them stale or wearisome. I know, however, how 
 much tastes differ, and I can quite well imagine people 
 of a different type of mind, even those in sympathy, who 
 might be almost unable to read writing of this kind. 
 The books, even more in style than in substance, were 
 out of harmony with the spirit of the age in which they 
 appeared. Never was there a writer more independent 
 of public opinion, or less obsequious to its fashion, than 
 Kenelm Digby. 
 
 Catholics, notwithstanding any difficulty of this kind, 
 should read the works of Kenelm Digby, because by 
 them they will learn to take a wide and noble view of 
 their own religion and be greatly confirmed in their 
 allegiance. They will learn, while holding to it with the 
 utmost strength, and without concessions on essential 
 matters, to look generously and charitably on those 
 outside the central Church. It is possible to be a strong, 
 unyielding, and yet quite friendly opponent, and those 
 who possess the most definite and lucid conception of 
 their own cause will feel and give rise to less exasperation 
 than those whose minds are not clear and firm. 
 
 II 
 
 Digby says that the idea of the book Mores Caiholici 
 first entered his mind at Vespers in a monastic church, 
 and at the close of the work he recalls this in a passage 
 of fine unmetred poetry, for life to him was a poem. 
 
 " Reader, you may remember that it was on the day 
 when souls are kindled, as the flame of embers is en- 
 livened at the breathing of the wind, on the day of All 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 99 
 
 Saints, and as the sun, then entering the eighth degree 
 of Scorpio, was sinking to its bed, that we began this 
 journey back in contemplation through past ages. 
 After leaving the church, my insatiate eyes had travelled 
 to the spangled firmament, where the stars, in magnitude 
 and lustre, shining forth with more than wonted glory, 
 seemed to declare the beatitude of those whose justice 
 was an effluence of Him whose seat is thus inlaid with 
 thick-studded gems. These planets, to which the sun 
 appears so much more glorious than he does from our 
 own earth, globes in which his heat is so intense, which 
 move with such amazing velocity that the Greeks even 
 gave them the name of divine messengers ; some so 
 near the sun as to be seldom visible, being lost in the 
 effulgence of its rays ; others more remote, alternately 
 rising in the morning and in the evening ; but, whether 
 bringing Hght or love, constantly turned towards the 
 source of their illumination — these stupendous bodies, 
 moving thus in such obedience, and contributing to the 
 happiness of beings so remote as men, seemed to invite 
 the mind to continue meditating on those living 
 splendours, that see face to face Him who is the Hght 
 of all intelhgence, that glow with flames of love pro- 
 portionate to their distance from its everlasting fountain, 
 and that, by its sweet influence, are to their ever constant 
 swiftness winged, impelled by Him that moves the 
 sun in heaven and all the stars. In Ages of Faith men 
 witnessed order in the Church resembhng such as in 
 these stars is seen. That evening, that I first conceived 
 this work, the moon, then in the twenty-sixth degree 
 of Taurus, was nearly half-illumined, as her sixteenth 
 day would indicate, and in the sky all night. I remember 
 it well, for she did me good service in the gloom of the 
 deep wood through which I had to journey. When 
 the monks left the choir, the sun had already touched 
 the forest on the plain beneath, and ere I left the cloister, 
 through its broad arches could be traced some pale 
 splendours. Capella and Cassiopeia lay over the north- 
 
100 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 east ; the Pleiads nearer to the Orient, Aquila towards 
 the south by west, and Cygnus nearly over-head. Lyra 
 was fainter in the west ; while the Great Bear paced 
 his circle in the north-west. When I rode forth, some 
 I had watched were sunk, and others risen in their 
 stead. The Twins and Orion towards the north-west 
 with undulating glance played along the horizon, the 
 Belt just rising below Aldebaran ; the Bear was mounting 
 to the Pole. Before I pulled the rein it was midnight, 
 and still increase of beauty. Orion fired the south-east 
 nearly half-way from the earth to the summit of heaven's 
 concave ; the Pleiads moved aloft verging to the 
 south. Sirius and Pegasus had caught my gaze. Asso- 
 ciated in my memory with that eve of All Saints and 
 vigil of the dead, when the first thought of this long 
 history darted across my mind, I can thus easily recall 
 their places as they wheeled through the serene air 
 from fall of night till the twelfth hour, star by side of 
 star, and now, after ten solar circles, the inclination of 
 the axle on which our world spins ever night and day 
 recalls the same great solemnities of the Church, and 
 again she chants her own beatitude, as truly blessed 
 mother. But while our earth has been performing these 
 revolutions through the unimaginable space, while spirits 
 beyond number have been added to that crowd above, 
 and we, still journeying through the obscure atmosphere 
 of mortal creatures, have been enjoying deeper and 
 deeper insight into the manners and events of past ages, 
 accumulating proofs with every change of position 
 produced by the silent flight of time, the circuit of our 
 vision widening from day to day, causing increase of 
 beauty and of wonder since those first vespers, when we 
 heard sung, ' quam gloriosum est regnum in quo cum 
 Christo gaudent omnes sancti ' ; while heaven as well 
 as earth has thus participated in the advance of years, 
 it seems as if for us time had been stationary, the one 
 All Hallows lasting without interruption while we were 
 composing the works which were to illustrate it, as when 
 
'' MORES CATHOLICI" ; . ;. : :101 
 
 the brief space of another holy season sufficed for that 
 mysterious voyage to the three worlds which the monarch 
 of celestial poesy describes. ... It is that, when high 
 and glorious themes have seized the faculties with 
 sensations of delight, time passes, and a man perceives 
 it not." 
 
 And on the last page of the Mores Digby says : 
 
 '' The anthems for the festival of All Saints which, 
 first suggested this course of historical inquiry, may be 
 repeated as the best conclusion, and with the voice 
 of holy choirs let us end. ' Admirabile est nomen tuum, 
 Domine, quia gloria et honore coronasti sanctos tuos. 
 Domine, spes sanctorum, et turris fortitudinis eorum, 
 dedisti hereditatem timentibus nomen tuum, et habita- 
 bunt in tabernaculo tuo in saecula.' " ^ 
 
 Mores CatJiolici is a book of great dimensions based 
 upon a very simple ground-scheme. Digby takes the 
 eight beatitudes named in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 and shows by a multitude of citations in what ways 
 each of them was realized in practice, at least in some 
 degree, in the Ages of Faith, the Faith which though 
 still continuing, was, he thinks, broken and diminished 
 by, and since, the religious revolution of the sixteenth 
 century. The eight Beatitudes are these : 
 
 1 . Blessed are the poor in spirit ; for theirs is the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 2. Blessed are the meek ; for they shall possess the land. 
 
 3. Blessed are they that mourn ; for they shall be comforted. 
 
 4. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice ; for they 
 shall be filled. 
 
 5. Blessed are the merciful ; for they shall obtain mercy. 
 
 6. Blessed are the clean in heart ; for they shall see God. 
 
 ^ " Admirable is thy name, Lord, because thou hast crowned thy saints 
 with glory and honour. Lord ! hope of the saints, and tower of their 
 strength, thou hast given the inheritance to those who revere thy name, 
 and they shall dwell in thy tent for ever." 
 
102 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 7. Blessed are the peace-makers ; for they shall be called the 
 children of God. 
 
 8. Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice sake ; 
 for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 These were ideals laid down by an Authority as to 
 whose divine nature there was then, among professed 
 Christians, no doubt or question raised, at any rate, in 
 a pubHc way. They were the ideals of humility, mild- 
 ness, penitence, justice, mercy, purity, peacefulness, 
 endurance of wrong. Digby shows how in rude ages of 
 nations slowly issuing from the pride, savagery, coarse- 
 ness, lust, intemperance, cruelty and love of fighting 
 characteristic of barbarians, these ideals were powerfully 
 and steadily upheld by the Cathohc Church, and did 
 really largely prevail and leaven every part of life, 
 industry, government, the family, the schools, the fine 
 arts, literature, the professions, and even war. The 
 success was within limits, and the Protestant Reforma- 
 tion was, in a sense, a revolt of the still only partially 
 tamed Teutonic tribes, in these islands and in all 
 northern Europe, against the spiritual Roman Empire, 
 wliich had for a while suffered from its own success 
 and prosperity. But the true principles of the Sermon 
 on the Mount remained in the Catholic Church, what- 
 ever may have been the faults or lapses of many of 
 its children, and they were revived by the northern 
 storm, while the Reformation movement swept onwards 
 towards regions still further remote from the central 
 principles and the realm of peace. 
 
 At the beginning of Mores Catholici Digby says of 
 the view which he recommends to his readers : 
 
 " Such a view would present a varied and immense 
 horizon, comprising the manners, institutions, and spirit 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 103 
 
 of many generations of men long gone by ; we should 
 see in what manner the whole type and form of life 
 were Christian, although its detail may often have been 
 broken and disordered ; for instance, how the pursuits 
 of the learned, the consolations of the poor, the riches 
 of the Church, the exercises and dispositions of the 
 young, and the common hope and consolation of all 
 men, harmonized with the character of those who 
 sought to be poor in spirit ; how again, the principle of 
 obedience, the constitution of the Church, the division 
 of ministration, and the rule of government, the manners 
 and institutions of society, agreed with meekness and 
 inherited its recompense ; further, how the sufferings 
 of just men, and the provisions for a penitential spirit 
 were in accordance with the state of those that were to 
 mourn and weep ; then, how the character of men in 
 sacred order, the zeal of the laity, and the lives of all 
 ranks, denoted the hunger and thirst after justice ; 
 again, how the institutions, the foundations, and the 
 recognized principle of perfection proclaimed men 
 merciful ; moreover how the philosophy which prevailed, 
 and the spiritual monuments which were raised by piety 
 and genius, evinced the clean of heart ; still further 
 how the union of nations and the bond of peace which 
 existed even amidst savage discord, wars and confusion, 
 as also how the holy retreats for innocence which 
 then everywhere abounded, marked the multitude of 
 pacific men ; and finally, how the advantage taken 
 of dire events and the acts of saintly and heroic fame 
 revealed spirit which shunned not suffering for the sake 
 of justice." 
 
 This sentence summarises the scope of the eleven 
 -crowded volumes of Mores Catholici. Written upon 
 these lines the book is a wonderful collection of sayings 
 and happenings illustrating every side of Hfe during 
 the ages of unbroken ecclesiastical unity in Europe, 
 that is, in all the Christian world save those parts which 
 
104 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 were decaying under the Greek Emperors, or were 
 submerged beneath the flood of Islam. 
 
 Digby, in the Mores Catholici, was in advance of his 
 time in reinstating the intellectual position of the 
 Middle Ages. Fewer people would now speak, like 
 Ernest Kenan, so late as 1883, of " I'effroyable aventure 
 du moyen age, cette interruption de mille ans dans I'his- 
 toire de civilisation." ^ Digby, on the contrary, says, and 
 it is surely the more reasonable and true view that there 
 was no such terrific chasm in intellectual continuity : 
 
 "To a Catholic, not only the philosophical but also 
 the literary history of the world, is prodigiously enlarged ; 
 objects change their relative position, and many are 
 brought into resplendent light, which before were 
 consigned to obscurity. While the moderns continue, 
 age after age, to hear only of the Caesars and the philo- 
 sophers, the Catholic discovers that there lies between 
 the heathen civilization and the present, an entire 
 world, illustrious with every kind of intellectual and 
 moral greatness ; the names which are first upon his 
 tongue are no longer Cicero and Horace, but St. Augustin, 
 St. Bernard, Alcuin, St. Thomas, St. Anselm ; the 
 places associated in his mind with the peace and dignity 
 of learning, are no longer the Lyceum and the Academy, 
 but Citeaux, Cluny, Crowland, or the Oxford of the 
 Middle Ages." ^ 
 
 All this world used to be carefully hidden from the 
 view of Englishmen, and, though it is probably rather 
 better now, certainly so late as the time that I was 
 myself at Eton, there was nothing in the school course 
 to inform a boy that there was any literature or philo- 
 sophy worth notice between Tacitus and Shakespeare. 
 A deep-thinking American waiter has said that the 
 
 ^ Souvenirs de Jeunesse. ^ Mores Catholici, vol. iii. 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 105 
 
 thirteenth century was the European " Age of Pericles." ^ 
 One may certainly ask whether in solidity of learning, 
 and laborious and patient thought, there has not been 
 a gradual decline from that period to this present age 
 of brilliant disintegration, and the same question arises 
 with regard to Art in architecture, painting and sculp- 
 ture. Are we not arriving, that author suggests, at a 
 second edition of the Lower Empire ? 
 
 There was a true appreciation of Mores Catholici in a 
 book, pubUshed in 1838, called Reminiscences of Rome, by 
 an anonymous author who styles himself " A member 
 of the iircadian Academy," an institution of that city. 
 He says : 
 
 " And here let me pay a passing tribute of grateful 
 homage to a philosopher, though to me personally 
 unknown, whose works, redolent with the choicest 
 flowers of religious poesy, have contributed not a Httle 
 to banish the ennui of many a cheerless hour of my 
 existence. In the sublimity of his views the author 
 of Mores Catholici, not unlike his favourite device, 
 the Cross of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, appears 
 to stand isolated and alone in the Republic of Letters. 
 His graphic pen describes scenes so refined, so philo- 
 sophic, and, withal, so devout, as to make the fictitious 
 and guilty episodes of novelists and romance-writers 
 paltry and vulgar in comparison. The holiest imaginings, 
 the purest tendencies, and the noblest aspirings after 
 all that is chaste, love-worthy and true characterize 
 the pages especially of his later productions. The 
 exalted tone- of his religious and moral feeUngs, and the 
 mystic images wherewith he clothes them, added to 
 the not unfrequently eloquent and melodious style of 
 his diction, seize upon the fancy of his reader, and 
 raising it, as it were, upon angelic wings to a sphere 
 
 ^ Brookes Adams, Laiv of Civilizaticm and Decay. 
 
106 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 above this earth, introduces the soul to communion 
 with those purified intelHgences that once adorned his 
 now, alas ! I fear for ever by-gone 'Ages of Faith.' " 
 
 This writer found that Digby's works had power to 
 " banish the ennui of many a cheerless hour." This 
 is most true. From time to time, especially in more 
 advanced years, almost every one must feel a certain 
 taedium vitae. One is, perhaps, unoccupied for the 
 time being, and feels solitary ; yet, as one looks round the 
 books on one's shelves there is none that seems to suit 
 the mood. Then take out a volume of Mores Catholici, 
 or Evenings on the Thames, and the weariness will 
 depart. To read most authors is like hearing one 
 person talk, and as Keats says, " Where's the voice 
 however soft one would hear so very oft ? " But Digby 
 is like a friend who introduces one into a wide circle 
 of charming persons, and these are not one's own co- 
 temporaries, of whose conversation and ideas one may 
 have had enough, but men and women, the elite of all 
 times down to the middle of the nineteenth century, 
 and of many countries. One meets them too in a setting 
 of pleasant places in this country and on the Continent. 
 All these persons belong in some sense or another to 
 the Catholic Church, because if they are pre-Christians 
 or non- Catholics, they are only quoted when they express 
 Catholic wisdom or feeling. Adversaries are, indeed, 
 quoted, but only as shades against which the Catholic 
 beauty stands out in rehef. Read for an hour, and 
 your weariness will have passed away, and you can 
 face the world again. 
 
 A writer in the Dublin Review in 1840, commenting on 
 the first nine volumes of Mores Catholici, says : 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 107 
 
 " It was impossible that, through vague assertions, 
 generalities, and fine writing, we could entertain a fit 
 conception of the all-pervading spirit of those Cathohc 
 ages, and accordingly the author has sought to prove 
 his theories in the only way in which the subject admitted 
 a proof, — by such immense research, such stores of 
 illustration as we confidently assert to be unparalleled 
 in modern literature. We are quite astonished at the 
 quantity of learning which is dispersed through this 
 work ; but so completely is it rendered subservient to 
 the author's main object, that we lose sight of it in 
 the train of new and interesting ideas the book excites 
 in us. The* author is not only famihar with the whole 
 range of the classics, and perfect master of the Greek 
 and Latin, but in Itahan, Spanish, French and German, 
 in these languages and in his own, he has read probably 
 every work that is worth notice, and that not of one 
 period only, but including the whole range of their 
 literature, not upon one class of subjects only — he has 
 left none of them untouched. Divinity, History, 
 Poetry, and Memoirs have been his favourite studies, 
 his mind is imbued with them, he appears to have 
 -dehghted in the old romances. ..." 
 
 Here also (it is sixty-five years later) may be quoted 
 a notice of the American edition of Mores Catholici 
 which was published in 1905. It was given in the 
 Ecclesiastical Review of Philadelphia. The writer says : 
 
 " Cathohc communities, especially librarians who have 
 not a copy of Digby's Ages of Faith, will be glad of the 
 publication of a work which, like the Monks of the West 
 by Montalembert, or Christian Schools and Scholars, 
 possesses the permanent value of both a Classic and a 
 History. It is true that Mores Catholici cannot be 
 styled a history in the critical sense in which the term 
 is now commonly understood, as designating exhaustive 
 and accurate collections of statistical documents and 
 
108 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 elaborately certified annals. Probably we should not 
 consider its actual worth as great as it is, if it were a 
 work of such a character, for then it could never have 
 exercised the intellectual and religious influence arising 
 out of its exposition and valuation of the ethical elements 
 that furnished the sub-soil wherein the seed of all that 
 is noble in European civiUzation was planted. Digby's 
 power lay in his ability to create an atmosphere at once 
 healthy and agreeable, He had an instinct for whatever 
 was beautiful, and his aim was to communicate it and 
 realize it for the adornment of religion and the uplifting 
 of man to the level of religious perfection. His extra- 
 ordinary capacity for storing varied information was 
 something Uke that of CorneHus or Lapidi. He seems 
 in the intellectual order to be what the gardener 
 was, who designed the terraced paradise of Isola Bella, 
 one of the Borromean islands in the beautiful Lago 
 Maggiore, a lover of flowers and trees, collecting the 
 beautiful and useful growth from every part of the 
 globe to illustrate the culture of the human soul under 
 the unchanging spring-like influence of the Catholic 
 Faith. In Mores Catliolici the author has collected ' the 
 fragrance of past Ages,' — that is a true appreciation. 
 He was a young man when, still outside the pale of the 
 Church, he pubUshed that masterpiece of Christian 
 ethics, the Broadstone of Honour, in which he identified 
 himself with the good and great, the heroic and holy, 
 in former times. Sterling, no mean judge of Christian 
 chivalry, tells us, after reading one of Digby's books, 
 that he never pored over a volume ' more full of gentle- 
 ness and earnest admiration for all things beautiful 
 and excellent.' These judgments are not exaggerated 
 when applied to the author's present work in particular. 
 Aside from the didactic instruction in the Ecclesiastical 
 History and moral philosophy it gives our youth, such 
 a work might well be employed as a sort of accompanying 
 torch to illuminate the way to a practical appreciation 
 of all serious study in the field of rehgion and ethics » 
 
" MOEES CATHOLICI " 109 
 
 There is danger that the new methods of criticism in 
 history cause the average reader to over-estimate the 
 necessity of dwelling upon the darker side of historical 
 facts, and of lapsing from the extreme of optimistic 
 fanaticism to that of immoderate objectivity, which, 
 under the plea of investigating truth, loses sight of the 
 primary object aimed at in all teaching of history. That 
 object is to make the experience of the past the caution 
 of the future, rather than to lay bare the evil for the 
 multitude to gloat over. Digby's Mores Catholici is 
 an excellent antidote against this tendency. From it 
 we learn what is profitable for society or the individual. 
 It gives us a right estimate of the value of rehgion, 
 without subjecting the mind to either the strain of hard 
 theories, or the delusive sense of unreality in matters of 
 faith. The author tells the story of those great and 
 good teachers of the past whom Grotius, though by no 
 means an enthusiastic admirer of the Scholastics, admits 
 to have been safe guides in all human conduct, irre- 
 spective of times and places. ' Ubi in re morum consen- 
 tiunt, vix est ut errent ' {Proleg. De Jure Belli ac Pads)} 
 " For the priest in particular there are few works that 
 offer more refreshing and instructive matter of thought 
 and fact told with a certain amount of fervour and 
 beauty of diction, the frequent reading of which can 
 hardly fail to impart the habit of good style and fluency 
 of language, together with an atmosphere or temper 
 most valuable for understanding rightly the methods 
 and manners of the ages of faith." 
 
 It might be added that a priest who possessed the 
 Broadstone of Honour, Mores Catholici and Compitmn 
 would have an inexhaustible store of ammunition from 
 which to feed his sermons. On every page he will find 
 quotations from the best ancient and modern thinkers 
 and poets suggesting trains of thought to himself, and 
 
 ^ " Where these agree in the matter of morals, they can hardly err." 
 
110 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 many a tale of heroic and saintly deeds to illustrate his 
 themes. Those works would be invaluable to those, 
 the great majority, who cannot have a large library of 
 their own. They are a hbrary in httle. 
 
 The Mores Caiholici pleased that noble son of France, 
 the Count de Montalembert, and assisted him in writing 
 his great work, The Monks of the West. In the Intro- 
 duction to that book he says : "I know no writer who 
 has better comprehended and shown the happiness of 
 monastic life, such as it is described and authenticated 
 by ancient authors, than Mr. Kenelm Digby, in the 
 tenth volume of the curious and interesting collection 
 entitled Mores Catholici. It has served to guide me 
 in this attractive study, and has afforded me a pleasure 
 which I would wish to share with all my readers by 
 referring them to this valuable work." And, again, 
 Montalembert says, " The best book to make the Middle 
 Ages known and loved is the work of a layman, 
 and of a layman gone over from Anglicanism to the 
 Church. ... It is right to acknowledge that the defec- 
 tive aspect of the Middle Ages (what the Germans so 
 justly call the Schattenzeite) has not been sufficiently 
 brought to light by Mr. Digby." Montalembert's own 
 study is, perhaps, the fairest of all books in this respect 
 so far as regards monastic institutions. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The charge is often made against English CathoUcs, 
 and some of them perhaps give occasion for it, that they 
 do not sufficiently appreciate the piety and moral virtues 
 of their non-CathoHc fellow-countrymen. This charge 
 could not rightly be brought against Kenelm Digby, 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 111 
 
 all of whose books furnisli evidence to the contrary. 
 His feeUng is well shown by the following passage, 
 written in 1842, near the end of Mores Catliolici. Why, 
 he asks, should we despair of England ? 
 
 " Have we not reason to hope that she will not for 
 ever scorn the sacred mysteries of faith and Rome that 
 watches over them ; that she will not continue to ridicule^ 
 the name of priests, as though they were next inheritors 
 to fools ; that she will not continue to jest at their 
 reverend and holy ceremonies ; but that she will be 
 brought to believe, with the Apostles and holy fathers, 
 that these things are full of divine truths; to believe 
 with all learned historians that these priests having 
 from Rome their mission, were the first bringers in of 
 all civility ; to believe with philosophers, so well repre- 
 sented by Picus of Mirandula, that without them 
 morality is an empty sound ; to believe with political 
 economists that their institutions can alone preserve 
 society from the horrors of pauperism and servile wars ; 
 to believe with those who have found pleasure in the 
 preceding books that the manners which they taught 
 were truly those inculcated from the mountain ; lastly, 
 to believe the one voice of these past ages themselves, 
 when they tell her they will make her happy and glorious 
 by their faith. Yes, let us hope that England may be 
 won ; that the words of Isaiah may be applicable to 
 her. ' Quae arida erit in stagna et sitiens in fontes 
 aquarum,' ^ for, once enlightened, her wishes rest here 
 for ever — won by that which she of her own generous 
 nature covets most — won, the country of Cowper by 
 fervent, true, and undefiled devotion ; the country of 
 Johnson, by the inestimable riches of good sense ; the 
 country of Milton, by the love of heavenly musings, and 
 of embodying the sacred lore in bright poetic forms ; 
 the country of Bacon, by whatever tends to the augmen- 
 
 ^ " She who was dry shall be turned to lakes and the thirsting to fountains 
 of waters." 
 
112 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 tation of solid learning, and to tlie stability and decorum 
 of the social state ; the country of Addison, by the 
 food prepared, as if expressly for its instinct of the 
 correct and orderly, which quells every unruly passion ; 
 the country of Shakespeare, by that which makes every 
 flower of genius to germin in eternal peace ; the country 
 of Sterne, by pity mild, deep and tender sentimentality ; 
 in fine, the country of so many saints, poets, moralists 
 and philosophers, by the tears and graces of that Holy 
 Mother, of the everlasting counsel ordained to be to 
 mortal men, of hope, of charity and love, the living 
 spring, the sole ennobler of their nature. Then will 
 she learn from her own experience- that, in the holy 
 Catholic and Roman faith, is all sustenance for the 
 high intellectual and moral life of a people ; that it 
 alone possesses the great secret for inheriting both 
 earth and heaven, all that can sweeten and compose to 
 order the uncertain wanderings of the human existence, 
 and all that can e;xalt with innocence as a preparation 
 for everlasting beatitude, the dignity and happiness 
 of man." ^ 
 
 This passage contains the key-note of all Digby's 
 writings from first to last. He did not deny the existence 
 outside the Catholic Church of all the virtues any more 
 than he denied the outside existence of so many truly 
 CathoUc souls, but he held, without doubt or deviation, 
 that in the Catholic, ApostoHc, and Roman Church 
 all these scattered rays are focussed, and gathered up, 
 and find their true and complete fulfilment and exist- 
 ence, and that outside the Church they are, so to 
 speak, disembodied and acting in the void. This beUef 
 can be maintained without lack of charity. No one 
 held more firmly than Digby the orthodox doctrine 
 that many belong to the soul of the Catholic Church, 
 
 ^ Mores Caiholici, xi. p. 467. 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 113 
 
 though not to its body, just as many belong to its 
 body, but not to its soul. 
 
 Many, now, in England say : " We agree with all 
 that you say about the Catholic Church ; we agree in 
 the main with all its doctrines, except that the Church 
 is not, as you beheve, that body which is in union with 
 Rome, and has there its energizing centre, but is some- 
 thing "much wider" — all who profess and call themselves 
 Christians, some of us think, or all those who recognize 
 certain episcopal institutions, as others more restrictedly 
 assert." 
 
 With these Digby could not agree, or even argue. 
 
 " You say," he replies, " for even to this outrage on 
 historic truth our ears are destined, that the system 
 which the law of England recognizes as the state rehgion 
 is in reaUty Catholic as of yore ; that it has been per- 
 secuted by kings and parliaments, and that it would 
 not otherwise have departed, as in some points you 
 admit it has, from the disciphne and doctrine of anti- 
 quity ; that it is your mother, to be excused and forgiven. 
 To all this, one conversant with the dead will deem 
 silence the best answer. Possunt haec credere, as St. 
 Leo says, qui possunt talia patienter audire.^ An his- 
 torical study of the events which led to the catastrophe 
 is a bad preparation for assent to the propositions 
 which are generally advanced by those who do not 
 view things from the centre of CathoHc unity." 
 
 Digby, in his latest years, might have written this 
 more softly, but certainly there is something rather 
 irritating in those who, with their predecessors in title, 
 have fully enjoyed the material benefits and supremacy 
 of the State Church since the days of Elizabeth, and 
 
 1 " Those can believe such things who are able to hear them with 
 patience." 
 
 K.D. H 
 
114 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 now picture it as a "branch" of the Catholic Church 
 long-oppressed by heretical kings and parliaments. No 
 doubt this much is true, and a reason for hope, that 
 there has always been in the Church of England a 
 section, sometimes very small, as in the eighteenth 
 century, sometimes expanding, as in the seventeenth 
 and nineteenth, who have regretted the separation from 
 the Centre of Unity, and the breach with Catholic 
 doctrine and consequent ritual. 
 
 Although Digby could not admit that separated com- 
 munions in East or West are as much part of the Catholic 
 Church after separation from the centre of unity as 
 they were before, he held that these bodies are not untrue 
 in belief or practice, but in various degrees incomplete, 
 and all of them incomplete because divided from that 
 centre. He illustrates this by a similitude in his book 
 called Evenings on the Thames : 
 
 " If the whole truth were told by travellers I beheve 
 it would be found that what we English, on going abroad, 
 like most in the scenery of foreign countries is something 
 that, under a form which is new to us, puts us in mind 
 nevertheless of what we loved at home in dear old 
 England. That grey ruin, for example, on the hill, 
 that path by the river, that stile on the road-side, leading 
 into a wood ; that shady lane at the entrance of the 
 village ; that solitary church ; that blue horizon ; 
 that babbling stream with the plank across it ; all 
 of these objects are only a French, German, Itahan 
 or Swiss version, as it were, of what was famihar to us 
 from our childhood ; but then one must confess also that 
 generally this version of an old favourite comes, for 
 some reason or other, nearer to the ideal of what we 
 loved than the original ever did. There is somehow 
 more meaning in it ; there is besides generally more 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 115 
 
 sun in the picture ; a warmer tone of colouring ; there 
 is more history in it, more antiquity, more pleasing 
 terror, more that we cannot fathom, more mystery, 
 more romance, and. in some instances, more sub- 
 limity." 
 
 " Now," continues Digby, " all this holds in rehgion. 
 The CathoUc Church, for those whose youth was passed 
 out of it, comes upon them like a famiUar image trans- 
 formed, like a remembrance of what was best loved 
 in their earliest days ; but it is a remembrance that 
 is allied with an increase of attraction in the subject ; 
 as, in point of fact, it is the Catholic view which imparts 
 reality, and meaning, and legitimate cause for wonder, 
 to what they once loved and reverenced, without much 
 exercise of logic, and merely as children, without fully 
 possessing even the power of enjoying what they beheld, 
 and heard, and wished to love and to admire, more 
 than strict truth, at that time, would have given them 
 grounds for." 
 
 This was always Kenelm Digby's thought. The 
 Catholic reUgion, centred as to its visible organization 
 in the Chair of St. Peter at Rome, is the completion, and 
 sanctification, and elevation of all that is good in other 
 religious bodies, and in social life, and in nature. It is 
 the central sun, itself receiving light and fire from God 
 through Christ, which warms and illumines all else, and 
 gives colour to things, and so transfigures all that it 
 touches. 
 
 St. Augustine's meaning was the same when he spoke 
 of the African Donatists, the lineal succession of whose 
 Bishops from the Apostles, and the vaHdity of whose 
 sacraments, he did not deny. He said to them, " What 
 are you doing, my brother ? We are brothers ; we 
 call upon the same God ; we believe in the same Christ ; 
 we hear the same Gospel ; we answer with the same 
 
116 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Amen ; we celebrate the same Easter. Why are you 
 without " (the Catholic Church) " while I am within ? " ^ 
 According to some modern theories, St. Augustine 
 was mistaken, which is of course possible, and the 
 Donatists as well as himself and the Bishops with whom 
 he was in communion in Africa, were, as they themselves 
 held, within the Catholic Church. Again, he says in 
 his letter to Theodoras : 
 
 " Who can say that he has the charity of Jesus Christ 
 so long as he does not remain in his unity ? When, 
 then, they (the Donatists) re-enter the Catholic Church, 
 they do not receive there that ivhich they already had ; hut 
 that which they had not, and that which makes useful 
 to them that which they had, since they are now grafted 
 upon the root of charity by the bond of peace and the 
 unity of the Spirit, by which all the other sacraments 
 of truth which they already had become useful to them 
 for salvation." 
 
 The words italicized summarize the thought, which 
 Digby was for ever expressing, and he extended their 
 range to all people who have the natural good quahties 
 of humanity, in which, perhaps Digby, living in a long 
 christianized world, believed more strongly than did 
 Augustine, living in a world decaying and still half 
 pagan. Cardinal Newman has expressed the same thing 
 with his usual lucidity when he says {Essay on Develop- 
 ment, chap, i.) that a gradual conversion 
 
 " consists in addition and increase chiefly, not destruc- 
 tion." ... " True rehgion is the summit and perfection 
 of false " {i.e. incomplete) " rehgions ; it combines 
 in one whatever there is of good and true separately 
 remaining in each. And, in like manner, the CathoHc 
 Creed is for the most part the combination of separate 
 
 1 Enarr. in Psalmis, liv. 16. 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 117 
 
 truths, which heretics have divided among themselves, 
 and err in dividing. So that, in matter of fact, if a 
 reHgious mind were educated in, and sincerely attached 
 to, some form of heathenism or heresy, and they were 
 brought under the light of truth, it would be drawn off 
 from error into the truth, not by losing what it had but 
 by gaining what it had not, not by being unclothed, 
 but by being clothed upon. That same principle of 
 faith, which attaches it to its original wrong doctrine, 
 would attach it to the truth ; and that portion of its 
 original doctrine which was to be cast off as absolutely 
 false, would not be directly rejected, but indirectly, 
 in the reception of the truth which is its opposite. True 
 conversion is ever of a positive, not a negative character." 
 
 IV 
 
 All through these years Kenelm Digby maintained 
 correspondence with his old Cambridge ally, Ambrose 
 Phillips de Lisle, of Garendon and Grace Dieu in the 
 county of Leicester. I may quote here two passages 
 from de Lisle's letters relating to Mores Catholici. The 
 first, dated at Garendon, 18th November, 1834, refers to 
 the fifth volume published that year. It was addressed 
 to Digby at 22 Hue de la Ville L'Eveque, Paris. 
 
 " My dear Digby. — I was thinking of you, and saying 
 to myself how much I longed to hear from you again 
 when I was greeted by the arrival of your dehghtful 
 letter. I was also on the point of writing to you, and 
 you have cause to think me ungrateful for not having 
 sooner thanked you for your most welcome present of 
 your Book, which arrived here quite safe. But first I 
 must tell you how enchanted I am with your book. I like 
 it the best of all your books. When I read the third 
 volume of the Mores Catholici I thought you never 
 could write anything again that could equal that in 
 
118 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 sublimity of style or in the interesting views it gives 
 of Christian history, but this seems to me to surpass 
 all you have ever before written ; it is indeed beyond 
 all praise ; in reading it I seem to be listening to one 
 whose voice fills one with the most enchanting delight 
 and calm contentment. How you discover to every 
 one the sublime views of the Church ! What a world 
 of good must result from this, for how few Catholics 
 in England enter into the spirit of the Church, but no 
 one can read your book without catching the flame 
 which burns throughout it. Mr. Kirk of Lichfield told 
 me that he had begun to read it aloud to his people 
 on the Sunday, after Vespers, in the beautiful new 
 Gothic church which he has built at Lichfield, and that 
 he intends to go completely through with it. I never 
 beheld any picture more admirable or more lovely than 
 that which you place before our eyes in the very com- 
 mencement of the book. Your vision of the saintly crowd 
 of all degrees whose pursuit is the thirst after justice 
 is quite enrapturing, and one imagines such an har- 
 monious shout of heavenly melody bursting from the 
 venerable multitude as melts the very soul. But how 
 sad it is to turn from such a scene to contemplate the 
 melancholy change that has taken place all over 
 Europe. . . ." 
 
 His second letter, dated 11th January, 1835, relates 
 to the next volume of Mores Catholici. 
 
 " I have done nothing but read and meditate upon 
 your Golden Book ever since I last wrote. I cannot 
 describe the impressions it produced on me, and what 
 I said in my last letter only makes me ashamed that 
 I can express myself so poorly in praise of a book to 
 study which would dehght the Angels. You tell me 
 sometimes that I look at the bright side of things ; well 
 now, you shall never tell me again that I am too hopeful, 
 for your book of itself is enough to convince any rational 
 being that the age that could produce such a work is 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 119 
 
 one pre-eminently calculated to inspire hope, and to 
 justify the brightest anticipations. To praise your 
 book, my dear Digby, would require an angel's tongue. 
 I assure you it has many times overpowered me as with 
 a torrent of celestial delight ; the disquisition on the 
 ecclesiastical Chant and Musick is sublime ; I could 
 fancy myself listening to the melodies of the Angels. 
 The beautiful histories too with which you have illus- 
 trated the whole are most affecting. That story of 
 the Friars of St. Francis reconciling the Bishop and 
 Oovernor of Assisi is enough to melt into a flood the 
 most frozen heart, and your admirable description 
 makes one almost hear them singing that holy song 
 which changed hatred into love. When I think of 
 your book I am filled with amazement. You say in 
 your letter, my dear Digby, that you look upon my 
 friendship as one of the most happy events of your life. 
 What then must I say of your friendship ? No words 
 of mine can express what I feel, what I owe to you. . . . 
 I hope you will not forget what you tell me about return- 
 ing to England in the spring, and then you know with 
 what longing desire Laura and I will expect your arrival 
 at the shady groves of Grace Dieu, and if your Lady is 
 fond of musick, we can at least boast of our nightingales 
 in the wood. We have got a most curious room at 
 the very top of the house which has a very extensive 
 view in two directions, one to the East and the other 
 to the West, and it looks over leads and pointed roofs 
 beyond which rises the cross on the end of the Chapel, 
 at one side of which is the little Belfry with our Angelus 
 Bell, at the sound of which all the neighbouring parsons 
 are said to quake. ..." 
 
 At the close of Mores Catholici Digby bids farewell to 
 his book in touching words : 
 
 " The thought of having done, of having had life 
 prolonged to finish any work by the permission and grace 
 of Him in Whom all things live, is solemn. 'Tis like 
 
120 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 the sound of the sea or the murmur of the grove, after 
 the departure of a friend whose presence on the previous 
 day had tuned it to unmixed gladness ; it is Hke the 
 sorrow of one who casts a last hngering look on the 
 beautiful cities of Italy, or at the snow-capped mountains 
 of the bright warm South, which he is leaving never to 
 see them more ; or like recalling to mind the journeys 
 which were made along the beautiful shores of Alpine 
 lakes, when one was a boy, the thousand innocent 
 transports to which the heart yielded with such ardour, 
 as one walked through vineyards, rode through valleys, 
 clomb rocky mountains, and swam in the placid or rushing 
 waters of those deUcious climes." 
 
 It is true, perhaps, that no conversions are directly, 
 or absolutely, due to books or conversation, but only 
 to events in life and to the mysterious magnetic attrac- 
 tion which works through and from the central CathoUc 
 Church and draws into it those hearts which have the 
 right steel in them. Yet it is within the province of 
 Reason to judge whether this attraction is to the higher 
 or lower parts of human nature, and to advise the 
 deciding Will, or Self, whether to yield to, or resist, it. 
 Books like those of Digby play an important part in 
 enUghtening the Reason, and, hke a midwife or doctor, 
 assist in the " accouchement " of the soul. In this 
 sense Digby probably assisted many to make the great 
 decision, when his books were more widely known than 
 they are now. Mother Anne Pollen, of the Sacred Heart, 
 in her excellent Memoir of Mother Mabel Digby, gives 
 one such instance. Mabel Digby' s father was Simon 
 Digby, of Osbertstown, County Kildare, a near cousin 
 of Kenelm and, though a strong Protestant of the 
 Orange brand, always a good friend of his. His wife, 
 much influenced, says Mother Pollen, by Mores Catliolici, 
 
" MORES CATHOLICI " 121 
 
 was received into the Catholic Church in September 
 1852 at MontpeUier, and was soon followed by her 
 three daughters, Geraldine, Mabel, and Eva. Mabel 
 was received in 1853, at the age of eighteen, and became 
 a postulant of the Order of the Sacred Heart at Mar- 
 moutiers on 19th February, 1857. She made her 
 novitiate at Conflans, took her first vows there in March, 
 1859, and, after years spent in convents in France, and 
 then at Roehampton, was elected in 1895, in succession 
 to a French Superior, to be Superior General of the 
 whole of this great international Order, the first English 
 woman to become this. Her noble life and character are 
 beautifully described in Mother Pollen's Memoir. She 
 died in the year 1911, and was buried at Roehampton. 
 It was Mabel Digby who steered the Order through its 
 great crisis of expulsion from France, and founded anew 
 in other lands the forty houses lost in that country of 
 its birth. 
 
 Mabel Digby's conversion was not in the least due 
 to reading or study, — she was not a girl of that kind, — 
 but to a sudden movement, under a radiation from the 
 altar, in a church in France, which to her young friends 
 at that time seemed miraculous. The conversion of her 
 mother, however, was one of the long and slow kind, 
 much assisted by Kenelm Digby's writings. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 " COMPITUM " 
 
 " MiLLE viae ducunt homines per saecula Eomam 
 Qui Dominum to to quaerere corde volunt." 
 
 Alamis. 
 
 In the year 1849 Kenelm Digby published the first two 
 volumes of the last of his three largest works, entitled 
 Compitum. This is the Latin word for a point at which 
 roads meet, or to which roads converge, like the straight 
 drives one sees in such forests as Compiegne or Fontaine- 
 bleau, meeting at a point from which they radiate like 
 spokes in a wheel. The meeting point in the book is 
 formed by the central principles of the Cathohc Church, 
 in which alone is found the happiness and peace of those 
 who travel by the many roads. The roads are the 
 various phases of human life, such as the road of 
 children, the road of youth, the road of the family, 
 that of old age, that of the schools, that of travellers, 
 of joy, of sorrow, of death, of contemplation, of wisdom, 
 of warriors, of priests, of kings, of active life, of the poor, 
 of friendship, and many others, through seven long 
 volumes, crowded with admirable quotations and reflec- 
 tions. In the first pages Digby thus describes the genesis 
 of this idea. The scene is his favourite haunt, the forest 
 of St. Germain. 
 
 ** On the elevated range which prematurely hides 
 the setting sun from a city of France, whose ancient 
 
 122 
 
''' COMPITUM " 123 
 
 is better than its recent fame, and yet in which many 
 of this age have followed gentle studies in their youth, 
 there is a gloomy forest bearing the venerated name of 
 the great saint whose huge abbey towers still form one 
 of its chief ornaments. . . . During the summer months 
 the stranger ,1 coming to reside at the very skirts of the 
 wood, became familiar with many of its secrets. In 
 the house where he was lodged, there was a small upper 
 room, of which the window received the Hght of the 
 setting sun, and displayed in full beauty the vast undu- 
 lating tract of the forest, as far as eye could reach. An 
 old map of all its alleys, suspended there time out of 
 mind, was the only decoration of that dehcious little 
 chamber, and on that map he used often to trace his 
 walks, unravelling the intricate mazes through which 
 he had wandered during the day. A certain palmer- 
 like guest one night, as he remained with him alone, 
 observed that it would be well to draw out a map of 
 the intellectual forest through which men travel from 
 youth to age, noting each turn of the various tracks 
 that predecessors, as if with human feet, have worn, 
 and showing how wonderfully nature has provided 
 avenues and attractive openings to guide all pilgrims 
 safely to their end. There was, besides, here, a local 
 peculiarity, which seemed to add force to the suggestion, 
 for far in the level forest's central gloom was one bright 
 spot where stood a convent, girt by a smooth, sunny 
 lawn, towards which innumerable paths conducted 
 from all sides the least practised wanderer. Once a 
 monastery of Augustine Friars, a holy sisterhood now 
 possessed it." 
 
 The road-pierced forest idea is carried out throughout 
 Comfitum. Kenelm Digby had studied deeply books 
 of forestry, and he makes many observations, in them- 
 selves good reading, like Evelyn's Silva, on the 
 
 ^ Digby speaks of himself throughout the book as " the stranger." 
 
124 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 nature of various trees, always symbolizing them with, 
 facts of the human-moral sphere, after the fashion of 
 St. Francis of Sales, from whose writings quite a good 
 book on natural history might be extracted. 
 
 St. Augustine compares the CathoHc Church itself to 
 one of the great imperial roads of Rome, well guarded, 
 running straight to the celestial city. Digby says that 
 if you know the line of the high road running straight 
 to its goal through the forest, you are safe. You can 
 deviate here and there into pleasant and curving by- 
 paths, keeping always the same direction, and you are 
 sure, when you are tired of them, to recover the high 
 road, which will take you to your destination. 
 
 If there are parallel by-ways safe to follow, there are 
 also others which are tempting but fatally misleading ; 
 and some of these Digby indicates, the road of evil, of 
 sin, of pride, of the " dry tree," of the " four winds.'* 
 It is by knowing to what quagmires or hopeless jungles 
 they lead, that the true and saving character of the 
 right road is also, negatively, proved. The road of 
 the " four winds " is that of " false, cold and denying 
 doctrines," by which men are blown about. 
 
 The great modern deviation into the road of the four 
 winds was when the Protestant Reformers abandoned the 
 principle of a living Authority and Interpreter. As 
 Balmes said, " By the principle that the Bible is the reli- 
 gion of Protestants, and that each is to judge of it by his 
 own understanding, Protestantism is self-condemned, for 
 it lays down a principle by which it dissolves itself." * 
 And Digby says, in this chapter, " the history of the 
 march of these opinions is the record of a succession 
 of prodigious mistakes which have been maintained by 
 
 ^ 1a Protestantisme compare au CathoUcisme, ch. vi. 
 
" COMPITUM " 125 
 
 men appealing to their own personal conviction indepen- 
 dent of all authority for their warrant. . . . Surely to 
 give a plain unvarnished statement of Calvinism, or 
 Anglicanism, is to refute it. Yet impassioned men 
 will cling to this, or rather, like the charmed vest of 
 Hercules, heresy will attach itself to the very flesh of 
 the man who unconsciously clothes himself with it. 
 Hence St. Augustine says, ' Nihil infelicius est homine 
 cui sua figmenta dominantur ' (' Nothing is more un- 
 fortunate than the man who is dominated by his own 
 fictions '). But, if the Catholic should err, we find that 
 his fictions sit lightly on him. At the first word of 
 the Church he flings them from him to the winds." 
 ''Men," says Digby, referring to the conflicting 
 Protestant theories of the Church, " men who contra- 
 dict themselves cannot be expected to agree with one 
 another. Accordingly the want of harmony and unity, 
 even under their own banners, may be regarded as 
 another signal directing all wanderers wearied with 
 discord to the centre at the Catholic Church." 
 
 From the day when St. Peter confessed that Jesus 
 was the Son of God, the Christian religion has had faith 
 or trust for its foundation. It demands not individual 
 reasonings primarily, but individual acts of faith, the 
 choice of the individual either to accept the results 
 of collective intuition, embodied in formulas, or to 
 reject them. The Catholic believes and accepts not 
 only the verity of the New Testament, books received 
 on the authority of the Church, but the collective 
 inspiration of the Church interpreting and developing 
 the doctrine down to the present day. Private judg- 
 ment applied to Scripture was, and is, the fundamental 
 principle of every form of Protestantism. Living Autho- 
 
126 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 * rity is that of Catholicism, and the Catholic has a firm 
 and definite idea of what that Living Authority has 
 been, and is. That is the great issue between Catholics 
 and Protestants, and it has been that from the first. 
 St. Augustine says, in his De utilitate credendi, the work 
 so much commended by the philosophic Leibnitz, that 
 " heretics " (the dissentients on fundamentals) attack 
 the " CathoHc Church " because it commands those who 
 come to it to believe, " Quod illis qui ad eam veniunt 
 praecipitur credere " ; while those dissentients them- 
 selves boast that they " do not impose the yoke of 
 believing, but open the fountain of teaching," in the 
 name of Reason, " in nomine rationis," thereby flattering 
 human vanity. He adds that rehgion must first be 
 believed {i.e. accepted de fide), and afterwards under- 
 stood, and can in no way be rightly entered upon 
 without a grave command of Authority, " sine quodam 
 gravi auctoritatis imperio iniri recte nullo modo potest" ; 
 and that nothing in the Catholic Church is so salutary 
 as that authority precedes reasoning, " quam ut rationem 
 praecedat auctoritas." Again, he says in argument 
 against the Manichaeans that " if they deny that there 
 should be belief in Christ unless undoubted reason can 
 be given, they are not Christians " ; " The Pagans say 
 the same thing against us," he adds, " foolishly indeed, 
 but not inconsistently," because they did not even 
 pretend to accept any Authority. Augustine gave full 
 value to the intellect (" intellectum valde ama"), but 
 in its right place, and for its right purpose. He thought 
 that reasoning should be founded on faith, not faith on 
 reasoning. He said, " I believe in order that I may 
 understand; I do not understand in order that I may 
 believe." 
 
" COMPITUM " 127 
 
 " Dogma datur Christianis," said St. Thomas Aquinas, 
 is given to them from outside, to be recognized and 
 intellectually apprehended by them individually. The 
 mediaeval Eichard of St. Victor says that we ought to 
 try to comprehend by reason what we hold from faith. 
 
 Kenelm Digby's works never had a popular circula- 
 tion, but they were read by those interested in these 
 subjects, who themselves write and influence others. 
 His continuous output of volumes all bearing on the 
 same central point, from 1822 to 1854, had a real and 
 considerable, though little recognized, effect upon the 
 rise and development of the Catholic movement, whether 
 it took the form of change inside the Church of England 
 and other bodies more remote from the Centre, or 
 whether that of conversions to the Catholic Churchy 
 and the moral and intellectual stimulation of that 
 society in England. 
 
 When Digby began to write he was almost alone in 
 this country in his view of the Middle Ages, and was 
 deemed a Don Quixote ; but he had the singular aid of 
 a very different writer, the Radical Wilham Cobbett, 
 whose popular history of the " Protestant Reformation," 
 published in 1827, written not from a religious but a 
 social and economic point of view, ran fiercely and 
 absolutely counter to all the accepted and orthodox 
 ideas of English history so forcibly voiced by Macaulay, 
 the great writer whose time at Cambridge nearly 
 coincided with Digby's. By the time that Digby had 
 published the last of the seven volumes of Compitum, 
 the CathoUc hierarchy had been restored in England, and 
 a number of clergy and laity in the national Church 
 now virtually accepted all CathoUc doctrine, except 
 that of divinely ordained unity under the rule and 
 
128 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 guidance of the successors of St. Peter at Eome. Some 
 a,ccepted even tMs, as more do at the present day. Of 
 these some passed over ; others were detained, partly, 
 perhaps, by the idea of " corporate re-union." Is it 
 possible — yet so it seems to be — ^that any one who 
 really believes in the visible organic and Catholic Church 
 centred in the ApostoHc See, should wait to re-unite him- 
 self with that Church until every one else is ready to do 
 so ? He is like the rustic of Horace who waits to cross 
 until the river has flowed away and left the channel dry. 
 
 " Rusticus expectat dum defluit amnis, at ille 
 Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum." 
 
 The man who really accepts the idea will not wait 
 until the rolling eternal river has flowed away; and, 
 if he waits, this shows that he has not really accepted 
 the idea, although he may think that he has accepted 
 it. Action is the test of belief. 
 
 " Men " (says Digby) " take leave of error with too 
 much ceremony ; they speak too much about their 
 nation, about the world, seeming to forget that each 
 one of us here, let the nation and the world believe, or 
 not believe, has, as Carlyle says, ' a life of his own to 
 lead, one life ; a little gleam of time between two 
 eternities ; no second chance to us for evermore.' You 
 should, therefore, look to yourselves, and, having once 
 caught sight of truth, hoist all your sails to follow her, 
 heedless of the nation, or of the world's remonstrance. 
 If you must wait for all to follow, I fear, as Dante says, 
 ' Your cboice may baply meet too long delay.' 
 ' Eia age, rumpe moras ; quo te sperabimus usque ? 
 Dum, quid sis, dubita,s jam potes esse nihil." ^ 
 
 Ulysses again, through desire to save them, makes 
 
 1 Martial, " Up ! act ! no more delay ! Till when shall we hope for 
 3?ou ? While you doubt what to be you may already be Nothing." 
 
" COMPITUM " 129 
 
 liis companions weep. After they had tasted the lotus 
 none of them wished to return. Thus should men act 
 towards brethren, when they find them so infatuated, 
 as to think no more of escaping to their true country." 
 
 So that it is legitimate, he thinks, to give some pain 
 to others to prevent them from passing the rest of their 
 lives in the island of the lotus. Elsewhere Digby says : 
 
 " Some of those whom we have now, perhaps, with 
 weak words grieved, are gentle and humane writers, 
 whose instinctive reverence, and I know not what kind 
 of poetic affection for all that pertains to the holy 
 Catholic Church, which they view from a distance only, 
 should render them, even without reference to diviner 
 motives, the objects of our tenderest sympathy and 
 sincerest love ; but, if honour be due to their genius, 
 and affection to their noble capacities, truth and sin- 
 cerity are no less a sacred debt, which we should render 
 to them, heedless of the loss and injury and multiplied 
 sorrow, which may result too surely to ourselves." ^ 
 
 To such sincere and seeking people as these might be 
 
 applied the beautiful passage in a Latin poem of St. 
 
 Hildebert, applied by him to the invisible City of 
 
 Heaven, which may thus be rendered : 
 
 " Founded on the rock securely, 
 Holy city, beauteous city ! 
 Tossed on seas of dubitation, 
 From a distance I salute thee, 
 Call to thee, and seek for thee, 
 In thy haven is salvation ; 
 In thy haven ships may anchor, 
 By thy circling hills defended 
 From the storms of desolation 
 Which destroy the hearts of mortals. 
 Heavenly city, peaceful city ! 
 From a distance I salute thee, 
 Sigh for thee, and long for thee." 
 
 ^ Mores CatJiolici, vol. iii. 
 
130 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 De longinquo te saluto. " Almost you persuade me 
 
 to be a Christian," said the Roman Proconsul to St. 
 
 Paul. How many, in these days, are almost persuaded 
 
 to enter the CathoHc Church ! They stand by the river 
 
 " tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore." But 
 
 there is a Charon, who, " into his boat now receives these, 
 
 now those, but keeps others far away from the shore." 
 
 " nunc hos, nunc accipit illos, 
 Ast alios longe submotos arcet arena." 
 
 In one way the Compitum is more important than 
 the Mores Caiholici. In it Digby develops, from many 
 points of view, his idea of the Centre of Unity, the 
 guardian of what he so often calls " central principles " 
 of life in all its provinces. Like St. Augustine he 
 regards the visible Church, with its visible centre, as 
 the sacrament of unity and charity. It is easy enough 
 to show that during the very earUest centuries the See 
 of Rome was not the visible centre in the full sense of 
 later times ; but if evolution in history is accepted, and 
 if evolution is to be deemed, as Christians must hold, 
 the operation of the divine will, this is not, as the old 
 Protestant controversialists supposed, a conclusive argu- 
 ment against the central living Authority. We need 
 not deny that the acorn was not the oak in outward 
 appearance. Those who have, since the schism of the 
 sixteenth century, adhered to the Church of Rome, 
 notwithstanding specious reasonings, and notwithstand- 
 ing internal faults or scandals, have maintained unity 
 against anarchy, life against dissolution, centripetal 
 forces against centrifugal. We may hold in principle, 
 and with all our heart and mind, that the Church centred 
 in the Chair of St. Peter is the one Catholic Church, 
 outside which is no safety ; but in practical discussion 
 
" COMPITUM " 131 
 
 with non-Catholics, it is, perhaps, wiser to maintain 
 it as the Central Church without which there never 
 has been, and never will be, any possibility of real 
 unity. And without the visible and ruling centre at 
 Rome there never has been, and never could be, unity 
 within the Central Church which comprises, as it must 
 comprise, people of all nations, races, languages, and 
 degrees of civilization and education. According to 
 Our Lord, and according to his great follower St. Paul, 
 the unity of the Christian Society is to be the unity of 
 a living body. This is something quite difierent from a 
 poUtical confederation, or league, of nations or churches. 
 The Catholic Church, centred at Rome, and diffused 
 throughout the world, is, to say the least, the reaHzed 
 part of the CathoUc Church as it should be. Other 
 Christians, organized in national, or racial, or sectarian, 
 bodies, are, in this sense, the unrealized part of the 
 Catholic Church. Beyond this outer circle, or, as 
 diplomats say, " sphere of influence," extend the vast 
 spiritual regions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Mahom- 
 medanism, which still have to be brought within the 
 central Christian civilization, and would be brought 
 in the sooner if the realization of the whole of the 
 Catholic Church within the limits of that civilization 
 were completed, and if altar were no longer raised 
 against altar throughout the world. 
 
 The Compitum, like the Mores, shows the extraordi- 
 nary range of Digby's knowledge of theology, history 
 and Hterature of all ages. His favourite authors at 
 this period were Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, 
 Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Livy, St. Augustine chiefly among 
 the Fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, St. Bona- 
 venture, St. Bernard, Victor and Richard de St. Hugo, 
 
132 KENELM HENKY DIGBY 
 
 Shakespeare, Walter Scott. But these were only 
 great stars in liis firmament amid a myriad authors, 
 ancient, mediaeval and modern, and of all the nations. 
 He had very perfect knowledge of the offices and hymns 
 of the Catholic Church, and they sound through all his 
 writings, as they do, like an undertone, through Dante's 
 Commedia. " En clara vox redarguit, obscura quaeque 
 personans." He had read all the old chronicles and the 
 older French Memoirs, and was well versed in much 
 of the Hterature of his own day. He is an excellent 
 guide in reading to those who prefer literature somewhat 
 mellowed by time to the last books from Smith's or 
 Mudie's, and the soHd wisdom of ages to the latest 
 theory in circulation. 
 
 Kenelm Digby was accused by some of his critics 
 of want of " original thought." If this were true, 
 which I should not admit, yet is it not an even better 
 service to have, collected the wisdom of the wise and 
 the beauty of poets, and tales of noble deeds, and to 
 have arranged them in good order to support and 
 elucidate a central theme of the highest interest ? I, 
 for one, would certainly rather have books of this kind 
 on my shelves than the volumes of a good many " original 
 thinkers " whose thoughts usually prove to be not so 
 very original, after all. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 FAMILY LIFE 
 
 " Oh ! say what is thy children's bower 
 But Heaven here in a finite hour." 
 
 Ken ELM DiGBY, Ouranogaia. 
 
 I 
 
 Kenelm Digby married, in the year 1833, a young 
 Irish lady, Jane Mary Dillon, who was then only sixteen, 
 about half his own age. She was the youngest daughter 
 of Thomas Dillon, of Mount Dillon, and of Eadestown, 
 in the County of Kildare. Her father was descended 
 from Edmund Dillon of Ardenegarth, in County West- 
 meath, who died in 1629, a brother of Theobald, who 
 was created first Viscount Dillon on 16th March, 1621. 
 Their early ancestor. Sir Henry de Leon, went to Ireland 
 with John, Earl of Moreton, afterwards Eang John, 
 in 1185. Jane Mary's father, Thomas Dillon, married 
 a lady of the family of Plunkett, and had three daughters, 
 but no sons, except one who died young. The eldest 
 daughter, Helena Maria, married Sir Michael Dillon 
 Bellew, Bt., of Mount Bellew in Co. Galway. The 
 second daughter, Mary Anne, married in 1834 the Hon. 
 Arthur Southwell, and her son Thomas became the 
 fourth Viscount Southwell, succeeding his uncle, and 
 one of her daughters married Lord Fitzgerald, B.C., and 
 another Evelyn Wood, the future Field-Marshal. Jane 
 
 133 
 
134 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Mary, the youngest daughter of Thomas Dillon, married 
 Kenelm Digby, and brought to him £10,000, her share 
 in her father's personal property, the family silver, and 
 the Eadestown estate in County Kildare. She was 
 her father's favourite child. ' 
 
 Jane Mary used to say that one ought to be proud 
 of being a Catholic in a country not Catholic. She 
 came of a purely Catholic and Irish race, and would say, 
 with a laugh, that she had not one drop of non-Catholic 
 blood in her veins. During a century and a half, 
 English, Scottish and Irish Catholic gentlemen were 
 debarred by the Test Act from all public service, military 
 or civil, and if they wished to have a commission in 
 army or navy, or to be in the diplomatic service, had to 
 migrate to the Catholic kingdoms of France, or Spain, or 
 Austria. For this reason some of the Dillons, relatives 
 of Jane Mary, had long been naturalized in France. 
 One of them was the celebrated Count Edward Dillon, 
 " le beau Dillon," who was put to death at the head of 
 his own troops, a victim to the Revolution. In his 
 early days in Paris, Kenelm Digby knew the old widow 
 of " Beau " Dillon, a lady who had once been Am- 
 bassadress of France in Florence. He knew also the 
 Countess de Rochefort, who came of Dillon blood. 
 
 " Aged, but still sprightly, beautiful e'en yet, 
 And one whom no one ever could forget." ^ 
 
 Jane Mary Dillon herself had been educated in France 
 and spoke French perfectly. 
 
 Kenelm Digby used to go to evening receptions and 
 balls at Lansdowne House in London, and there first he 
 met his future wife. One night he was with a party, 
 
 * Temple of Memory, Canto VT. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 135 
 
 including the girl, at a theatre. Next morning he 
 started for Cambridge on a mail coach, but had not gone 
 ten miles before the desire to see the lovely being 
 became too strong for him. He shpped ofi the coach, 
 leaving his luggage to go on, and walked the ten miles 
 back to London. The loved one had, he found, departed 
 to Ramsgate in the Isle of Thanet. Kenelm followed, 
 with " sudden, unexpected, firm resolve," that which 
 comes to true lovers of the divine or human Uke an 
 inspiration; and there she became his betrothed. In 
 one of his later poems Kenelm attributes his success 
 to his writings — the Broadstone or the first volumes of 
 the Mores. He says of Jane Mary : 
 
 " To learning grave she opes the door 
 And sets great value on its store, 
 AU she deems merit wins her grace 
 And finds in her a resting place ; 
 Her not with gold or jewels I 
 Coiild erst have moved, so tender, shy, 
 But what she thought a gracious book 
 Prevailed on her on me to look, 
 For her it was a poem bland ; 
 She yielded me her heart and hand." ^ 
 
 But probably it was less the " grave learning " than 
 the wild personal charm of the chivalric Kenelm that 
 won the heart of the young Irish girl. They were both 
 of Ireland, she of the early Norman-Irish breed, he of 
 the later Anglo- Irish. 
 
 They were married at Dover " in a kind of granary 
 which served the few Cathohcs at that time for Chapel." 
 " The children of the place," Kenelm Digby wrote long 
 after, " might have sung before her, with Jasmin, while 
 
 Chapel of 8t. John, p. 25. 
 
136 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 throwing a few flowers or green leaves upon the pave- 
 ment, 
 
 ' Les chemins devraient fleurir, 
 Tant belle epouse va sortir ; 
 Devraient fleurir, devraient grener, 
 Tant belle epouse va passer.' " 
 
 They drove on their wedding day about twenty miles, 
 over the high chalk downs and then across the marsh 
 levels, and up the chalk again, to Ramsgate. 
 
 Jane Mary was beautiful and charming, natural, 
 loviiig, deeply reUgious, penetrated through and through 
 by the spirit of the Catholic faith. Digby inserted in 
 the fourth chapter of the first volume, pubHshed in 
 1851, of his book named Compitum, the following 
 " mere sketch by a rude hand " of his wife, without 
 naming her : 
 
 " When she hears of the death of any one whom she 
 has ever known, however slightly, and who she thinks 
 has not left any pious friends, she sends to the nearest 
 church to have mass said for his soul. When she hears 
 of any one being sick, besides sending all temporal 
 assistance, she has masses offered for his recovery. 
 The devoted suppliant of blessed Mary, to one who 
 spoke before her of exceeding the due limits, she replied, 
 with an earnestness that might have raised a blush- 
 for having uttered such suspicions, ' It is always in 
 the name of Jesus that we ask for everything ; but we 
 implore the intercession of his blessed mother.' Her 
 views of all events are supernatural ; and therefore 
 sometimes, while the weak and worldly lament, she 
 seems to triumph, though indeed the tears that overflow 
 her eyes prove that the human affections still live within 
 her heart. Her scrupulous love of truth and justice 
 appears in the least things, as well as when the conse- 
 quences would demand from her an immense sacrifice. 
 Her zeal for God's glory renders the most timid the most 
 
FAMILY LIFE 137 
 
 courageous of hearts. The very officials of great 
 temples instinctively obey her directions when as a 
 stranger she denounces an abuse. Of the utmost 
 dehcacy of constitution, she endures with cheerfulness 
 whatever can occur to cause displeasure. ' It does not 
 disturb me, I am no fine lady ' is her smiUng answer to 
 those who would remove it. Still young, she has 
 conquered both the world and herself, rendering it 
 impossible to suppose that God would ever have placed 
 so much virtue in a juvenile heart, if eternal feHcity 
 was not prepared in another life for those who resemble 
 her. Not from the day when on this earth I first beheld 
 her charms have I ceased to follow her with an interior 
 and applausive song." 
 
 The following much earlier passage also, in the volume 
 of Mores Gatholici published in 1837, tells of Jane 
 Mary : 
 
 " One I have known, who not from the day when 
 on this earth I first beheld her charms, has ever ceased 
 with inward song adoring to converse with Christ, his 
 blessed mother, and the saints. thou pure and loving 
 soul, what will it be after so many prayers, so many 
 genuflexions, so many stolen vigils in the stilly night, 
 so many communions prepared for with all thy poor 
 strength, so many kisses bestowed upon the crucifix 
 and holy relics ever next thy bosom, so many Aves 
 muttered on the beads, so many tears and prostrations 
 while singing ' Tantum ergo ' and ' Salutaris Hostia ' 
 at the benediction of each closing day, which to thee 
 even in youth was joy, mirth, rapture, everything, — 
 what will it be, I say, after all this Hfe of expectation 
 and desire infinite, of alternate joy and sorrow, of light 
 and darkness passing through the heart, to behold thy 
 God, where days end not, where blessed moments change 
 not, where the vision of glory fades not through eternal 
 years ? spirit, born for joy, who, in the rays of life 
 
138 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 angelic, dost already taste that sweetness, what will be 
 thy radiance then? And where will be the poor heart 
 dwelling within this dust that can now only wonder at 
 thy beauty?"! 
 
 This was written when Jane Mary was hardly twenty, 
 although she had already been a wife for three or four 
 years, and a mother. After her death in 1860, Kenelm 
 Digby consecrated to her portrait a whole volume, the 
 really beautiful though forgotten book entitled. The 
 Chapel of St. John, or A Life of Faith in the Nineteenth 
 Century. Neither in this book does he ever mention her 
 marriage surname, nor ever say that the writer is her 
 husband, but the book records every shade of her manner 
 of life, tastes, actions, and ways of looking at things. 
 No picture of a wife so complete and minute has ever, 
 I think, been drawn by a husband, nor one so complete 
 of a true Catholic woman, living in the world. The 
 present memoir is intended chiefly to direct the attention 
 of those who do not already know them to the writings 
 of Kenelm Digby ; and, with The Chapel of St. John in 
 existence, it would be foolish to attempt to draw in 
 these pages a new portrait of the adorable soul flowing 
 over with love and bonte and generosity, fed, as it were, 
 from within by streams of Paradise, and diffusing them 
 through her surrounding world. 
 
 The mother of Jane Mary, the widow Marcella Dillon, 
 lived with the Digbys until she died, the same year as 
 her daughter, in 1860 ; and as neither Kenelm nor his 
 wife possessed the smallest business capacity, the 
 practical Marcella was of much service to them in 
 managing their worldly affairs. Digby says of her 
 in The Chapel of St. John : 
 
 1 Mores Catholici, vol. viii. p. 570. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 139 
 
 " She was a lady of most confirmed honour, of an 
 nnmatchable spirit, and determinate in all virtuous 
 resolutions ; yet shrinking from the employment of an 
 influence which attached itself irresistibly to her own 
 merit, she would be just against herself, and fearful of 
 using what another would long to use without deserv- 
 ing to possess it. . . . A poet paints to the life this 
 venerable lady when he says : 
 
 ' Hers was 
 A mounting spirit, one that entertained 
 Scorn of base action, deed dishonourable, 
 Or aught unseemly. 
 
 Wise she was 
 And wondrous skilled in genealogies. 
 And could in apt and voluble terms discourse 
 Of births, of titles, and alliances ; 
 Of marriages, and inter-marriages ; 
 Relationship remote, or near of kin ; 
 But these are not her praises, and I wrong 
 Her honoured memory, recording chiefly 
 Things Hght or trivial. Better 'twere to tell 
 How with a nobler zeal, and warmer love, 
 She served her heavenly Master. ' " 
 
 But the affairs and alliances of families are not really 
 by any means " things Hght or trivial," they are of the 
 essence of life ; nor is the knowledge of them a science 
 to be disdained. We do not, perhaps, nowadays, give 
 enough credit to the part which feehngs of pride, or 
 interest, in race have played in maintaining a standard 
 of energy and duty and honour. Old ladies should 
 be the priestesses who preserve the records of this 
 religion of the family, and keep it alive in the hearts 
 and minds of the young. Patriotism begins at home, and 
 one chief motive which makes men strive to serve their 
 country is the desire to raise and adorn their family name. 
 
 Kenelm Digby's eldest son was born in 1835, and, 
 
140 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 after that, came other children. Seven, in all, were 
 born before 1849. These years were spent partly in 
 a house in the Rue de Lorraine at St. Germain near 
 Paris, partly in various apartments in Paris, and partly 
 in different places in England, in summer-time and 
 autumn ; such as Clifton, Bath (at 19 the Circus), 
 or Tunbridge Wells, or near the New Forest. Few 
 married people, except soldiers or Anglo-Indians, have 
 lived in so many different houses as the Digbys, until 
 they settled down in Kensington in 1857. 
 
 In 1842 a thing happened which might easily have 
 brought the family to an end altogether. They were 
 then living in a house called Springfield House in " the 
 Paragon," in the outskirts of Southampton. The 
 Oxford Movement had now begun to bring a few con- 
 verts to Rome, and one of these early ones was the Rev. 
 Mr. Sibthorpe, a Fellow of Magdalen College, a disciple of 
 Newman. He was received into the Church in October, 
 1841. This step was less frequent than it became 
 soon afterwards, and Mr. Sibthorpe was viewed with 
 indignation by Protestants. The new convert arrived 
 at Springfield House on a visit to the Digbys, on 
 Saturday, 1st January, 1842. On Sunday a sermon 
 was preached in a local dissenting chapel in which the 
 congregation were told that Mr. Sibthorpe " deserved 
 to be burned." On Monday afternoon Mr. Sibthorpe 
 left. Next morning at 2 a.m. the house was found 
 to be on fire ; the family were fortunate to escape 
 with their lives, and everything in the building 
 was destroyed, including volumes of manuscript notes 
 by Kenelm Digby. Affidavits made at the time show 
 pretty conclusively that the fire was not accidental but 
 malicious. Suspicious persons had been seen the 
 
FAMILY LIFE 141 
 
 evening before prowling about the place, and the house 
 had evidently been entered through a ground-floor 
 window and fired. And the worst of it was that Mr. 
 Sibthorpe after all was not worth the sacrifice, for he 
 was a weak character, and presently reverted to 
 Anglicanism. 
 
 \ 
 
 II 
 
 The Revolution of 1848 ended Digby's abiding in 
 Paris, though to the close of his life he made frequent 
 visits to that city. 
 
 " One beautiful summer day," he says in Com'pitum,^ 
 *' the stranger " (Digby) " was serving as a guide to 
 two venerable priests and an illustrious friend, long 
 versed in diplomatic life, through the forest of St. 
 Germain. He was looking at the stately trees and the 
 beauteous flowers, and inviting his companions at every 
 step to admire their grandeur and their loveliness. The 
 visitors, for they had only just arrived from the capital, 
 were holding sad, foreboding talk on the probability 
 of fresh poHtical disturbances and new woes prepared 
 for their unhappy country. ' But look,' said the 
 stranger, deeming their apprehensions at least exagge- 
 rated, ' look at the heights beyond this forest. See the 
 wooded uplands of Marly, and the vast chestnut trees 
 on Montaigu.' Insensible to the invitation, they gazed 
 mournfully at those solemn groves. He wondered at 
 their obduracy, but lo ! in a few months the horrors 
 of revolution burst, not only upon that devoted land, but 
 upon nearly the whole of Europe." 
 
 In June, 1848, Kenelm Digby once more heard the 
 voice of cannon in Paris. His last son, John Gerald, 
 
 1 Vol. V. p. 306. 
 
 N 
 
142 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 had just been born, and doctors advised that in such 
 dangerous and menacing times it would be best, for 
 his wife's sake, to leave Paris. They packed up 
 hastily and drove away, effacing the Digby arms, which 
 contained the reactionary fleur de lys, upon their 
 carriage, to escape the wrath of the mob, and found, 
 as Digby says, in England the true Liberty, Equality 
 and Fraternity for the idea of which blood was being 
 vainly shed in Paris.^ 
 
 The Digbys passed two or three years after 1848 
 first at Chfton and then at Tunbridge Wells, and then 
 in 1851 took a house at Ramsgate, where they Hved until 
 the end of 1856. It was Number 2 Royal Crescent, 
 at the western end of Ramsgate, a crescent of early- 
 Victorian houses, with a large and cheerful common 
 garden in front, good to pace in after breakfast, with a 
 cigar, in the sun and the finest air in England. Beyond 
 the garden fence is a broad paved parade, at the edge of 
 a steep chalk chff, going down straight as a wall to the 
 sea. From here is a noble view over wide distances of 
 sea and land. At the western end of Royal Crescent 
 stands the beautiful Catholic church which was built 
 by Pugin, who lies there buried, at his own expense. 
 It had been begun in 1847, and was opened for worship 
 in 1851. It is not a large, but a nobly massive, church, 
 and has been called " Pugin' s gem." He intended it 
 to be a parish church, but when the Benedictine com- 
 munity, trained for the purpose at Subiaco, came in 
 1856 to Ramsgate, and founded the now adjoining 
 monastery of St. Augustine, the church was attached 
 to it. 
 
 Kenelm Digby loved this Kentish region, in which. 
 
 1 Temple of Memory, Canto VII. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 143 
 
 near twenty years earlier, he had begun his happy married 
 hfe. He has left a beautiful description of the scenery 
 in his book, the Chapel of St. John. The passage is 
 long, written in his leisurely style, which some, possibly, 
 may find reposeful in these days of impressionist and 
 staccato writing ; and as the book is scarce and not 
 easily obtained, some readers, especially those who know 
 East Kent, may be grateful if I quote it here. Digby 
 says, then : 
 
 " Passing down the Thames, or crossing the land in 
 a more southerly direction, we come to that region of 
 England which Tacitus describes as being in its chmate, 
 and even in the manner of its inhabitants, more similar 
 than any other of its districts to those of France. One 
 breathes, certainly, along its white clifis, which in the 
 shades of evening assume a dusky hue, a more elastic 
 air ; the sky is generally clearer, and you, perceive as 
 much of that magic splendour of the sun as our northern 
 latitudes can ever enjoy. It is not indeed that we can 
 hope to be presented with such a spectacle as is offered 
 by the enchanted coast of Chiaja, or by the shores of 
 the island of Capri, or even by those of our own Devon- 
 shire, but that in reality there is no part of the British 
 Islands where the climate so nearly resembles that of 
 the Continent. Nowhere is there more effulgence of 
 that 
 
 Traj/Tcoi' 
 AiOrjp KOivov (pao9 elXL(Tao}v.^ 
 
 And as, after all the deficiencies of the general scenery, 
 there is ever before your eyes the blue sea and an un- 
 obstructed horizon, with a sky that is most frequently 
 clear and cloudless, there is enough to refresh and 
 satisfy those who from time to time experience a want 
 
 ^ " Pure essential air, the common light of all circUng things." Aeschylus 
 in PrometheiLs Vinctus. The Greek word AWy]p needs adjectives to give 
 its meaning in EngUsh. 
 
144 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 to soliloquize a little while gazing, as we say, on the 
 face of nature. Besides there are certain indentures 
 of the coast which present the appearance of bays, that 
 are by no means without picturesque beauty. Then 
 you have also, intersected by long dykes and almost 
 blending with the sands, vast marshy tracts, over which 
 herds of cattle wander, forming a landscape full of 
 attraction for those who have a taste for Cuyp scenery, 
 and not less for those who in a boyish way are enamoured 
 of the brooks and rushes and the green lowlands, and 
 are fond of spending hours thus with a dog or two and 
 some choice companion amidst the calm of rural solitude, 
 while hearing, as they saunter along, what the old 
 poet calls 
 
 irovTLOov re KVjULaTwi/ , 
 
 Av)]pi6fji.ov yeXaa-fxa.^ 
 
 " Then from plains that gently rise above these salt- 
 marshes the amplest range of prospect may be enjoyed — 
 low brown ■» or purple tracts, where a winding river 
 stagnates, are stretched out westward; beneath, right 
 at the cliff's southern base, you have the ocean breaking 
 audibly, not far distant from the Goodwins ; and south 
 of them, far away in pale-tinted regions, forming a 
 long ridge, that some might take for a perishable cloud, 
 you behold the coast of France, the cultivated fields 
 that streak its tawny summits, its churches, and even 
 its golden image of the Virgin shining from a dome, 
 being at all times discernible, while the revolving lights, 
 after sunset, cast a fitful gleam upon the dark waters 
 from its desert capes. Again, looking northward, you 
 have the open champaign country, which has also a 
 certain beauty of its own, constituting what a great 
 author 2 distinguishes as that of field-lands, which, 
 though capable only of an inferior and material art, 
 and apt to lose its spirituality, present, however, the 
 
 ^ " Innumerable laughter of ocean waves." Aeschylus, Prometheus 
 Vinctus. 
 ^ Ruskin. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 145 
 
 advantage of having sight of the whole sky, and of the 
 continued play and change of sun and cloud, and also 
 of greater liberty, being like the moss-lands, at least 
 at certain seasons, the freest ground in all the world, 
 while commanding all the horizon's space of changeful 
 Hght. On a spring morning the voice of waters must 
 here be softened down into a vernal tone ; a spirit 
 of desire and enjoyment, with hopes and wishes from all 
 living things, must seem to pervade the entire region. 
 Beast and bird, the lamb, the shepherd's dog, the 
 hnnet and the lark, must appear to be all comply- 
 ing with their Creator's invitation to rejoice and be 
 happy. 
 
 " Some, who in later months of the fine season chance 
 to walk alone beneath these cHffs at sunrise, or above 
 them with this sauntering crowd, that, like one family, 
 is listening to music under the rising moon, are not 
 left without memories of affections old and true. At 
 all hours, inland for many a mile, the elm-grove murmurs 
 with a sea-like sound, though still the habitual sight 
 of fields with rural works is cheerful. Far towards the 
 north-western limits of your view, lies an ascending 
 country, dappled over with shadows flung from many 
 a summer cloud ; those many spots lie in long streaks 
 determined and unmoved, with steady beams of sunshine 
 interposed, pleasant to him who on the soft cool moss 
 extends his wearied limbs. 
 
 " Now is the day decUning, and the faint evening 
 breeze plays on the meadow. Why is there not a 
 Claude here to see and paint these groves and these 
 long undulating tracts which mount up to purple eleva- 
 tions, with the zig-zag road that breaks the uniformity 
 of tone, and leads to these mills that stand like towers 
 for a sea-mark ? How would an artist have dehghted 
 in this foreground too, of rich entangled weeds, with 
 its goats and sheep, and the rough dogs that watch 
 them ! Then, suf&cient in itself to form a picture, 
 you come ever and anon to some old broken bridge 
 
146 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 across a rivulet, seeming to be half rock, half brick, 
 here covered with plaster, there lined with weeds and 
 beautifully interwoven plants ; beyond it are the fields, 
 now undistinguishable, as they are fast darkening in 
 the twiUght, while the horizon is coloured with the lovely 
 hues of sunset, diffused higher up amidst some rosy 
 clouds, fringed with gold, thinly floating motionless 
 in an azure so calm and profound, that you can hardly 
 imagine its being anything else but heaven. 
 
 " So, without anything that an untrained eye would 
 deem in the least remarkable, our travellers find them- 
 selves, they know not how, soothed and satisfied — a 
 few tufts of pine or elm, the blue or warm, radiance of 
 a lake-Uke bay, a meadow or a corn-field, the edge of a 
 cHfi, and the distant shores that mingle with the clouds — 
 such is the nature that contents them. 
 
 " Disdained by some, as being thronged in summer 
 with a motley crowd of Shakspeare's ' Sunday citizens,' 
 the whole scenery of the district recommends itself to 
 those who hold with a great authority in matters of art, 
 that ' all true landscape, whether simple or exalted, 
 depends primarily for its interest on connexion with 
 humanity, or with spiritual power,' ^ and that even 
 ' fragrant tissues of flowers, and golden circlets of clouds, 
 are only fair when they meet the fondness of human 
 thoughts, and glorify human visions of heaven.' 
 
 " Nor is the interest attached to historical recollections 
 wanting to this region ; for on one of these upper soHtary 
 plains the Anglo-Saxons had their place of solemn burial. 
 Here first Caesar saw Britain, and here Augustine landed 
 to bring light and immortality." 
 
 This is a beautiful and true description of scenery 
 which moved Hasted, the eighteenth-century historian 
 of Kent, to more prosaically expressed enthusiasm. 
 He says of the superb view from the chalk down above 
 
 1 Buskin, Modern Painters. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 147 
 
 Minster over all this region, the most interesting view in 
 England : 
 
 " From this place may be seen not only this island 
 [of Thanet] and .the several churches in it ; but there 
 is a view at a distance of the two spires of Keculver, 
 the island of Sheppey, the Nore, the mouth of the river 
 Thames, the coast of Essex, the Swale and the British 
 Channel ; the cUffs of Calais and the kingdom of France ; 
 the Downs and the town of Deal, the bay and town of 
 Sandwich, the fine champion country of East Kent, the 
 spires of Woodnesborough and Ash, the ruins of Rich- 
 borough Castle, the beautiful green levels of Minster, 
 Ash, etc., with the river Stour winding between them, 
 the fine and stately tower of the cathedral of Canterbury, 
 and a compass of hills of more than one hundred miles 
 in extent, which terminate the sight." 
 
 So that, when you are on the hill above Minster in 
 Thanet, you know where you are, locally and historically. 
 But it seems to me that this view is now less clear than 
 when Kenelm Digby saw it, or when I myself saw it 
 as a boy. One seems less often to see the coast of 
 France with that wondrous distinctness. This may be 
 due to the increased smoke emitted by the far more 
 numerous steamships in the Channel and, in some 
 winds, to the coal-mines of the Pas de Calais. And 
 now East Kent, once so purely rural, except for its 
 fringe of cheerful and not too large sea-side towns, 
 is threatened by its own coal-mining and consequent 
 developments, and places once sweetly untouched, hke 
 Sandwich and Ebbsfleet and old Reculver, are in 
 danger of being destroyed by sea-side villa building. 
 The delicious low shell-strewn shore from Sandwich 
 to Pegwell Bay is no longer quiet and unfrequented, 
 and behind it during the War has arisen an unnatural 
 
148 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 kind of town, erected by Government. It is a pity, 
 but apparently tbe progress of " Civilization " cannot 
 be arrested. Descendants may be sadly glad that 
 Kenelm Digby knew this region in its more Arcadian 
 days, and has left in writing so lovely an impression. 
 Those who visit this land fifty years hence, when it may 
 have become a black industrial country covered with 
 chimneys and slag heaps and mining and smelting 
 villages, may Uke to have this description of it when it 
 was still one of the most peaceful, untouched, and rural 
 parts of England. 
 
 Ill 
 
 These years, from 1848 to 1856, spent in EngUsh rural 
 places, especially those five, until the last, at Ramsgate, 
 in the fine, cheerful-making air of East Kent, were, 
 surely, the happiest in Kenelm Digby' s life. He was 
 now in the first half of his sixth decade, a season corre- 
 sponding to the bright and reposeful and fruitful month 
 of September in the English year. There is less gaiety 
 than in spring, but also more certain warmth and no 
 really bitter winds. Then his family was now in its 
 fullest and most perfect bloom, almost intact and all 
 together. Every family has its most perfect moment. 
 The Digbys had lost one child, Frances Mary Venetia, 
 who died at eighteen months old, but they brought six 
 to Ramsgate. Their names were in this order of birth : 
 Thomas, Marcella, Kenelm, Mary Anne Letitia, John 
 Gerald, and Mary, boys and girls alternating so as to 
 form a most pleasing garland. Kenelm Digby says 
 much of this family in his book of 1858, called The 
 Children's Bower, or What you like. The family were the 
 more united and homogeneous because none of them 
 
FAMILY LIFE 149 
 
 had been sent away to boarding-schools or convents ; 
 they had all been educated at home by tutors and 
 French governesses. They had had the education 
 given by a cultivated home, and, in the case of the elder 
 ones, by intimate touch with some good French families 
 and priests, and that which is given by living in more 
 than one beautiful or interesting place. Digby says : 
 
 " The imagination of these children and youths 
 had been nourished by places rendered beautiful both 
 by nature and by art. Moderately, not greatly, favoured 
 in this respect, they had not seen Italy, they had not 
 seen even a mountain. From their window was not 
 beheld, as from that of Titian's house at Venice, the 
 chain of the Tyrolese Alps, where every dawn that 
 reddened the towers of Murano lighted also a line of 
 pyramidal fires along that colossal ridge; but they 
 were famihar with such scenes as dehght Ruskin — 
 the beautiful grove of aspen poplars, the fountain and 
 the meadow — as meet the eye of the traveller every 
 instant on the much-despised lines of road through 
 lowland France, scenes to them, as to himself, quite 
 exquisite in the various grouping and grace of their 
 poplar avenues, casting sweet tremulous shadows over 
 their level fields and labyrinthine streams. On the 
 continent they had seen what he ascribes to its scenery, 
 comprising works of human art, the links unbroken 
 between the past and present, the building as at St. 
 Germain des Pres and Calais tower of the eighth or 
 tenth century standing in the open street, the children 
 playing round it, no one wondering at it, or thinking 
 of it as separate and of another time, the ancient world, 
 a real thing and one with the new, being all continuous. 
 Then they had seen smiling plains, solemn churches, the 
 wood of Boulogne when it was wild and solitary, the 
 forest of St. Germain, Marly and Montague, where 
 they were all ' assueti silvis.' Thomas, mounted on his 
 
150 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 fiery little charger, knew every path and pass of those 
 woods extending to Versailles, as well as if he had been 
 one of those king's pages that the ancient friends of his 
 family had been in their youth, and whose adventures 
 they used to describe to him so often that he might 
 almost have thought that he had lived himself in those 
 times. Then the whole party knew later CUfton with 
 its rocks and downs, then the upland wilderness of 
 Tunbridge Wells, lastly the Sandwich marshes, so 
 frequented by the strange water-fowl that Bewicke 
 copied, and the adjacent harbour with the sea-roads 
 of that town^ which from the cliffs, whose sides are 
 yearly wasted by the deep, St. Augustin's grey massive 
 tower dominates ; town of midsummer mirth, if you 
 will, town of children and of those who in their cheerful- 
 ness resemble them, as if each thought himself again a 
 child, but town of humanity, with all the virtues which 
 that word imphes, sorrow for the dead being one here 
 by me most gratefully remembered, town not deserving, 
 like that ItaHan city, the epithet Superb ; not proud, 
 not ambitious, like so many others where arrogance 
 and grandeur keep their vain, melancholy state ; but 
 only an unpretending sunny place of simple and, Uter- 
 ally, childlike recreation for the common inhabitants 
 of London, aspiring, like one family, after nought but 
 air and mirth, health and freedom, gathering shells 
 on summer eve, ladHng sand, and breasting the ocean 
 wave." 2 
 
 The eldest boy, Thomas, usually called Tom, had 
 reached the age of twenty-one in 1856, the last of these 
 happy Ramsgate years, and had just received a com- 
 mission in the army. He was the young hero of the 
 family, " tall, gay, gallant, the pride of all these young 
 hearts, though himself the humblest of the humble ; 
 the lover of horses and boats, and nets and guns, the 
 
 ^ Ramsgate. ^ Children's Bower, ch. v. p. 141, 
 
FAMILY LIFE 151 
 
 gentleman, as common persons that know Mm say, 
 ' every inch of him.' The gay songster, and the skilled 
 on the sweet silver cornet. The inspirer of joy wherever 
 he enters." 
 
 Next came Marcella : 
 
 " We must try to imagine dignity and grace combined 
 in a tall girl, with a mind well-stored, like those we 
 read about in medieval histories, as skilled in many 
 tongues, and able to discourse with scholars in their 
 own Latin ; possessing a deep heart of nature's moods 
 of grandeur and solemnity, and light and shade 
 
 ' With each anxious hope subdued, 
 By maiden's gentle fortitude 
 Each grief, through meekness, settHng into rest.' 
 
 Words which I picked up from a verse which I happily 
 did not cast away, though little suspecting that I should 
 live to have need of them, when we were to see her one 
 day like sorrow's monument." ^ 
 
 After MarceUa came Kenelm, " grave and courageous, 
 serious and firm, very steady," and after Kenelm came 
 Mary Letitia, '' a gentle tall one, a creature flowing with 
 what might appropriately be termed the ' oil of glad- 
 ness,' oleum laetitiae, a sensitive creature, whose little 
 girlish fears it is delightful to behold, a child of nature, 
 with a heart inspired with the love of all beautiful, all 
 glorious, all quiet, or impassioned things." 
 
 Then came John Gerald, who was eight years old 
 in 1856, " the sweetest companion that ever man 
 bred his hopes out of, so loving and so joyous that 
 none need dread the depth of his dark meditative eye." 
 He was one of those youngest children, whom one some- 
 times sees, in an affectionate family, whose love and 
 
 ^ Children's Bower, vol. i, p. 44, 
 
152 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 gaiety seem to be brought out in an uncommon degree 
 under the sun of so much concentrated and united 
 affection. The " visible angel of the house " his father 
 calls him. 
 
 Lastly came Mary, the only one of this fair ring of 
 children who still lives on this earth. " How vivid, 
 how dehcate her glee!" says her father. "How arch^ 
 how frolicsome ! No living man need fear the worst 
 of fortune's malice, were she at his side, wanting only a 
 wand to be a fairy." 
 
 So this happy group lived these few years at Ramsgate^ 
 riding and hunting, boating, fishing and swimming, 
 rambUng over the cHffs, sands, and marsh-levels, studying 
 and reading and singing, frequenting mass and vespers 
 and benediction at the beautiful new church of St. 
 Augustine. 
 
 Looking back, when he was half-way between seventy 
 and eighty, upon this delightful time, Kenelm Digby 
 wrote in his poem Ouranogaia, or Heaven on earth : 
 
 " Oh ! say what is thy children's bower 
 But Heaven here in a finite hour ? 
 For me to think of little John 
 On earth, then Heaven -with it is one. 
 Letitia, Mary, Thomas, me,^ 
 Did spread around felicity ; 
 Neither was tall Marcella found 
 A flower foreign to such ground ; 
 Nor yet Kenulmus, ever grave, 
 And less inclined to romp and rave, 
 But all enjoyed, and did impart 
 Of these bless'd fields not small a part." 
 
 But now came the first of the great blows which were 
 to break up the happy circle. Little John Gerald, in 
 
 ^ A Saturday Reviewer was very severe upon this bold inversion, and 
 indeed it does need apology. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 153 
 
 his ninth year, was caught by a malignant fever, and 
 died eight days later, on the 25th June, 1856. 
 
 A few Sundays earlier his father had looked at him 
 during Benediction in the Abbey Church. He beheld 
 him " with his little head bowed down, and forehead rest- 
 ing on the rail, so innocently and so devoutly praying " 
 that his father turned away his eyes, as if they were 
 '' not worthy to sustain the vision of such pure inno- 
 cence." Little John seemed to have a presentiment. 
 He used to talk of being in heaven first, and seeing his 
 elders come there after him. 
 
 '' There was a song he used latterly to sing, laughing, 
 every day at the dining-room door, where he waited 
 to see pass one whom he greatly loved. This was the 
 burden of it : 
 
 ' Oh Maunie, 
 When I am dead and buried, 
 Cry no more for me.' 
 
 " Every Sunday he used to walk with Anne, one of 
 the domestics. Shortly before he sickened he bought 
 for her a broach set with forget-me-nots. ' Oh, 
 how pretty ! ' she exclaimed. He replied, ' You will 
 soon have a handsomer one.' Three weeks after, she 
 received a valuable gold broach filled with the dead 
 boy's hair. The last present that he gave his good 
 young governess was a little print of his own choosing, 
 representing a Trappist digging a grave, with this 
 inscription, ' To-day for me, to-morrow for thee.' "... 
 
 The last day that the child heard mass, his father 
 turned round to look at him in his corner, and 
 
 " almost shuddered, so struck was he with the boy's coun- 
 tenance. There was something in it more than gravity, 
 and yet it was so sweet." ... " The last time that little 
 
154 KENELM HENKY DIGBY 
 
 John ever went to take a drive, he sat on the coach-box 
 as usual. It was the day before he sickened. It was 
 late in June, the carriage was open. ' Why are you so 
 silent, John 1 ' asked his mother, knowing how he used 
 always before to like chatting with the coachman. 
 John replied not, only smiled. ' He is full of thought,' 
 said the driver, turning round and laughing. ' Why, 
 mamma,' said John, ' it is only that I have nothing to 
 say.' " 
 
 Kenelm Digby adds : 
 
 " Only to think of that little sweet soul left to meet 
 death alone. Snatched from life, from mother, sisters, 
 brothers, and all the charms of existence. He is driving 
 out now through the dear scenes he loves, but next 
 week he will have to travel alone beyond the stars 
 into eternity. So God seems to communicate to him a 
 sense of what he is about to witness. To-day he sees 
 what he doats upon, the horses, and the fields, and the 
 waving corn, but he heeds them not. He sits by the 
 friendly coachman, with whom he loved to chatter, but 
 speaks not. He sits before his mother, with looking at 
 whom he could never he satiated, but he turns not a 
 joyous face, as he was wont, to nod at her ; he is 
 silent. ' He is full of thought,' said the old coachman, 
 laughing." 
 
 Kenelm Digby tells in the Children's Bower in moving 
 words the last days and the end.^ An hour after that, 
 late at night, the poor father saw his two remaining 
 sons 
 
 " seated in silence on the balcony of the next room. 
 The casement stands open. 'Tis between twelve and 
 one. The moon rises slowly over the sea. Those boys 
 are watching it ; not a word is uttered ; only the distant 
 wave is heard. God, can he [the father] ever live 
 
 ^ Children's Bower, chap. v. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 155 
 
 to forget that silence and that spectacle. ' A breath 
 from the region of spirits seemed to float in the air of 
 night.' Where now is his little companion ? The 
 brothers sat in silence gazing on it— one of them little 
 aware that he was himself so soon to be initiated in 
 the same mysteries of eternity. More than half the 
 darkness now is past. Night will soon fly before the 
 beam when pom-ed on the hill. The young day will 
 return, but John returns no more. It was an hour to 
 look inw^ard. 
 
 ' While thouglits on thoughts, a countless throng, 
 Rushed, chasing countless thoughts along.' " 
 
 A few days later the body of little John was buried 
 at Hales Place, in St. Stephen's, close to Canterbury, 
 in the vault of the old Catholic and Kentish family of 
 the Hales. The funeral came by road some seventeen 
 miles from Eamsgate. Kenelm Digby thus describes 
 the tender-sad scene in his impersonal way : 
 
 " On a fine day, amidst all the triumph of the summer's 
 youth, in a southern county of England, some strangers 
 are passing outside the wall of a well- wooded park. The 
 nightingale, the cuckoo, and the linnet, have long opened 
 the beautiful season in these groves ; the lark is singing 
 overhead ; only the heat at this hour suspends the full 
 concert. It is Wednesday, the 2nd of July, 1856. But, 
 lo, something must have happened lately in the neigh- 
 bourhood not in visible accordance with this smiling 
 serenity of nature. Many young men and other persons 
 are standing silently in groups under the shade, collected 
 round the ivy-bound gates of a long plane-tree avenue 
 which leads to a great house, which is the well-known 
 seat of an old historic family. A priest clad in his 
 vestments, and many acolytes and children are waiting 
 about the lodge, ready, it would seem, to do all rites 
 that appertain to a burial. Several soldiers too are 
 
156 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 straying about, while others of their company are 
 expressing regret that they can wait no longer, as duty 
 calls them elsewhere. The strangers stop and join the 
 groups, as if they had no other occupation but to observe. 
 At length, about two o'clock, between the dusky trees,, 
 and along the road through the open green, comes gliding 
 on serene and slow, soft and silent as a midsummer's 
 day dream, a funeral procession. 
 
 " There is a hearse with four tired horses and white 
 trophies, preceded by tall bending vapoury plumes 
 that wave their swan-Uke purity over the summer corn. 
 There are two coaches, and all the horses seem to have 
 come from far. The broad gate swings on its hinges. 
 Some mourners alight. If there was a diviner of the 
 future to whisper in your ear, you would take especial 
 notice of that tall and handsome youth, wearing over 
 his deep black a white scarf. As it is, they who know 
 him remark his graceful, noble air, and think that it 
 never struck them more forcibly than at this moment. 
 You would say now how well he looks. You do not 
 yet see death about him. . . . Then from the second 
 carriage some women descend, all clad as maidens in 
 their silvery livery, as if with mirth in funeral, and dirge 
 in marriage, in equal scale weighing dehght and dole. 
 The coffin, of an ivory hue, as if white to figure purity, 
 is then taken out, and borne on men's shoulders. The 
 priest receives it processionally, and all move on, singing 
 as they walk the funeral chant appropriated for those 
 peace-parted souls who died in their innocence. The 
 psalm, ' Praise the Lord, ye children,' is entoned with 
 a clear voice ; and to that music the little train moves^ 
 up the avenue. 
 
 ' How like a gentle stream shaded with night 
 And gliding softly, with our windy sighs, 
 Moves the whole frame of this solemnity ! ' 
 
 The view on both sides of the leafy aisle, which is fra- 
 grant with the perfume of a thousand flowers, that grow 
 
FAMILY LIFE 157 
 
 within an open garden on one side of it, is smiHng as 
 if in spite of death. The groves at least seem happy. 
 
 Non canimus surdis ; respondent omnia silvae.^ 
 
 And, in fact, those who follow the train said later, that, 
 after a long journey along scorching roads, and across 
 vast, open, shadeless plains, and, latterly, through the 
 streets of an adjacent city filled with strange faces, 
 where, though all respected, no one recognized as his 
 own the symbols of their ancient faith, on coming to 
 this spot, where for ages it had reigned uninterruptedly, 
 and where so many friends were waiting for them with 
 their hymns, encompassed by the charms of nature, that 
 seemed to join in with its own responsive voice, they 
 felt as if they had reached the gate of that Paradise 
 which was to receive the httle one. 
 
 " But let us mark all as if we were unconcerned 
 spectators. They move on. Observe their order. First 
 ghdes the processional Cross, with its attendant acolytes 
 carrying Hghted tapers in their hands. Then 
 
 ' Village girls in robes of snow 
 Follow, weeping as they go.' 
 
 The song is then changed to Our Lady's Htany ; the 
 clergy preceding the body close the procession, which is 
 like the subject of it, simple, — acolytes and schoolboys, 
 a few women mourners in white, and thoughtful-looking 
 soldiers compose the chief part of the train, but the 
 avenue is lined on each side with people that in the 
 burning sun walk with forgetful sadness. Arrived at 
 the Chapel which adjoins the house, the cofhn is laid 
 down in front of the altar. An aged priest who had 
 come with it places on it wreaths of flowers, while round 
 it are arranged the customary Hghts. Then the choir 
 sings ' Praise ye the Lord from the heavens,' and the 
 organ, causing long pent up tears to burst forth, accom- 
 panies the chant. After this little office the procession 
 
 ^ " Not to the deaf we smg ; the woods make answer to all things," 
 Virgil, Eel 10. 
 
158 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 is formed towards a monumental cave of death behind 
 the altar. Here the coffin is sprinkled with holy water, 
 and the cold vault fumed with incense. The poor 
 remains are then deposited in their sacred resting-place, 
 the priest taking off his own sacerdotal girdle, to offer 
 it to those who let it glide down, as if he thought nothing 
 too precious to use on such an occasion. The priest 
 and his attendants then return to the altar, singing the 
 Canticle of the Three Children, ' All ye works of the 
 Lord, bless ye the Lord,' and then, turning to the people, 
 he speaks a few simple words, which for aught a stranger 
 knew, might or might not be commonplace, while he 
 seems to struggle with himself, as he looks at some 
 before him, saying, ' Noli flere, noli flere, melior est dies 
 mortis quern dies nativitatis.' " ^ 
 
 The writer gives some account of this Uttle sermon, 
 how the priest spoke of the goodness of the child, 
 " that really heaven seemed about him, and yet that 
 he had all the innocent graces of common youth, 
 so that wherever he entered joy seemed to come in 
 with him." 
 
 The groups melted away down the avenue, but some 
 few Ungered by the vault to take a last farewell, and 
 scatter flowers. 
 
 Thus Kenelm Digby has illuminated in the darkness 
 of the past this sad-sweet pageant of sorrow over sixty 
 years ago. It is strange that a beautiful description 
 of another funeral, twenty-nine years later, at the end 
 of April this time, coming up the same avenue to the 
 same chapel, remains in print, in the Letters of Mary 
 Sibylla Holland, who was born the same year as Marcella 
 Digby, and died a year earUer than her.^ It was that 
 
 ^ " Weep not, weep not ; better is the day of death than the day of 
 birth." 
 
 ^ At page 102 of 3rd edition, published by Edward Arnold, 1907. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 159 
 
 of Mary Hales, the last of that old Catholic and Kentish 
 family, whose body was brought, also along the road 
 from Thanet and through Canterbury, from her retreat 
 at Sarre Court, to be buried with those of her ancestors. 
 Probably, as a girl of about twenty, Mary Hales saw 
 that child's funeral in 1856. In the Ramsgate days 
 the two elder of the Digby children, Tom and Marcella, 
 used sometimes to come over and spend a night 
 or two at Hales Place. That house became in the 
 'eighties a College of the Jesuits, not allowed to have 
 schools in France, and it now is a seminary of French 
 Jesuits. From the seventeenth century, at least, the 
 sacrifice of the Mass has there been continuously 
 offered. 
 
 No one without experience knows what these heart- 
 rending pains are. Happier those parents or sisters, 
 whose dear young ones die suddenly on a distant field 
 of battle, than those who see them die before their eyes. 
 
 " Impositique rogis juvenes ante ora parentum." 
 
 Three months later the Digbys, still at Kamsgate, 
 received a new blow so crushing that they needed all 
 the wonderful consolations of the Catholic rehgion. 
 Their eldest son, the bright and manly Tom, died also. 
 Like his Httle brother he seemed to have some presenti- 
 ment. A few weeks before he sickened he said to a 
 friend, " I Hke that black horse of mine. I wish he 
 might be led after my body at my funeral." The last 
 day that he hunted he came home early. He was 
 thoughtful and grave. His bay mare, he said, refused 
 to take leaps such as she had never before refused. 
 Only once more he went out on horseback with his 
 father (who also, after this, rode no more), and this time 
 
160 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 came back lamenting that he had lost from his neck a 
 locket containing little John's hair, and this went on 
 troubUng him. The last time he was ever out of doors, 
 returning home, apparently in usual health, he met a 
 friend who asked him where he was going. He repHed, 
 " I am going home to have my last sickness." He came 
 home chilly and unwell, and early next morning desired 
 to see the priest, who came and gave communion. Tom, 
 also, had been seized by a mahgnant fever, and in nine 
 days he died. " I know I am dying. I am quite 
 happy," were among his last words. 
 
 *' It is Sunday the 12th October. Slowly had that 
 day passed in bitterness. The bell of the neighbouring 
 church of St. Augustine now tolled for vespers. He 
 grasped the habit of the young Benedictine who knelt 
 by his side, and implored him not to leave him. There 
 was another priest in the church to say them, and he 
 did not leave him. Moreover to the last, too, he saw 
 round him female heads that expressed ' sorrow, dignity, 
 and faith in God.' In fine, recovering composure 
 somewhat before the setting of the sun, he took his last 
 leave of this fading Hght, and with his soul sought for 
 beams eternal. Gently he breathed, and without a 
 sigh expired, his face immediately assuming for a short 
 interval a look of bojdsh beauty, which had distinguished 
 his earUer years. . . . 
 
 " So the gay young EngUsh sportsman, the sweet, 
 clean, noble gentleman, loved by all classes through an 
 entire county, the bold horseman, the joyous songster, 
 the friend so noted for his generous, dehcate, open, and, 
 in the old EngUsh sense of the word, merry heart, the 
 familiar comrade of the local youth, the desired at every 
 ball-room — after seeing twenty sweet summers died Uke 
 a Bayard, like the Cid. . . ." ^ 
 
 ^ Children'' s Bower, vol. ii. p. 288. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 161 
 
 Thomas Digby was buried close to the north wall of 
 the Church of St. Augustine on the spot where his parents 
 had already resolved to build an outside Chapel of 
 St. John, and thither to bring back from Hales Place, 
 as they afterwards did, the body of their little John 
 Gerald. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 FAMILY LIFE— Continued 
 
 " Do what you will, and think what you will, but know this, and 
 make up your mind to it, that from your cradle to your grave you 
 move amidst a vast system of grief, where, if you yourself are spared, 
 grief is mistress, making others pay that tribute which she disdains 
 to accept from you. . . . Whatever be the reason for this being 
 written, it is written, and by a hand apparently firm to its purpose. 
 Oh ! then, there is peace in acquiescing in this general order, in 
 suffering wiUingly, in order that some one else may be relieved ; for 
 whoever so suffers, at the feet of Christ, removes suffering from 
 another, in accordance with the principle of solidarity amongst 
 us all." Lacordaire. 
 
 I 
 
 After these sad events the Digbys left Ramsgate and 
 went to live in London. They took one of those roomy, 
 eighteenth-century houses with large gardens which 
 were then to be found on the road from Kensington to 
 Hammersmith. It was called Shaftesbury House, and 
 stood on the south side of the road a Uttle west of what 
 is now the Kensington Underground railway station. 
 The house has years ago been pulled down and the site 
 covered by great shops. Here Digby Uved till he died in 
 1880. 
 
 In his first year at Kensington he endured a new and 
 bitter loss. Marcella, his eldest daughter, was of all his 
 children nearest to himself in mind, tastes and interests. 
 He had given her a strong education. She had learned, 
 with her brothers, Latin and Greek, from their tutor, 
 
 162 
 
FAMILY LIFE 163 
 
 a Cambridge convert and a fine scholar, and slie had 
 read much history and literature for her age. She 
 loved the outdoor Hfe, and especially riding, and was 
 rather fond, too, of dress and jewels. But the sudden 
 deaths, in 1856, of her youngest and her eldest brother 
 had a tremendous effect upon this girl of nineteen. It 
 was Marcella whom her father saw looking like " sorrow's 
 monument." If this is life, she said, "it is better to 
 give one's whole self to rehgion." She had also been 
 much impressed by her father's defence of the monastic 
 life in his books. She now asked his leave to become 
 a Nun, and he refused to give it. Like Montalembert's 
 charming and high-spirited daughter Catherine, to her 
 father, when she had made the same resolve, Marcella 
 quoted his own writings against him, silently handing 
 to him, says Mother Pollen, a volume of Compitum} 
 Montalembert, when his daughter became a novice of 
 the Sacred Heart, was heart-broken. Kenelm Digby 
 was not the first, nor will be the last, father who 
 has entered the CathoHc Church, and has then seen his 
 children go beyond him in devotion. That same attrac- 
 tion which brings some into the Church draws others on 
 further still. It is, in this sense, a dangerous religion. 
 But those who believe in, and therefore join, the CathoHc 
 Church, must be prepared to take all the consequences 
 of their action. 
 
 What happened to Marcella is related in an MS. 
 account of her written by a French nun of the Sacred 
 Heart, which the Mothers at Roehampton have allowed 
 me to see and to use. The writer was with Marcella 
 in Chili, and saw her life and death there, and heard from 
 her such recollections of the past as her reserved nature 
 
 * In her Memoir of Mother Mabel Digby. 
 
164 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 allowed her to give. During an absence abroad of her 
 father she obtained her mother's permission to make a 
 Retreat, at a convent about thirty miles from London, 
 conducted by a then well-known Jesuit priest. She 
 told her desire to this priest, and asked him to direct 
 her to a community which would receive her at once. 
 He mentioned the Convent of the Sacred Heart, at 
 Roehampton, but required her first to write to her 
 mother telling her of this, and promising to conform 
 with her wishes. Mrs. Digby replied that if Marcella were 
 certain of her resolve, it would be best that she should 
 go straight to the Convent, so as to decide the question 
 without further painful discussion. Later, Mrs. Digby 
 admitted that when, with many tears, she wrote this 
 letter, she was persuaded that her daughter would not 
 act upon it. But, as soon as the Retreat was ended, 
 the resolved Marcella went straight to Roehampton, 
 passing her Kensington home, sitting in a corner of a 
 vehicle, well-shrouded in veils, so fearful was she of 
 being seen. She used afterwards to speak of the 
 anguish of this journey. This was in December, 1856.^ 
 
 " Desormais," says the French MS., " on put suivre 
 dans cette ame si genereuse comme une double action, 
 I'attraction victorieuse de son coeur eleve vers un de- 
 pouillement absolu, une immolation complete, et les 
 revendications d'une nature fi^re, peu dominee et 
 fantasque, mais que la grace et un amour ardent pour 
 N.S. devait subjuguer entierement et transformer." 
 
 Marcella for some time was occupied in small employ- 
 ments about the house. " She passed usually " (says 
 
 ^ I gather this date from what Digby says in the Chapel of St. John, 
 pp. 305 and 311. She spent the following spring and summer at 
 Roehampton. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 165 
 
 the MS.) " the hours of leisure at the window of her room 
 which looked on a meadow bordered with trees and 
 enamelled with flowers. Numerous birds flew about, and 
 our postulant regarded with envy these pretty neigh- 
 bours, asking herself if she would have the courage to 
 endure for ever the yoke of a voluntary captivity." 
 From the window she could also see the road along which 
 would come sometimes a groom of her father's, bringing 
 letters or parcels, and that mounted upon her own 
 darling horse. This was the bitterest trial or temptation 
 of all, but she overcame these natural weaknesses by 
 the conviction that she must fulfil the will of God. 
 " Besides, when she was summoned to the parlour, she 
 felt herself changed, in a way which she herself did 
 not understand, and those of her family who came to 
 visit her went away satisfied seeing her so calm and so 
 happy." 1 
 
 In September, 1857, Marcella was sent to the House of 
 the Order at Conflans in France for her novitiate. Mabel 
 Digby, about two years older than herself, had begun 
 her novitiate at Conflans a few months earlier, and the 
 two cousins were together there until 1859. On the 
 13th September, 1859, Marcella took her first vows there, 
 and remained in that House for two years. She returned 
 to Roehampton on 23rd September, 1861. "In the 
 community," says the French MS., " she was silent 
 and reserved ; one felt that she experienced interior 
 pains, and went to God by a way little usual. The 
 
 ^ St. Theresa, after describing the violence of the agony of parting from 
 her parents, says : 
 
 " At the moment when I took the habit, God made me conscious how- 
 he blesses those who deny themselves for his sake. This internal struggle 
 was known to him only ; on the surface nothing appeared in my conduct 
 but courage and firmness." 
 
166 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 complete rupture in whicli her well-loved father persisted 
 was for her heart a painful thorn." 
 
 Kenelm Digby had made no formal opposition to the 
 reception of his daughter into the Order of the Sacred 
 Heart, but he could not reconcile himself to the renuncia- 
 tion. Once he came to the Convent and asked to see 
 Marcella, but did not give his name. The Mother 
 Superior, in giving permission to Marcella to see the 
 unknown visitor, directed the Mother Clifford to accom- 
 pany her. Mother CUfEord sat down by a remote table, 
 and Marcella advanced towards the visitor. Marcella 
 and her father looked at each other without speaking a 
 word, and in a few seconds the latter took up his hat 
 and walked out of the room. Then Marcella said to 
 Madame Clifford, "It is my father." Kenelm Digby, 
 mortified to see his daughter accompanied, on this first 
 meeting since their separation, could not trust himself 
 to speak, and Marcella was so taken by surprise by this 
 sudden and unexpected appearance of the loved and 
 long unseen father whose displeasure she had incurred, 
 that she lost her presence of mind, and could not speak 
 in time either. She did not, according to the French 
 narrative, and if this correctly states what she told the 
 Nun who wrote it, see her father again for years, till 
 just before she started from Paris for South America, in 
 1876, never to return to England. All that can be 
 said is that Kenelm Digby had suffered so much in 
 1856 that he could not yet endure this further loss, of 
 the daughter most hke to himself, and that he was 
 deeply wounded by her flight without his consent. He 
 thought that she and her mother had not been fairly, 
 and that he had not been honourably, treated by the 
 priest who advised her, or the Order who received her. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 167 
 
 It may be suggested that it would have been wiser 
 to advise Marcella, as her cousin Mabel had been advised 
 at eighteen or nineteen, to wait for two or three years to 
 test her resolution, and to see whether then she could 
 gain her father's consent. I think that most experienced 
 spiritual Directors would agree as to this. She was 
 hardly twenty, and was acting under the influence of 
 a very great and recent shock, the deaths of two 
 brothers within three months, so that her father had a 
 good deal of reason on his side. He would probably 
 not have refused to assent two or three years later. 
 Mrs. Digby also, perhaps, did not act in the most judicious 
 way in advising her daughter. It is, however, difficult 
 or impossible, and also unwise, to form a judgment on 
 a matter Uke this, especially without knowing much 
 more in detail what really was said and written, 
 and I should not, perhaps, have said even so much 
 were it not necessary, in directing attention to Digby's 
 writings, to explain certain otherwise mysterious pas- 
 sages in the Chapel of St. John and in Evenings on 
 the Thames. 
 
 Marcella might have quoted against her father one 
 of his own favourite saints, the cheerful and far from 
 austere Francis of Sales, who told a young lady, in like 
 circumstances, that " if one had to obey the advice of 
 parents in such matters few people would be found to 
 embrace the perfection of Christian Hfe. ' ' But, if Francis 
 of Sales had had the conduct of this affair of Marcella, 
 he would have managed it wisely and gently {doucement 
 was his favourite word), so as to break the pain to a 
 father's heart, or even to convert it into sad joy. In 
 a memoir which has been printed of the English Jesuit 
 who advised Marcella, it is written : 
 
168 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 " The impression which his whole being conveyed was 
 that of a strong and many-sided nature brought under 
 by a great self-renunciation. One thing alone mattered 
 to him, the extension of God's kingdom on earth. Every- 
 thing else was secondary and could be brushed aside." 
 
 There is danger in a disposition so absolute, even 
 from the point of view of extending the kingdom. 
 
 Kenelm Digby could not soon or easily reconcile 
 himself to that which had happened, although he did, 
 in the end, resume affectionate correspondence with his 
 exiled daughter. Perhaps he had, all through a happy 
 hfe, enjoyed his own free way too completely, and had 
 not learned in the workaday world to accept the 
 unavoidable. And greater joy in family life involves 
 corresponding pains, no doubt. 
 
 In February, 1868, Marcella Digby was sent from 
 Eoehampton to Paris to the Convent of the Sacred 
 Heart, in the Rue Varennes, since then destroyed. Here 
 she worked with great devotion, but found some difficulty 
 in keeping the French girls in order. 
 
 " Rien ne decouragait cependant " (says the MS.) 
 " notre chere soeur, qu'on trouvait toujours prete a s'effa- 
 cer. La concentration de son caractere et I'oubli dans 
 lequel elle affectait de vouloir vivre, ont fait que peu 
 de personnes ont su penetrer les aspirations de cette 
 ame si belle qu'il fallait deviner en faisant la part d'un 
 caractere original, qui etait comme le voile jete sur 
 des vertus solides et un merite reel." 
 
 Marcella Digby made her final profession at Paris 
 on the 17th October, 1873. She had long ardently 
 desired to be sent to a distant mission, and at last she 
 was allowed to form one of the Sacred Heart Colony 
 which in 1876 was sent to Chih. 
 
FAI^IILY LIFE 169 
 
 " Rien ne peut rendre I'allegresse de M'"^ Marcella 
 quand elle vit ses esperances realisees. Son excessive 
 reserve disparut pour faire place a une aimable ex- 
 pansion, et son courage en communiqua aux membres 
 de sa famille reunis a Paris pour les a(fieux." 
 
 Marcella worked first at Valparaiso, and after 1882 
 at Lima. She taught girls, but no employment was too 
 humble for her. Once when her Superior wished to 
 release her from some humble and wearisome night 
 task, Marcella said : 
 
 " Ma mere, vous ne savez pas quel bonheur c'est pour 
 moi de me sentir au service de N.S. et le jour et la nuit." 
 
 " All that she had known and loved hardly now seemed 
 to exist for her ; it was hterally that, following the 
 counsel of the Apostle, our good mother wished to forget 
 all that was behind her, but with the particular com- 
 position {trempe) of her character she would have done 
 it with a pious excess, breaking entirely all relations with 
 the old world, to lose and hide herself in obhvion " 
 — had not her Superior made a rule to the contrary, and 
 said she must sometimes write. 
 
 After 1884 Marcella was placed at the head of a Sacred 
 Heart institution for coloured women. She wished to 
 give her whole hfe and energy to the service of the 
 poorest. The Chilian school-girls of the bourgeoisie 
 declared that Mother Digby cared for no one who was 
 not in rags. Some very poor and ragged girls sat some- 
 times in a dim corner of a certain room. Some young 
 ladies ensconced themselves there one day, and Mother 
 Digby, whose sight had become feeble, came toward 
 them with extended arms and unwonted animation. 
 
170 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 " Les etourdies " jumped out crying, " Now we know 
 whom you love most, Mother." 
 
 So the years passed on. Once or twice she was able 
 to go with some of the community in their school hoUdays 
 to a rough kind of house they had in the country by 
 the cliffs of the sea. Then she became more expansive 
 and they saw how much she enjoyed the rural scenes 
 and the solitude. At the end of 1890 her sight almost 
 failed her ; she had to give up playing the organ, and 
 could do no more than sing in choir. In 1892 she fell 
 ill, at the age of fifty-five, of a mild form of typhoid 
 fever, too much for her exhausted strength, and received 
 the last Sacraments. " And you will leave us to sing 
 without you ? " said the Mother Superior, by way of 
 saying something. Marcella, with a vivacity out of 
 keeping with her weakness, said, " Au Ciel, au Ciel, 
 nous chanterons." She sent a message to the Mother 
 General. " Tell her that I am happy to die in the 
 Society, and in the Mission to which she sent me. Thank 
 her again. — To die in the Mission, what happiness ! " 
 These were almost her last words. 
 
 Madam d'Arcy, of the Sacred Heart, who is still at 
 Roehampton, tells me that she remembers seeing Mother 
 Marcella Digby at the Rue de Varennes and being much 
 struck by her. 
 
 '' She was very tall, with a very striking Digby face, 
 the forehead and eyes rather Hke our other Mother Digby, 
 her cousin, whose Ufe you have read. We walked 
 about the beautiful garden, and I gave her some Enghsh 
 news, to which she listened with a far-away look in her 
 eyes. Our Mother Mabel Digby was then at Roe- 
 hampton, and she was always glad to hear us speak of 
 her, for even then she thought her very holy. I saw 
 
FAMILY LIFE 171 
 
 Mother Marcella make her profession at Conflans. She 
 begged to delay it far beyond the usual time because 
 she considered herself so unworthy. But our Mothers 
 would gladly have received her to profession even 
 before the usual time, so convinced were they of her 
 great virtue. I have often thanked God that I knew 
 these holy and charming Mothers Digby." 
 
 A girl who enters the Order of the Sacred Heart 
 adopts a life of deep interest, that of rehgion and teaching. 
 But she can never again see her father's home, or have 
 one of her own, gives up the world with all its adventures, 
 chances, and varying interests and pleasures, must 
 always be within the walls and gardens of a convent, 
 except when she moves from one convent to another. 
 It is a great renunciation, say what you will, and to 
 none can it have been more so than to the well-born, 
 beautiful and active girl who in 1856 was hving in the 
 cheerful home circle at E-amsgate, and riding with her 
 father and brothers about the sunny Kentish downs 
 and levels. Marcella gave up, not Hke some, a dull 
 or sordid home, and disunited or unsympathetic rela- 
 tives, but everything that was imited and detaining, 
 while yet good and innocent. Is it the call of God when 
 some are drawn to make such sacrifices, and even, some- 
 times, to inflict bitter pain on their dearest ones ? One 
 must beUeve so, if one is a CathoUc. One dares not say, 
 " No." What, after all, would Rehgion be if it meant 
 merely social reform or mildly improved general morahty, 
 and did not sometimes urge the young, at least, into 
 heroic and chivalrous action ? It is almost always the 
 young ; after a certain age very few can do these things. 
 It is that the greater reahty kills the less. As in another 
 sphere a great war makes diversions hke tactic-politics 
 
172 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 and many other things seem but the shadows they 
 are, so a near and vivid apprehension of God makes 
 everything, to those who have it, seem relatively unreal 
 except his direct service and union with Him. This is 
 why those who love this present world ; not only those 
 who love its corruptions but those who, Hke Kenelm 
 Digby, love all its good and innocent pleasures, may^ 
 even if they are Catholics, instinctively resist the ulti- 
 mate calls to a few chosen souls of the reUgion which 
 is of this world and yet also of another world. It is an 
 instinct of self-preservation, this resistance, which, no 
 doubt, is also necessary as part of the divine scheme, if 
 the world is to go on. The reason why the CathoHc 
 Church, centred in the Apostolic See, is in this sense 
 dangerous to family life, as in the earhest centuries,, 
 is that by strongly settUng all questions of order and 
 discipline, and by firmly and unchangeably defining 
 doctrine, it liberates souls for these higher flights, to 
 which also it encourages them, thus bringing them, as 
 it were, by soHd Eoman roads, rapidly and smoothly 
 to the desolate border of that austere and solitary region 
 where men, like Moses in the Wilderness of Horeb, 
 most vividly apprehend the presence of God. These see 
 around and above them no other visible and organic 
 Church to which they could possibly transfer their 
 allegiance, so that this question, at least, does not hold 
 them up or delay them in their higher flight towards 
 infinite EeaHty. 
 
 In the fifth volume of his Monks of the West, there 
 are some sad and beautiful pages which Montalembert 
 must have written with tear-dimmed eyes, thinking of 
 his own darling daughter. He says at the end of his 
 chapters about the Saxon nuns of England : 
 
FAMILY LIFE 173 
 
 " Twelve centuries after the Anglo-Saxon maids 
 whose devotion we have related, the same hand falls 
 upon our homes, upon our desolate hearts, and tears 
 away from us our daughters and sisters. Never since 
 Christianity existed have such sacrifices been more 
 numerous, more magnanimous, more spontaneous than 
 now. Every day since the beginning of this century" 
 (the nineteenth) " hundreds of beloved creatures have 
 come forth from castles and cottages, from palaces and 
 workshops, to offer to God their heart, their soul, their 
 virgin innocence, their love, and their hfe. Every day, 
 among ourselves, maidens of high descent and high 
 heart, and others with a soul higher than their fortune, 
 have vowed themselves in the morning of Hfe to an 
 immortal husband. They are the flower of the human 
 race, a flower still sweet with the morning dew which 
 has reflected nothing but the rays of the rising sun. . . . 
 They are the flower, but also the fruit, the purest sap, 
 the most generous blood of the stock of Adam, for daily 
 these heroines win the most wonderful of victories by 
 the manhest effort which can raise a human being above 
 all earthly instinct, and mortal ties. . . . Thus they 
 go bearing to God, in the bloom of youth, their hearts 
 full of those treasures of deep love and complete self- 
 renunciation which they refuse to men. They bury 
 and consume their whole life in the hidden depths of 
 voluntary renunciation, of unknown immolations. When 
 this is done, they assure us that they have found peace 
 and joy, and in the sacrifice of themselves the perfection 
 of love. They have kept their hearts for him who never 
 changes and never deceives, and in his service they find 
 consolations which are worth all the price they have 
 paid for them, joys which are certainly not unclouded, 
 for then they would be without merit, but whose savour 
 and fragrance will last to the grave. It is not that they 
 would forget or betray us whom they have loved, and 
 who love them. No ; the arrow which has pierced our 
 hearts and remains there has first struck through theirs. 
 
174 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 They share with us the weight and bitterness of the 
 sacrifice. Is this a dream, the page of a romance ? Is 
 it only history, the history of a past for ever ended ? 
 No, once more, it is what we behold, and what happens 
 among us every day. The daily spectacle we who speak 
 have seen and undergone. What we had perceived only 
 across past centuries, and through old books, suddenly 
 rose one day before our eyes, full of the tears of paternal 
 anguish. . . . How many others have also, Uke ourselves, 
 gone through this anguish, and beheld with feeUngs 
 unspeakable the last worldly apparition of a beloved 
 sister or child." ^ 
 
 Montalembert says that, while there are these deeds 
 of heroic self-devotion, those who accept the teaching 
 and example of Jesus Christ cannot doubt that what- 
 ever may be defects of the Church in other directions, 
 it is animated by His divine life, and by the Holy 
 Spirit. He ends these pages thus : 
 
 " Who then is this invisible Lover, dead upon a cross 
 eighteen hundred years ago, who thus attracts to him 
 youth, beauty, and love ? who appears to their souls 
 clothed with a glory and a charm which they cannot 
 withstand ? who darts upon them at a stroke and 
 carries them captive ? who seizes on the living flesh 
 of our flesh, and drains the purest blood of our blood ? 
 Is it a man ? No, it is God. There Hes the great 
 secret, there the key of this subhme and sad mystery. 
 God alone could win such victories and deserve such 
 sacrifices. Jesus, whose God-head is amongst us daily 
 insulted or denied, proves it daily, with a thousand 
 other proofs, by those miracles of self-denial and self- 
 devotion which are called vocations. Young and 
 
 ^ Pp. 360-361 of vol. V. of the authorized translation into English (1861) 
 of the Monks of the West. I omit a touching and beautiful passage which 
 foUows. It is almost too personal to Montalembert. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 175 
 
 innocent hearts give themselves to him, to reward 
 him for the gift he has given us of himself ; and this 
 sacrifice by which we are crucified is but the answer of 
 human love to the love of that God who was crucified 
 for us." 
 
 It is dehghtful and consoUng to know that, at last, 
 after this sorrow and trouble, all was well and in order 
 between Kenelm Digby and his daughter Marcella. 
 The following letter, so loving and so tender, was written 
 by Marcella to her father from Valparaiso, dated " The 
 Feast of Kings," at the end of December, 1879. In those 
 days, before railways crossed South America, the journey 
 was long, and if the letter reached him in time, it can 
 only have been shortly before he died, on the 22nd 
 March, 1880 : 
 
 ' ' My own dearest, dearest Father. A Merry Christmas 
 and a Happy New Year, — better late than never, I hear 
 you exclaim. I wanted to wait for the hoHdays to have 
 a little more leisure to chat with you at my ease, so this 
 will be my excuse to-day. So accept it, Hke a dear, 
 good father, as you are. On Christmas Day the Prizes 
 were given, and the next morning early all the Uttle 
 pigeons flew away. It really seems more sensible, after 
 all, that, with the real year, the scholars' year too should 
 terminate, and so we can celebrate this holy festive 
 season in perfect peace, around the Crib of Bethlehem. 
 I was enchanted to hear that you had enjoyed another 
 autumn at Pouliguen, and I do entreat of you to say 
 all that is most affectionate and loving to our dear 
 friends there whenever you write to them. I can never 
 forget their kindness, and pray for them daily during 
 the Holy Sacrifice. Tell me something about Kenelm 
 Vaughan ; it appears he is in Peru still, and expected 
 to return here sooner or later. If so, I shall certainly 
 see him, for he comes often to our Convent, they say, 
 
176 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 and all are greatly edified by his fervour and sanctity. 
 It will be quite a pleasant visit for me ; it is such an 
 event here to see any true-born Briton, or to hear our 
 tongue in its native purity. So, if you have any message 
 for your namesake it would also be an agreeable surprise 
 for him, I am sure. His father, if I remember correctly, 
 was and is still a great friend of yours. What news 
 from England ! How many conversions ! Deo gratias 
 et Mariae ! But Germany is still under the iron yoke, 
 is it not ? and France rather agitated ? Rare and far 
 between are the tidings that reach me of co-temporary 
 events, so never be afraid of prolonging your chat too 
 much, or of exhausting my patience in reading your 
 letters. On the contrary, send me a long journal of 
 everything you think of, important or trifling ; all will 
 be welcome and gratefully received. I want you to feel 
 me, though so far away, as ever at your side, and talk 
 to me as you would if you had me there with you, for 
 truly it is so, my dearest father. You cannot imagine 
 how often, how fondly, I gaze upon you, for your image 
 is vividly impressed upon my heart. Time and Distance, 
 Oceans and Mountains, what are they, to intercept 
 the close union of souls Unked together by God's eternal 
 chains of love ! As for me, the bonds that unite us 
 seem firmer and stronger, and more dear than ever. 
 Have always on your table a letter commenced for the 
 little absent wanderer from home, and, if it were but a 
 word, add something to it every day, until the thickly 
 covered sheets and the coming mail warn you to close 
 the long-wished-for missive and send it to its destination. 
 If you do so, and if it could please you, I shall do the 
 same, though you might be bothered to have to read 
 such trash. We are enjoying the beautiful season, 
 while you are shivering over your blazing logs. Yet 
 it will be early Spring when these lines reach you, and 
 this thought delights me, for I know your objection to 
 the frost and snow. May this note then greet you as 
 pleasantly, dearest father, as the voice of the gentle 
 
FAMILY LIFE 177 
 
 iierald of Europe's bright season. We have no cuckoo 
 here to sing for us, nor nightingale either, and the only 
 feathered friends we have to cheer us with their voice are 
 miserable in comparison to other countries. Anything 
 so monotonous as their notes, so uncouth, so insipid, if 
 I may say so, you cannot conceive. As I want to write 
 to May, you must let me say good-bye, dearest father. 
 May our dear Lord continue to bestow upon you his 
 choicest gifts and every blessing during the coming year. 
 Such is the fond and ardent prayer of your tenderly 
 attached and devotedly loving until we meet never 
 more to part daughter, Makcella M. Digby. 
 
 " Love to all the noisy httle tribe around you, and 
 to their Papa, with Aunty's best wishes to each and all, 
 not forgetting old Anne, who has quite forgotten me, 
 no doubt." 
 
 II 
 
 But now we must return to the year 1 860. Mrs. Digby 
 had suffered in 1856 the most crushing blows that can 
 befall a mother, in the loss of the sweet vision on earth 
 of her eldest son and her youngest. Then came all the 
 trouble about Marcella, the loss of her girl, and, even 
 more, the way in which her poor husband took this loss. 
 He was, perhaps, Hke most men of poetic and artistic 
 temperament, never quite easy to Uve with, in his 
 changing and capricious moods — he seems to admit this 
 himself in his Chapel of St. John ^ — and his gloom and 
 vexation after the flight of Marcella must have been 
 trying even to her love and faith. He says of his wife : 
 
 " The common sorrows of humanity in which she had 
 been steeped, her faith could teach her to endure with 
 calm courage. . . . But sorrows not sent her by God, 
 as far as seemed to many probable, to spring out of the 
 
 1 p. 318, etc. 
 
 K.D. M 
 
178 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 very element of supernatural joy, but faith itself to 
 be inordinately enlisted against her maternal heart . . . 
 circumstances made to appear as if requiring a viola- 
 tion of what she thought she owed to others ! This was 
 a trial. For herself she was resigned to everything in 
 advance ; but then she feared to behold shocked the 
 feeble understanding of another whom she loved only 
 too well." 1 
 
 A page, written two or three years later, in Evenings 
 on the Thames (vol. ii. p. 471) shows that Kenelm Digby 
 had come to feel that some, perhaps too much, self- 
 regard had mingled with his pity for Marcella, hurried, as 
 he thought, into the conventual life too young, without 
 time for reflection, and in what might have been a 
 passing mood, and with his pity for her mother who 
 had lost her. " Whatever," he says of himself, " he 
 may have thought, it may have been somewhat for 
 himself all the while that he was feeling. When lives 
 and memories are cemented together by affection, it is 
 difficult to separate the sufferings that belong to each. 
 No doubt a man pities himself a Kttle at times." 
 
 Apart from these sufferings of the heart, Jane Mary 
 had, perhaps, become a mother too young. Since she 
 was sixteen she had borne seven Digby children, and 
 her physical health was now worn out, although in 186D 
 she was only forty- two years of age. Poor mother I 
 She said once to her husband, "I see many sweet Httle 
 fellows, but somehow not one of them is like our little 
 John." 
 
 On the 2nd January, 1860, her mother, Marcella 
 Dillon, who had always lived with her, and had shared 
 all her joys and sorrows, died at the age of seventy-two, 
 
 1 Chapel of St. John, p. 324. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 179 
 
 and was buried at Ramsgate, in the now finished Chapel 
 of St. John, where her two grandsons, Thomas Digby 
 and Kttle John Gerald, whose body had been brought 
 back from Hales Place, were already interred. 
 
 Public events combined with private sorrows and 
 troubles to cloud her last days, for in 1860, the " mili- 
 tarism," then dominant in France under Napoleon III., 
 very nearly brought on a war, for no good reason, 
 between England and France, so recently alHed in the 
 war against Russia on behalf of the decaying Turkish 
 Empire. Digby says of his wife, " Her last weeks 
 beheld the whole nation in suspense. . . . Dover heights 
 and Castle, beneath which the last week of her Ufe was 
 spent, sent forth each morning the thunders of experi- 
 mental artillery." ^ Such a war would have been 
 heart-rending to one so intimately connected with each 
 of these great nations. Jane Mary felt that her Ufe 
 was near its close. She used to say, " in a careless 
 way, ' I have suffered so many afflictions of late that 
 I often think I shall die suddenly.' In her last months 
 she used to say, ' I am not what I was. I feel my 
 nerves shattered, my heart somehow affected; I shall 
 never recover my former health ; but what of that ! ' " ^ 
 Digby says, " The last blows in fact had gone through 
 and through poor Jane Mary's heart." After her death 
 an Abbot who knew her well, wrote, " The departure 
 of her mother and sons made her more and more sigh 
 after her own rest. She has entered into it, and we are 
 called on to rejoice." 
 
 Mrs. Digby became less and less willing to leave her 
 house and garden in Kensington. " For myself," she 
 said, when summer came in 1860, "I should be well 
 
 1 Chapd of 8t. John, p. 325. 2 P. 342. 
 
180 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 content with this sweet garden were we to remain here 
 the whole season, but one must think you know of 
 what the interest of the others requires." So in the 
 middle of July the family went to Dover, the place 
 of her marriage, for change of air. On Wednesday, 
 18th July, there was in the morning an eclipse of the 
 sun, which she hardly seemed to notice, as she was 
 finishing some household affairs. About three o'clock 
 in the afternoon Kenelm Digby went out to roam over 
 the hills with his two other children, leaving Letitia 
 with her mother, when she called to him from her room. 
 " The stairs were high and the others were already 
 outside the door. For the first and only time in his 
 life he did not hasten to her when she called him. 'Tis 
 true a sweet girl's voice, echoing her mother's, replied 
 from the top of the stairs that it did not matter. He 
 ran out after the others, and from that hour never again 
 did he see ahve Jane Mary." 
 
 It had been agreed that they were all to meet at the 
 Catholic Chapel at a certain time, and soon Mrs. Digby 
 also left the house with Letitia, and they walked to 
 a pier which stood east of the harbour, and here she 
 sat down, and opened her book of prayer. It was 
 the day of St. Camillus de LeUis, patron of those in 
 their agony, and the collect runs, " Deus, qui sanctum 
 Camillum ad animarum in extremo agone luctantium 
 subsidium singulari charitatis praerogativa decorasti, 
 ejus quaesumus meritis spiritum nobis tuae dilectionis 
 infunde ut in hora exitus nostri hostem vincere, et ad 
 coelestem mereamur coronam pervenire, per Dominum 
 nostrima Jesum Christum." ^ Presently Jane Mary 
 
 1 " God, who hast adorned holy Camillus, for the aid of souls struggling 
 in the last agony, with singular prerogative of charity, we pray thee by 
 
FAMILY LIFE 181 
 
 suddenly said to her daughter, " Poor dear, ever since 
 thy birth thou hast had sufferings and sorrows." Then 
 they went to the CathoHc Chapel, and she prayed some 
 time before the altar. After half an hour she left the 
 Chapel, and had hardly walked a few steps before a poor 
 woman, to whom in former stays at Dover she had 
 often given charity, who had also been in the Chapel 
 and followed her out, saw her stagger, and running to 
 her made her sit down on a stone. Her daughter and 
 maid, who had been in the organ loft, went out, and 
 missing her, found her there ; they called a passing 
 carriage, and drove homewards. Very soon the palpita- 
 tions of her heart became worse, and she said she must 
 ahght. She entered a chemist's shop opposite, and 
 asked the chemist, whom she knew, for a glass of water. 
 Shown into the back shop, and lying on a sofa, she 
 recHned her head upon her daughter's breast, and 
 then said, ''Is it possible that this can be dying ? " 
 She was heard, as in the carriage, praying, uttering 
 " Jesus and Mary," and repeating the " Memorare " 
 to the last instant. Her husband arrived a few minutes 
 later. 
 
 " There she lay, with eyes that are now dimmed by 
 death's black veil, though still her old accustomed 
 smile Ungered upon her face ; the loved one, she who 
 ' clave to her,' standing motionless at her feet ; the 
 poor woman kneehng at her head, kissing the scapular 
 which had been round her neck, but had now fallen from 
 within her dress, and with expanded arms praying, and 
 proclaiming with a sort of ecstasy that she was in heaven. 
 Besides these two no-one present. In death quiet, 
 
 his merits, infuse into us the spirit of thy love, that in the hour of our 
 death we may deserve to conquer the enemy, and attain to the heavenly 
 crown through our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
182 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 gentle as she lived. . . . Truly a celestial blazon never 
 yet conceived in heraldry. Supporters of a novel kind, 
 and very appropriate, Weakness, with tender devotion 
 in the person of her child, and Holy Poverty in that of 
 the grateful beggar. In life she loved the Poor ; well, 
 at her death she saw them thus. It is not every rich 
 person who has at her death one of the poor of Christ, 
 caUing out that the soul departed must be in Abraham's 
 bosom." 
 
 Then entered a Dominican friar, who happened to be 
 passing by with the priest of the town, and said to Digby, 
 " Trouble not yourself, it's all over now, and I promise 
 you it is well with her ; I knew her from a child." ^ 
 
 " How full of consoUng thoughts," wrote to Digby a 
 gentleman of ancient Cathohc race, " is the departure 
 of one whose whole Ufe was directed towards heaven ! " 
 " Quelle noble fin et digne d'une telle vie ! " wrote a 
 French nobleman long intimate with her. " Entre la 
 priere et la charite — sur I'epaule de son enfant et le 
 sourire au bord des levres." Another wrote, " Je suis 
 emu jusqu'au fond de Tame. J'ai un mortel regret de 
 n' avoir revu cette chere saint e que j'ai tou jours et 
 depuis tant d'annees aime tendrement." " I feel I 
 have said nothing," wrote an EngUsh priest. " But 
 then it is such a sorrow. No one but God can reach 
 to the depths of such a grief." An old priest in Paris 
 wrote that he had wept Uke a child, and said, " my 
 God ! What a world is this ! another name to add to 
 my memento of the dead. 0, my God, what a loss, and 
 what sadness in this Ufe ! " '' For myself too," wrote a 
 Russian friend, " it is a most cruel loss, as I had from 
 the bottom of my heart attached myself to that angeUc 
 person." 
 
 1 Chapel of St. John, p. 356. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 183 
 
 " As a benefactress, churclies prayed for her, and by 
 the desire of distant friends, many an altar in foreign 
 countries heard whispered the name of Jane Mary. A 
 solemn dirge for her soul was sung in the two monasteries 
 at Subiaco, of St. Scholastica and St. Benedict, also in 
 the monasteries of Praglia, Genoa, and Pierre-qui-vive, 
 besides, by order of the Abbot, a daily mass, for a long 
 while, at Ramsgate." 
 
 The body of Jane Mary was borne from Dover to 
 Ramsgate along the very Hne of some twenty miles of 
 road, over the chalk downs and across the marsh levels, 
 *' so full of tender poetry are the sternest events of 
 Hfe's drama," which on the day of her marriage had once 
 beheld her pass as bride. What a different journey for 
 Kenelm Digby, as he followed in this sad procession ! She 
 was buried under her Chapel of St. John, where lay the 
 mortal remains of her two darUng boys and of her mother. 
 
 Soon after this Kenelm Digby went to Paris, for a 
 space, and sadly visited the Churches where he could 
 so vividly recall her, especially Notre Dame des Victoires, 
 "' the sanctuary of her heart, where one might still 
 seem to see her kneeUng with eyes bedewed, you knew 
 not whether with joy or pure devotion, and when you 
 expected almost every moment to distinguish in the 
 holy melody the sound of her sweet voice." He found 
 all these places " embalmed, and in a human way, one 
 might dare to say, sanctified, by her gentle memory. 
 Her very smile would seem to meet one before each 
 altar." He visited also again St. Germain, and roamed, 
 disconsolate, through the forest so dear to his youth. 
 " It would be in the deep and silent shade of the wood, 
 in the green lanes of that sublime forest, and on the 
 €heerful terrace where she used so often to sit and gaze 
 
184 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 upon her children, that you can imagine the past, with 
 all its incomparable attractions, returned with a sense 
 of ghostly reality." He could see where she used to sit 
 " to watch her eldest boy frisking on his pony, and 
 the rest admiring him." He could see the " grass-grown 
 street of ' Lorraine ' " there, " where in happy days 
 she Uved with all she loved about her — the house now 
 shut up, the very number changed." He could recall 
 her " walking along the street with her mother every 
 morning to and from the church, often with all her 
 children about her, and her baby in the nurse's arms, 
 herself smiling and so purely happy." Nor could he 
 revisit without weeping " that parish church of the 
 Stuarts in which she used to kneel." 
 
 Ill 
 
 A fifth great sorrow, and this the last, was to be added. 
 Mary Letitia, the second daughter, had also, about the 
 same time as Marcella, wished to become a nun, in the 
 Benedictine Order, but had deferred this project in 
 order not to leave her mother, or to increase the sorrows 
 of her father. After her mother's death she undertook 
 the household cares in Kensington. Now in 1861 she 
 was found to be in a stage of consumption. Then 
 for a year the disease seemed to have vanished, and 
 immense depression in the father gave way to un- 
 warranted hope. In 1863 the disease reappeared in 
 an advanced form. She was taken for the summer 
 to a country place. Nothing, however, availed, and 
 Letitia died in the last week of December, 1863, on 
 Holy Innocents' Day, making a little before, by special 
 permission, her vows of profession as a nun in the 
 
FAMILY LIFE 185 
 
 Benedictine Order. Her father describes her character 
 and her departure from this world in his book named 
 Evenings on the Thames : ^ 
 
 " Tall, most beautiful, with large and singularly 
 expressive eyes, of exquisite grace in all her movements, 
 so as to be regarded in that respect as a model by the 
 French, and everywhere to be remarked for a singular 
 delicacy, lofty and yet humble, producing an unaffected 
 elegance of manner ; of an innocence that spoke to every 
 one's heart, in her smile, in her voice, and in all she 
 uttered, affectionate and playful Uke her mother, in- 
 tensely loving, so as to have no rest through soUcitude 
 for others, she retained during twenty summers the 
 quaUties which had endeared the child to all who knew 
 her. Latterly there was in her smile, as she passed 
 you returning from Mass, an eternity of love of which 
 certain eyes could hardly sustain the expression, accord- 
 ingly they dropped before it. Heroic and uncom- 
 promising when it was a question of speaking the plain 
 truth to people, she practised Uterally the precept of 
 the rule of St. Benedict which says, ' Veritatem ex 
 corde et ore proferre.' ^ Firm as granite when duty was 
 in question, dissolved in tenderness when love alone 
 had claims on her, Hving in a world of her own of sweet, 
 deep, holy thoughts, endeared to all who had the faculty 
 of appreciating the dehcate and beautiful in its sweetest 
 and most sublime expression ; admired by all for some- 
 thing that seemed to each, according to individual 
 predilection, most prominent, by a brother for what 
 he called her pluck, by a confessor for her innocence 
 unviolated from the font, by a father for the qualities 
 that he himself most wanted, and no doubt, as regards 
 this last relation, it was so with others, between whom 
 and her there may have been the attraction of opposi- 
 tion. . . . Her pleasures and enjoyments were charac- 
 
 ^ Evenings on the Thames, vol. i. p. 460. 
 
 2 "To set forth the truth from the heart and mouth." 
 
186 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 teristic. It used to be her pride to work with her own 
 hands in embroidering for the ornaments of churches. . . . 
 In the field, where seemed to be the only recreation 
 that she cared much for, she was a dauntless and graceful 
 rider. In music, which was for her more than an amuse- 
 ment, she proved herself a genius, but of the tenderest 
 and highest order, ready to play anything that was 
 asked for, but suffering all the while intensely if the 
 strain did not correspond with the elevation and instinc- 
 tive purity of her heart. In the sciences, to the study 
 of which she was led by a strong natural inchnation, 
 skilled and even impassioned — but with what an angeHc 
 passion — to read the wonders of the stars, as if really 
 it were from being herself a thing enskied. ' D'une 
 constitution excessivement delicate,' said her venerable 
 preceptor, ' d'un caractere ferme et resolu, d'un esprit 
 reflechi, meditatif, et propre aux etudes serieuses, elle 
 avait un gout prononce pour I'astronomie. A peine agee 
 de vingt ans, elle avait fait, dans cette science, de rapides 
 et surprenants progres, qui faisaient esperer, pour un 
 temps donne, des connaissances peu ordinaires.' Then, 
 again, all who knew her had remarked her power, 
 unconsciously possessed, of elevating souls, the moral 
 influence which she exercised over others ; her pensive 
 sadness when confronted with evils in any form ; her 
 loyal and amiable sincerity in the daily intercourse of 
 life ; her intimate afiinity with things innocent like 
 herself. Worthy, indeed, of being noticed, was that 
 peace which encompassed her, that child-Hke joy at 
 the least happy incident ; that genuine simpHcity which 
 filled worldly people with a feeling that they could not 
 interpret to themselves ; that rare and solid judgment of 
 things ; that keen discernment of characters ; that horror 
 for what is mean and base and selfish ; that natural 
 repugnance to what is vulgar ; that gratitude for the 
 smallest act of attention ; and, in fine, that invincible 
 courage, so marvellously visible at her supremely happy 
 death. ' What ! at home ! too ill to go to Vespers ! ' 
 
FAMILY LIFE 187 
 
 God, I knew what those words imphed. They instan- 
 taneously produced the first anticipation of the loss 
 which two years later overthrew our hopes. Con- 
 sumption, that seemed miraculously arrested in its 
 course, then for a year quiescent, suddenly declared 
 itself with violence only a month before her departure. 
 Is there for some natures peculiarly dehcate and angelical 
 a secret intuition of the heaven that awaits them ? Be 
 the effects of that affinity, which here below connects 
 them with it, what they may, her calm and profoundly 
 conscious state with regard to the future, became now 
 more than ever a thing to wonder at. Resigned to the 
 Divine will, with a mind, as she herself quietly said, 
 made up either to stay or go, wishing to stay for the 
 sake of others, hoping to the last to have her wish in 
 that respect granted ; loving this hfe for the sake of the 
 service that she knew she rendered to some dear to 
 her, though to her of late its joys, so spiritual for her, 
 had been mixed with both physical and mental suffering, 
 saying to one who loved her, ' Don't be so anxious 
 about me. It is the very way to lose me,' for she saw 
 the action of Providence in everything, and its justice 
 too ; absorbed every morning for some space in God, 
 though ever ready to welcome the chance visitor ; she 
 evinced to the last hour of her life the sweetest and 
 noblest quaUties, that bespeak natural delicacy, noble- 
 ness and honour. There was no fanaticism in her 
 mind. It was a human and solid one. Nevertheless 
 there were secrets not yet disclosed, with respect to her 
 view of the world and its mutabiUty ; she had never 
 liked it, or rather worldly people in it. Attached to 
 her family, as the tenderest and most affectionate child, 
 she would add no drop of bitterness to the cup of others, 
 already as it seemed to her sufficiently replenished.^ 
 
 ^ This means that she had for some years ardently desired to become 
 a Benedictine novice, and so a nun, but had consented to defer it because 
 her father who had abeady lost so much could not bear to lose her sweet 
 company. 
 
188 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 On the contrary, she devoted herself to household cares, 
 accepting duties from which she might well have excused 
 herself ; and fulfilling them without the pleasures which 
 make them sweet to mothers ; but it was clear all the 
 while that she looked to a religious Hfe as to an asylum 
 of peace, safe from the intrusion of all that was not 
 elevated and congenial to her heart. God did not wish 
 that her desires in this respect should be frustrated. 
 Some days before her departure, having extorted the 
 confession from her physician that there was no hope, 
 she entered the order of St. Benedict, and, in virtue of 
 a ' Bref ad hoc ' of the Sovereign Pontifi, she made, 
 secretly, between the hands of a superior of that Order, 
 her profession and her great vows. But still, to the 
 household, and to all who came to see her, nothing 
 was to be visible but her sweet humanity, her tender 
 affections, her resignation, and her patience. So, to her 
 father leaving her room on one of the last days, she said, 
 ' Come back soon, let me see you as long as I can.' To 
 her confessor she said, ' I fear it is presumption in me, 
 but somehow I am not afraid to die.' In truth, that 
 was clear to those around her. Sacramentally visited, 
 encompassed with divine protection and consolation, 
 privileged even in regard to ecclesiastic discipline, for, 
 being allowed to have Benediction in the house, she 
 heard, the last evening of her life, even the music that 
 she so much loved to play herself, the ' Adeste, fideles ' 
 and the ' Adoremus in aeternum ' by Herman ; passing 
 away thus with Heaven about her, elevated, trans- 
 figured by faith and its holy instruments, charmed even 
 by art and its inspirations of which she knew the source, 
 she woke at four in the morning of the Holy Innocents, 
 when calling on her brother to feel her poor hand, as she 
 termed it. The moment seemed supreme. Again, and 
 now for the last time, before re-joining him, visited 
 by her divine Saviour in holy Communion, she expressed 
 her wish to speak to each of those who were in the 
 room. So then, with a ' distant softness ' she made. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 189 
 
 to use her expression, a few last requests. ' Don't 
 speak much about me,' she said to one whose garrulity- 
 she distrusted, while ' Don't forget me, I fear you will 
 soon forget me,' was what she uttered to another, to 
 whom her whole life had been an inspiration. To the 
 very last minute she was in possession of the fullest 
 intellectual health. She continued kissing the cross 
 and smiHng at it. Then suddenly raising her large blue 
 eyes to Heaven she passed away, the body falling back 
 on the pillow, while you heard for a moment a faint 
 rattle, Hke the spring of a watch that snaps and runs 
 down. All was over, at six in the morning of the Holy 
 Innocents, herself one of them, who might truly say, in 
 the words of the office of that day, ' Anima nostra sicut 
 passer erepta est de laqueo venantium ; laqueus con- 
 tritus est, et nos libera ti sumus.' ^ Yes, even under the 
 mere impressions of nature we say, ' delivered ' ; for 
 she took away with her, so to speak, such an observ- 
 ing intelligence of all created things, combined with love 
 for their Author, such an intense and human perception 
 of what is subhme, and beautiful, and sweet, that you 
 can no more imagine that she, possessing and exercising 
 such faculties, has perished, than that the stars and the 
 flowers and the harmony have perished, which, without 
 such a creature, would be deprived of part, at least, of 
 the very object and reason of their creation." 
 
 " philosophe," said in a letter an old French priest 
 who had in France been the tutor of Letitia and the 
 other young Digbys, " qui niez ce qu'il y a de plus 
 certain au monde ; qui vantez les deux ou trois sages 
 que le paganisme a produits, voyez done la vie et les 
 derniers moments d'une vierge Chretienne, dans une 
 maison du monde, mais dans une maison ou la foi vit 
 toujours, et dites nous qui de vos sages paiens, qui de 
 vos amis incredules, a vecu et est mort en leguant au 
 
 1 " Our soul is torn away as a bird from the net of the fowlers ; the 
 met is broken, and we are delivered." — Psalms. 
 
190 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 monde de pareilles vertus ; tant de resignation, tant 
 d'heroique courage." 
 
 With all tlie consolations which reUgion, and above 
 all the Catholic reUgion, can give, no suffering exceeds 
 that of a parent who sees a darling child dying, and this 
 experience had thrice within the brief space of eight 
 years, in addition to the loss of his wife, been that of 
 Kenelm Digby. Perhaps it is all the harder for a man 
 whose life and work has always been in his own house 
 and family, and who has not the enforced attention 
 and absence from home which the outside professions 
 require. He looked back, in his now almost empty 
 home, upon happy days in France, with his wife and 
 young children around him, and recalled this loved 
 Letitia " the earUest of the risers, out laughing before 
 the dawn, and hurrying forth with her little sister before 
 any one else in the house was awake, and for that reason 
 the despair of aged priests who did not Hke to be fore- 
 stalled at the divine altar ; then returning full of praises 
 at the beauty of the sky and the sweetness of the morning 
 air, as if the sole object of such eccentric proceedings 
 had been to admire and enjoy them." 
 
 " tenderness of the ways of God ! " Kenelm con- 
 tinues. " Our mothers taught us His name when we 
 were children ; the wife engraved it on the soul of the 
 youth ; the beloved daughter, when left to him, repeats 
 it to the aged man, and communicates a last youthful 
 and virginal revelation on her bed of death. Such are 
 the transfigurations of the Christian woman." 
 
 " Impia jam pietas, animam lugere beatam, 
 Gaudentemque Deo flere, nocens amor est." * 
 
 ^ " It is an unpious piety to lament a blessed soul, and an ill love to weep 
 for one who is rejoicing in God." These words of a mediaeval poet are oi> 
 Letitia's tablet in St. John's Chapel at Ramsgate. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 191 
 
 In Digby's volume of poems of 1866 there are some 
 verses about his lost Letitia : 
 
 " I see her in the wondrous eye of mind, 
 Our joy, our pride, as if still one with us, 
 So tender, delicate, so gracious, kind. 
 Mysterious beauty compassing her thus. 
 
 Her large blue eyes, cast down upon me, smile 
 As once, on earth, when issuing from Mass, 
 When she would draw me upward to beguile 
 The sorrow deep in which she saw me pass. 
 
 Yes, in the downward look of those blue eyes 
 While somehow struggling upward to burst free, 
 There was a sign that pointed to the skies. 
 To warn, to cheer, to guide and comfort me." 
 
 And he could think of her as a small child, sitting, for in- 
 stance, at the foot of a great tree in the forest of St. Ger- 
 
 " Me thinks I see her seated there, 
 Her soft blue eyes, her flowing hair, 
 The gnarled roots, I see them still ; 
 No tears were then my eyes to fill. 
 Oh, yes ! it was a magic hour, 
 'Twas there began my children's bower." 
 
 IV 
 
 Mary Letitia also was buried under the Chapel of 
 St. John Evangelist at the Church of St. Augustine's 
 Abbey at Ramsgate. The Benedictine Abbey, founded 
 from Subiaco, had been built between 1856 and 1859, 
 and the Church previously built by Pugin, who had 
 a house at Ramsgate, as a parish church at his own cost 
 (and he is himself buried there) and opened for service 
 in 1851, had been annexed to the Abbey. 
 
 " On the last line of cHffs (says Digby), 
 
 ' Where Ocean mid his uproar wild 
 Speaks safety to his island child,' 
 
192 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 on tlie grassy summit, where tlie chalk, emerging from 
 the yellow clay for the last time, grows proudly ram- 
 parted, there stands a dark solemn pile, made up of 
 church and tower, of cloistered cells and halls that 
 announce themselves, as in the ancient style, monastical. 
 Pass within the portal. There is at the north entry, 
 and at the intersection of the two sides of an arched 
 cloister, a chapel under the invocation of St. John, 
 being a chantry over the bones of the dead. There is a 
 monumental slab, and solemn imagery representing 
 some who sleep below." ^ 
 
 Kenelm Digby's wife had built this chapel or chantry, 
 on Pugin's design, and Digby himself had contributed 
 to the cost of the cloister adjacent. Mrs. Digby, when 
 she left her garden in Kensington at all, wished to go 
 nowhere else than to Ramsgate. 
 
 " She loved the place where she had built this chapel, 
 of which she so admired the beauty, from which she 
 hoped that some spiritual good might flow to others, that 
 it seemed as if her eyes could not be satiated with 
 beholding it. ' How graceful it is,' she used to say, ' and 
 how cheerful.' And yet, after all her pains and sacri- 
 fices to leave it as you see, and all her desires to hear 
 Mass again over the remains of those she so dearly loved, 
 she consented for the last summer, as it proved, that 
 she was to pass in the world, not to visit it, but to 
 remove elsewhere (Dover) for the sea-bathing, and this, 
 in opposition to all her combined feelings of preference, 
 and merely to comply with the desire of those who 
 thought that, if she had come hither, she would have 
 passed the whole of each day in the church, praying at 
 her mother's grave." ^ 
 
 So, in another, and, for her, happier way, she was to 
 come that summer to the Chapel of St. John, and Mass 
 
 ^ Chapel of St. John, p. 6. 
 2 Idetn, p. 244. 
 
FAMILY LIFE 193 
 
 was to be said there when her senses could not hear 
 or see. And now, in 1863, the vault was opened for the 
 fifth time to receive the mortal part of Mary Letitia. 
 Her brother Kenelm Thomas was also buried here when 
 he died in 1893, a year after his sister Marcella. 
 
 The following description of the Chapel is taken 
 from a little book about St. Augustine's Abbey, printed 
 in the Monastery Press in 1906 : 
 
 " Immediately within the outer entrance door at 
 the north corner of the West Cloister is 
 
 The Chapel of St. John the Evangelist. 
 The Digby Chantry. 
 
 " This Chapel, designed by Edward Welby Pugin, was 
 erected in 1859 by the late Mr. Kenelm Digby, the 
 talented author of the monumental work Mores Catholici, 
 a,t the cost of over two thousand five hundred pounds, 
 as a burial place for himself and the members of his 
 family. 
 
 "It is altogether a work of art. An arcade of red 
 marble pilasters in a double row standing upon elegantly 
 carved bases and elaborately sculptured capitals set 
 upon a low stone wall, the arcades enclosed by grilles of 
 wrought-iron work, shuts it off from the North Cloister. 
 Entrance is gained from the West Cloister through gates 
 of wrought iron set in a carved stone doorway. In 
 the tympanum of the doorway is an elaborate carving 
 in alto rehevo of the armorial bearings of the Digby 
 family — a shield carrying a fleur de lys, surmounted 
 with the crest of an ostrich holding in his mouth a 
 horseshoe. Among the mantlings runs the label with 
 the motto of the Digbys, ' Deo non fortuna.' 
 
 " The walls on either side are pierced with large quatre- 
 foil-shaped openings, through which views may be 
 obtained of the interior, and Mass heard, by persons in 
 the cloisters without. The oak-panelled roof is sup- 
 ported on grey marble pilasters with richly carved stone 
 
194 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 capitals and bases, resting on brackets comprised of 
 three-quarter-length figures of St. Benedict and his 
 first disciples St. Maur and St. Placid, his nun sister 
 St. Scholastica, St. Augustine, the Apostle of England, 
 and St. Thomas of Canterbury, its most glorious martyr, 
 each having its proper distinctive emblem. 
 
 " The roof is divided into compartments, containing 
 over the altar painted representations of seraphim, 
 the other panels carrying a diaper work of golden fleur 
 de lys on a sky-blue ground. The floor is covered with 
 elegantly designed tiles. The chapel is lighted by three 
 windows on the South side, each of two lights containing 
 figures of the name saints of the family. Chief and 
 unique among them is the figm^e of the martyred boy 
 king, St. Kenelm, the founder's namesake. The others 
 include Our Blessed Lady with the Holy Child, St. Jane 
 of Valois, St. Marcella, the friend of St. Jerome ; St. 
 John the Evangelist and St. Thomas the Apostle. 
 
 " The entire head of the arch above the cornice of the 
 reredos of the altar forming the East wall is filled with 
 stained glass set in heavy stone tracery. The subject 
 is the Doom or Last Judgment. In the centre our 
 Blessed Lord is depicted reigning as a king with orb, &c., 
 throned upon a rainbow within a star-shaped compart- 
 ment. This is surrounded by six trefoils showing the 
 dead rising from their graves to receive reward or 
 condemnation. To the first an angel offers a crown, to 
 the latter is presented the flaming sword which drives 
 them from the presence of the Great Judge. In the 
 lowest compartment an angel is seen weighing souls 
 against the Demon, while in the highest Abraham 
 receiving into his bosom the spirits of the Just made 
 perfect. 
 
 " The marble and gilded altar is supported on pillars 
 of richly veined green marble with carved stone capitals 
 and bases. Behind is a tomb of alabaster pierced with 
 vesica-shaped apertures, enshrining the relics of the 
 boy-martyr St. Benignus translated from the Cemetery^ 
 
FAMILY LIFE 195 
 
 of St. Priscilla, 25tli June, 1859. The altar in wkich is 
 inserted relics of Sts. Florentina, and Arista, and other 
 Mart}Ts was consecrated by Bishop Grant on the 
 22nd March, 1859. It is backed by a reredos of carved 
 stone enriched with gilding, having as its central figure 
 the Risen Christ bearing aloft His victorious banner in 
 one hand and bestowing His benediction with the other. 
 In the four side compartments He is accompanied by 
 figures of adoring angels, St. Mary Magdalene with her 
 pot of precious ointment, the other Maries, St. John 
 and St. Peter with his keys. On the front of the altar 
 gradine are cut these words in Gothic characters : 
 
 ** ' 2)e prof unDis clama\>l a& tc Botnine, 2)omtne ejaubf 
 vocem iiteam/ 
 
 " Affixed to the South wall between the windows are 
 two carved and gilded marble tablets with the following 
 inscriptions. On one tablet is written : 
 
 " ' Impia jam pietas animam lugere beatam ; gaudentemque Deo 
 flere, nocens amor est.' 
 
 " ' Dulcissimae ac carisimas Virgini, Mariae Annse Benignae, ordinis 
 Sti. Benedicti, Mari^ Ann^ L^titi^ Digby, paterno nomine ; 
 quartse e septem liberis immatura morte abreptae ; perenne luctus 
 monumentmn posuit pater infelicissimus ; quae cum innocentissime 
 vixisset cum suis usque ad supremum diem, in SS. Innocentium 
 Festo decessit anno salutis MDCCCLXIII. " Anima nostra sicut 
 passer erepta est de laqueo venantium ; laqueus contritus est et 
 nos liberati sumus." Jhesu Maria, Jhesu Maria, Jhesu Maria, vestra 
 est ; accipite filiolam meam ! ! ' 
 
 " On the second tablet is written : 
 
 " ' Juxta in Christo requiescunt : 
 Joannes Geraldus Digby, qui decessit 
 
 MDCCCLVI, XXV Jun., annos natus VIII. 
 Thomas Everardtjs Digby, qui decessit 
 
 MDCCCLVI, XII Oct., annos natus XXI. 
 Marcella Dillon, horum avia, quae decessit 
 
 MDCCCLX, II Jan., annos nata LXXII. 
 Joanna Maria Digby, mater, Marcellse filia, quae 
 
 decessit MDCCCLX, XVIII Jul., annos nata XLII. 
 
196 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 " ' Hie superimposito requiescit pondere terrse, 
 Cara suis mater, cara marita viro, 
 Cara Deo, servisque.Dei, quos ilia fovebat, 
 Pauperibus : luctum pauperis urna tulit ; 
 Non iUi fatum diro languescere morbo, 
 Nee longa vires imminuisse die : 
 Occidit, ut medium via jam transegerat sevum, 
 Rapta licet propera morte, parata mori ; 
 Pauperis optarat mortem ; Deus aure benigna 
 Audiit ancillse tarn pia vota suse : 
 Dives in obscuram periit delata tabernam 
 Languentesque oculos elausit egana manus.' 
 
 " There is also a memorial brass inscribed as follows : 
 
 " * In pace Christi, hie quiescit Kenelmus Thomas Digby, natus 
 die XXIX Decembris MDCCCXLI, vita functus die XX Novem- 
 bris MDCCCXCIII. Cujus animse Deus miserieors propitietur. 
 Requiem ^Eternam dona ei Dne et lux perpetua luceat ei.' " 
 
 Those who visit Eamsgate should also visit the Chapel 
 of St. John, and breathe a prayer for the repose of 
 these souls, and that the perpetual light may shine 
 upon them. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 LATEST WRITINGS 
 
 " QuONiAM eripuisti animain meam de morte, et pedes meos de 
 lapsu, ut placeam coram Deo in lumine viventium." 
 
 Psalms. 
 
 After Letitia's death in 1863, Kenelm Digby, now 
 half-way between sixty and seventy, was left with one 
 surviving son, Kenelm, and one daughter, Mary, living 
 at home. No family group is more than a fair bubble 
 floating a little way down the stream of time, and 
 brief is the period of full flowering during which father 
 and mother, brothers and sisters, are all there, and all 
 together. In the Digby family this period had been the 
 longer in that none of the children had left home for 
 school, but the collapse, when it came, had been swift. 
 Less than eight years before the death of Mary Anne 
 Letitia, Kenelm Digby had been living so happily at 
 Ramsgate with his wife and six fair children ; what 
 a contrast his life was now in the Kensington house, 
 *' rooms becoming deserted one after the other, obser- 
 vances hallowed and dear to memory rendered impos- 
 sible for want of instigators and admirers, of agents 
 and players." ^ " There is a change here," said a visitor 
 friend when he came in. 
 
 1 Chapel of St. John, p. 361. 
 197 
 
198 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 " Efface ce sejour, 6 Dieu, de ma paupiere, 
 Ou rends le moi semblable a celui d'autrefois, 
 Quand la maison vibrait comme un grand coeur de pierre, 
 De tous ces coeurs joyeux qui battaient sous ses toits." ^ 
 
 Some passages in Digby's book of 1864, Evenings on 
 the Thames, will find an echo in the hearts of those, like 
 so many of us who are in the later part of life, and have 
 tasted of the same bitter experience. He says that 
 there are as many different kinds of sorrow as odours 
 in the flowers of a garden. 
 
 " The grief for your Httle boy's death, however 
 intense, is not the same as grief for your eldest son ; 
 grief for such a son is not the same as grief for a dear 
 friend, however entwined within your heart ; grief for 
 a mother is not the same as grief for a wife — there's 
 something quite new in that ; grief for a wife is not 
 the same as grief for a daughter, in whom your own Ufe 
 seemed blended inextricably ; and that grief even, 
 which appeared to reduce you to a state of utter exhaus- 
 tion, or, if you will, of being quite full, and to overflow- 
 ing, leaves space, nevertheless, within you for that 
 different grief with which you feel yourself at last left 
 in the world, in your own house, perhaps, with all your 
 books, and pictures, and trinkets, and memorials of the 
 bygone, quite by yourself, alone." Such, he adds, 
 " have taken their degrees in grief, and, as far as regards 
 suffering at least, may be said to have gone out in 
 honours." 
 
 The " frozen conventionalism of modern life," as 
 Digby says, stands in the way of forming new friendships 
 which might console, nor can even the best friends help 
 very much, and in vain will you direct such a sufferer 
 to literature or poetry as a consolation. 
 
 ^ Lamartine, La vigne et la maison. 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 199 
 
 " His reply may be in the lines so instructive in more 
 ways than one : 
 
 ' Difficile est, quod, amice, mones ; quia carmina laeta 
 Sunt opus, et pacem mentis habere volunt.' ^ 
 
 " No, more is required than all that ; therefore as the 
 orator even says : ' pergamus ad ea solatia quae non 
 modo sedatis molestiis jucunda, sed etiam haerentibus 
 salutaria nobis esse possunt.' ^ These consolations may 
 be referred to two sources, the hope of a future life, and 
 the reconciliation to the thought of death as the passage 
 to that other country of which we are all fellow-subjects." 
 These thoughts, he says, " are at the bottom of much 
 endurance, and of much silent, patient acquiescence in 
 the state of things actually around us. People submit 
 to a great deal that they would otherwise, however idly 
 and fatally, perhaps, revolt against, for the reason that 
 they think it is not to be perpetual." 
 
 This thought, or rather feeling, no doubt also sub- 
 consciously supports, in some degree, even those who 
 do not accept Christian doctrine, because, as Spinoza 
 says, ' We feel and know by experience that we are 
 eternal,' " Sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse," 
 but it must be distinguished from the mere callous 
 turning away of the mind and memory by those who are 
 insensitive, or are preoccupied with the transient 
 shows of this world. And, even for the sensitive, there 
 is, as Digby says, something left behind by a great and 
 critical sorrow which is often far worse than the sorrow 
 itself has been. 
 
 ^ " That which you advise, my friend, is diflScult, for joyful songs are 
 & work, and require peace of mind." 
 
 ■^ " Let us go to those consolations which are not only pleasing when 
 troubles have been allayed, but even while they still are clinging, can be 
 salutary to us." (Cicero.) 
 
200 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 '' It is a change in the inner man, which strands 
 him on the shoal of the present ; which warns him 
 from dwelling on the past, and, enforcing the lesson 
 of the vanity of human wishes, strikes from his 
 reckoning, as far as this life is concerned, hopes in the 
 future." 
 
 There is, he says, in the days immediately succeeding 
 to a great loss, something of the heroic, which consoles, 
 and then we still seem to feel on the stairs, in the rooms ^ 
 in the garden, the close presence of the loved one, 
 and so many visible traces still remain ; but most of this 
 gradually fades away, or becomes dim, by operation of 
 time and the natural process of memory. 
 
 " When the hour of this weaning comes for us ; when 
 the influence of these memories begins to fail, and the 
 heart grows hardened against their faihng potency ; it 
 is then that your beloved ones are gone ; it is then that 
 you feel left quite alone ; and that, let me tell you, is 
 the grief of griefs ; a sort of epoch of chaos, a sort of 
 desolation within you for which there are no words, with 
 no one, not even yourself, audibly to deplore it ; or, 
 we might say, that is the entire breaking up of the 
 wreck, and the dispersion one by one of even the floating- 
 planks, and the final triumph of the sea and the tem- 
 pest, when, as far as your perceptions are concerned, 
 the last vestige of what you doted on is dissipated 
 and lost, and nothing is left to gaze upon but the 
 trackless ocean that represents the unknown and the 
 eternal." 
 
 Lamartine has said, very beautifully, to the same 
 effect : 
 
 " Le temps, ce ravisseur de toute joie humaine 
 Nous prend jusqu'a nos pleurs, tant Dieu nous veut sevrer ; 
 Et nous perdons encore la douceur de pleurer 
 Tous ces chers trepasses que I'esprit nous ramene." 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 201 
 
 All, then, that remains, Digby continues, is 
 
 '' resignation, deep, religious. Christian resignation," 
 the peace which comes of acquiescing in the general 
 order decreed by the will of God, in the "vast system 
 of grief" in which, as Lacordaire says, it is willed that 
 men should here move. Resignation is the supreme 
 test, or mode, of the love of God, " Who, in a manner 
 inconceivable to us, is to restore all things. Quare 
 tristis es, anima mea, et quare conturbas me ? demands 
 the priest every morning at the commencement of the 
 holy mass, to whom it is answered, Spera in Deo. 
 Yes, the great God, the personal God, is the only true 
 consoler for the miserable ; though the valid consolation 
 emanating from him comes to us at times in a way that 
 we neither foresee nor understand. . . . The spirit of 
 resignation, then, on the whole, causes the particular 
 will to be lost and dissolved into the general and higher 
 Will ; causes the mind to love that Will as our end, as 
 being itself most just, and right, and good, and imparts 
 to the most impassioned an affection and loyalty to the 
 Governor of the Universe, which will prevail over all 
 private, indirect desires of our own, enabUng them to 
 acquaint themselves with God and be at peace." 
 
 " Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis, et in tribulatione 
 mea invocavi Dominum, et exaudivit vocem meam. 
 Diligam te, Domine, fortitudo mea ; Dominus firma- 
 mentum meum, et refugium meum, et liberator mens." ^ 
 
 And yet, with all the consolations of religion, what 
 pain to be without these loved ones, and to remember 
 happy hours. 
 
 '' Do what we will," says Digby, " do what we will, 
 the departed, though it be only the ' puer Ascanius,' or 
 
 ^ " The lamentations of death have surrounded me, and in my trouble 
 I have called upon the Lord, and he has heard my voice. I will love 
 thee, Lord, my strength ; Lord, my foundation, and my refuge, and my 
 deliverer." 
 
202 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 the playful girl, must accompany us on or off tlie Thames ; 
 it matters not ; there is no denying them. Like the 
 vision of the child in Macbeth, they can't be commanded. 
 You thought, perhaps, at one time, that in the soul are 
 no affections — that, as the poet says : 
 
 ' We pour out our affections with our blood, 
 And, with our blood's affections, fade our lives.' 
 
 Death's eloquence has now taught you better ; and you 
 believe that those whom you have lost take somehow 
 an interest in you still. You thought them left upon 
 the wind-swept cliff that beetles o'er the main, alone 
 within the dark sepulchral chamber, or under the soft 
 green sod ; but no ; they dwell within the luminous air ; 
 they enter the boat mth us ; they mount the garden 
 steps with us ; they sit by our side, or play near us 
 as we gaze on the gliding river. They haunt our houses, 
 too. 
 
 ' We meet them at the doorway, on the stair, 
 Along the passages they come and go, 
 Impalpable impressions on the air, 
 A sense of something moving to and fro. 
 There are more guests at table than the hosts 
 Invited ; the illuminated hall 
 Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts, 
 As silent as the pictures on the wall.' ^ 
 
 Yes, it is so with us, and, as the chorus in Euripides 
 says, ' What greater suffering than this canst thou find 
 for mortals, than to behold their children and their 
 loved ones dead ! ' " 2 
 
 Although the house of Kenelm Digby, by the end 
 of 1863, was left so desolate, new youthful life came to 
 cheer his later years. In 1865 his youngest daughter 
 the last left to his home, Mary, married, very young, 
 
 * Longfellow. 
 
 ^ The above quotations are from Evenings on the Thames. 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 203 
 
 Hubert, a son of the old Catholic family of the Barons 
 Dormer. In order that her father should not be left 
 quite alone, it was arranged that, as Mr. Dormer was 
 in a London Government ofl&ce, the young couple should 
 live with him at Shaftesbury House, and so they did 
 until he died, fifteen years later. They soon had several 
 xjhildren, and the house was refreshed by young faces 
 and voices. 
 
 II 
 
 Something must now be said about Digby's later 
 writings. After he had completed Compitum in 1854, 
 a certain reaction took place in him as to the study of 
 Christian antiquity and mediaeval history. He had 
 always protested against those who too much exalted 
 severe and serious studies and writings and pursuits, and 
 turned their faces away from the simple pleasures and 
 tastes and literature of the common folk. While he 
 was living in the Isle of Thanet, with its summer London 
 trippers and modest, cheerful tea-gardens and simple 
 pleasure resorts, he wrote the book named The Lovers' 
 Seat, published in the year so fatal to him, 1856. The 
 alternative name of the book — he always gave an 
 alternative name — was Kathemerina, or Common Things 
 in relation to Beauty, Virtue and Truth. The scene 
 introducing this book is laid not, as in the Broadstone, 
 on the banks of a stream in Dauphiny, nor, as in the 
 Mores Catholici, in a romantically situated monastery, 
 nor as in Compitum, in a forest of the kings of France, 
 but in a tea-garden on the suburban hills where now 
 stands the Crystal Palace. 
 
 " From long solitary study," says the author, " from 
 the elevated roads of honour and chivalry, from the 
 
204 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 schools of history and philosophy, from the sacred 
 limits where divinest truths are incidentally presented 
 or elicited, our readers may repair, seeking rest and 
 contentment and delight, to the lowly retreats where, 
 like Antaeus when suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, 
 by touching their mother Earth, they can renew their 
 strength and recover what is the most precious of 
 intellectual gifts, universality of mind and unlimited 
 benevolence, by habits of conversation with the loving 
 side of nature. And, perhaps, after all, the subject 
 itself, independent of all reserves, is as elevated as any 
 other. It may be allowable to observe that the beauty 
 of the earth, the common things and common persons 
 of the world, are called upon by the high voices that 
 we have heard in churches to praise our Creator ; it 
 is not only the angels that are so exhorted ; it is the 
 waters, the sun, moon and stars, the shower and the 
 dew, and heat and cold, tlie hoary frosts, the ice and 
 snow, the nights and days, the light and darkness, the 
 lightning and clouds, the earth, the mountains and 
 hills, all the things that spring up in the earth, the 
 fountains, seas and rivers, the fowls of the air, the beasts 
 and cattle, the sons of men, young men and maidens, 
 the old with the younger, and all people, or in other 
 words, all the common visible things around us, which, 
 if they were not worthy of being much thought about, 
 would hardly have been called on to fulfil such a pure 
 and exalted ministry." 
 
 Such is the theme of this very miscellaneous book. 
 Certainly it is good to remind religious people sometimes 
 of this wide scope of religion, which they may be apt ta 
 forget m the temples, though saints like Augustine and 
 Cyprian, Francis of Assisi and Francis of Sales, never 
 did forget it. 
 
 The Lovers' Seat, although, like all Digby's books, 
 no " popular success," was in accordance with the mood 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 205 
 
 of the 'fifties. General benevolence and cheerfulness 
 was in the air. Dickens was writing still, and his 
 books had given a true and charming picture of all this 
 side 'of life. Dickens, says Digby, not only sees, but 
 forces us to see, goodness in very minute things. Another 
 writer, less known now, Mayhew, collected in his book 
 called London a vast and admirable store of humble 
 conversations from the streets and markets. It is the 
 best book of its kind ever written. He is often quoted 
 by Digby to show the artless and truly human goodness 
 of the Many. 
 
 In the Lovers' Seat Kenelm Digby protests against 
 all kinds of excessive dogmatism, fanaticism, intolerance 
 or contempt of others, and intellectual or religious 
 arrogance. On the whole he thinks, unlike Milton, 
 that it is better to toy harmlessly i})ien entendu) with 
 charming Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles 
 of Nseera's hair, in a tea-garden, or a boat, or on a river- 
 bank, or on a bench by a suburban wood, than to 
 exhaust mind and body in the pursuit of fame, or exact 
 and precise metaphysical truth, closing eyes and heart 
 to the beauties of this earth and human nature. 
 
 The Lovers' Seat contains a passage^ which may be 
 quoted here because it is of an interesting autobiographi- 
 cal kind. Digby has been urging that disputes between 
 Catholics and non- Catholics ought not to be waged mth 
 asperity, and that the former, at least, should express 
 themselves in more tolerant and considerate language 
 than they always do. But, he says, 
 
 *' I hear it asked by others. Who are these persons to 
 admonish each other thus ? Do these counsels come 
 from one who has elsewhere written hastily, harshly, 
 
 1 Vol. ii. p. 34.5. 
 
206 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 unfairly, with the very thoughts, words and, we suspect, 
 looks of intolerance ? Well, is there no place for a 
 paUnode, supposing even that it were so, as is possible. 
 For 
 
 ' In what we love faults oft take gloomiest hue, 
 And thus, my countrymen, I warred on you.' 
 
 And yet, if an advocate so accused were allowed to 
 make a personal allusion, he would say, perhaps truly, 
 that the mischief at the worst was only skin-deep ;. 
 for if any one had then [i.e. at date of Mores Catholici, 
 etc.] turned towards him, moved by the gravity of 
 words borrowed from others and of examples cited from 
 others, and had said, I must 3deld myself up ; I am 
 persuaded ; I cannot resist this eloquence, this logic,, 
 this extraneous force, wielded by the genius and experi- 
 ence of so many others, he [Digby] might now tell us 
 that he would have stopped him ; that he would have 
 said to him. If you are only inflamed by the words 
 of another, persuaded, enticed, or forced or driven 
 by the eloquence of these passages, by the fears that 
 they produce, by the hopes that they kindle, by the 
 views that I take, by the feelings that I experience — 
 resist them, turn from them. Think not to build up 
 with the same instruments with which formerly it was 
 overthrown [viz. human agencies] that which once 
 stood upright. Be true to yourself, leave others and 
 forget them. But if you are thus moved because you 
 find in your own heart a spontaneous voice, an accordant 
 echo, because you know that by so yielding you are 
 leaving extraordinary for common thoughts ; vanity 
 and inconstancy, tempestuous emotions and libidinous 
 opinions, for common, certain, and defined law ; because 
 you are moved by the antiquity and constancy of 
 examples, by the authority of letters and monuments ; 
 because you know that by so yielding you are about to 
 embrace a union favourable to all the sweets of life and 
 to the exercise of all the endearing and precious offices 
 of humanity ; that you are }delding, not to this man or 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 207 
 
 that, but to a greater love of divine and human things, 
 convinced that these views will cause you to love 
 yourself less, God and men more ; that you will love, if 
 possible, your country, and all its venerable institutions 
 with more loyalty, your friends with more affection, 
 your enemies with more truth, your contemporaries 
 with more sincerity, the dead with more reverence, 
 that you will have a wider, broader ground on which 
 to develope all the sympathies of your nature ; that 
 you will be able better to embrace in your love all ages, 
 nations, and all mankind ; then see whether you owe 
 this change to the bigotry of another that would destroy 
 all the springs of your o^vn action, whether it is not to 
 yourself rather that you yield, v/hether the result is due, 
 not to another's intolerance, but to your own freedom.'* 
 
 This would be a good line of self-examination for one 
 who meditated uniting himself to the ancient Catholic 
 Church of Christendom, or even for one who had long 
 so united himself — to test the results of his action. 
 
 The Lovers' Seat is full of quotations, like all Digby's 
 works, and even now the great and wise, especially 
 Augustine, have their part, but more of the quotations 
 are from lighter literature, such as the writings of 
 Charles Lamb and Hood and Hazlitt, and innocent 
 popular sentimental verse of the nineteenth century. 
 It is a book, one would say, that a wounded soldier, 
 home from the wars, would like to have by his bed 
 of convalescence. Or it is a good book to take in 
 one's pocket for a summer day of lounging in woods, 
 or on the river. Like Digby's other later books, it 
 did not attract much notice, and it was blamed by 
 some religious critics of the strict and severe order, 
 who may have deemed it aimed against their own 
 rather gloomy predilections. Digby was grateful to his 
 
208 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 friend the Count de Montalembert, as one of the few 
 who praised the book, and blamed its blamers. 
 
 " Mere gratitude alone makes him desire 
 To tell of friendship that wovJd e'en admire 
 His Lovers' Seat. Montalembert did blame 
 Those who condemned it. I need no one name. 
 The praise he gave it I dare not repeat ; 
 From such a pen the words must have been sweet ; 
 But thus much can be sung, when at the end 
 He styled himself a true devoted friend, 
 ' For ever grateful,' too, he chose to add 
 For the same pages others said were bad. 
 But what's the blame of critics, when we know 
 That he was pleased with what they coimted low ? 
 Montalembert will outweigh all their store. 
 When he approves what mortal can ask more ? " ^ 
 
 Montalembert wrote, in EngUsh, from the Athenaeum 
 Club, 22nd May, 1858, to Digby : 
 
 " My dear Friend, 
 
 " I have been detained here some days longer 
 than I expected on account of the Duchess of Orleans' 
 death, and during my melancholy excursion to Rich- 
 mond and Claremont. On that occasion your delightful 
 Lovers' Seat has been my constant companion. I have 
 not yet read more than the best part of the first volume, 
 but I am quite charmed with your talent and your 
 style. Your loving and generous soul has never shone 
 out to greater advantage. Who can be the narrow- 
 minded, bad-hearted people who have abused those 
 exquisite volumes ? I wish I knew them, and could 
 abuse them as they deserve. They must be some of 
 Veuillot's satelHtes in English clothes. All I can say is 
 that I agree with every word of what you have wTitten. 
 I intend to read the rest on my way to Paris, but cannot 
 refrain from thanking you des a present for the extreme 
 
 * Temple of Memory, Canto VI. 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 209 
 
 gratification and edification you have afforded me. 
 Believe me, your obliged and devoted friend, 
 
 *' C. MONTALEMBERT." 
 
 Digby's wife rather regretted his deviation from his 
 severer studies of old. " Where are those fine old books 
 you used to read ? " she said to him. " I like to see 
 their very outsides." " Oh, you must and will," she said 
 to him a few days before her death, " before this summer 
 ends, write something that may do good." But some 
 books can only be written at one time of life ; others 
 at other times, because man himself is never exactly 
 the same two years together. No man, said the Greek 
 sage, " dips his foot twice in the same river." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Some passages have already been quoted from Digby's 
 next two books, the Children's Boiver, published in 
 1858, after the death of his two sons, and the Chapel 
 of St. John, published in 1861 after that of his wife. 
 After the events of 1856 the light-heartedness of the 
 Lovers' Seat was not to be looked for. Digby at the 
 beginning of the Children's Bower speaks of himself, in 
 his usual way, as if he were speaking of another unnamed 
 person, as " prostrated by irresistible calamity coming 
 upon him in an unexpected form, the death of those 
 he loved." ^ 
 
 But, he says, " however stunned, disheartened, struck 
 to the quick, such a person has something more to do 
 than to feel. He will still move and work mechanically, 
 as muscles after life has left them. He cannot remain 
 long at rest, crossing his hands before him, and wholly 
 abandoning the pursuits which had hitherto deluded 
 
 1 Chapel of St. John, p. 179. 
 
 K.D. O 
 
210 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 him with the idea of his being not wholly a dead weight 
 upon the earth. The often repeated saying, ' It was 
 so easy for the author not to have written it ' does not 
 apply in every instance. It is not so easy always not 
 to write, especially when the imagination and the heart 
 have been struck, to say nothing of something else 
 having been deeply and powerfully moved. Therefore 
 in spite of all discouragement, finding no other advantage 
 in the process but only the losing of hope by time, 
 without the prospect of any pleasure resulting to himself, 
 he returns to his former habits, and proposes to offer 
 some sketch that, while in harmony with his own condi- 
 tion, may possibly, however little his pretensions, prove 
 not wholly uninstructive or unsuggestive to others." 
 
 The subject of the Children's Bower was that then 
 nearest to his own heart, childhood and early youth, 
 its innocence, cheerfulness, simplicity, imaffectedness^ 
 naturalness — all the virtues which made Christ set a 
 little child in the midst of his disciples — interwoven 
 with lovely memories of his own two lost boys. Like 
 all Digby's books, the Children's Bower is not exactly 
 a work of art, but a garland of beautiful things gathered 
 by the way, and, like all his books, its discursive character 
 makes it impossible to describe. Those many who 
 have loved and lost a darling child, or a youth on the 
 brink of manhood, just now so vast a legion, would 
 find it of some consolation to read this book. 
 
 " A child, like little John, stay of our steps in this 
 life, and guide to all our blessed hopes hereafter, abso- 
 lutely calls on us to see and hear what is divine. He 
 seems to have a mission ' illuminare illos qui in tenebris 
 et in umbra sedent,' so that one may apply to him the 
 words of St. Augustin, ' Corruscasti et splenduisti, 
 et rupisti surditatem meam.' " - 
 
 ^ " Thou hast shone forth with splendour, and broken ray deafness." 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 211 
 
 At the close of the Children's Bower, Digby speaks of 
 his general aim in the book ; a lofty aim it is : 
 
 " I have wished to arrange, as it were, a vast and an 
 imposing procession ; I have sought to call forth, as 
 assistants at the funerals of this child and this youth, 
 some, at least, of their ancestors and, as one might say, 
 living relatives, that is, representatives who resembled 
 them in their character, persons collected from the 
 human race, taken from the one family of the innocent, 
 the heroic, and the religious, the vast brotherhood of 
 nature and grace, of blood and of spirit. I have not 
 shrunk from inviting even those who in antiquity seem 
 to have aspired at what they of Christian times alone 
 could reaUze. Hence have passed as it were before us 
 Plato and St. Augustin, Pindar and David. To assist 
 at it I have called some from the dead and others from 
 the living. There have been fellow-countrynien, and 
 those who from foreign nations have passed the seas 
 obedient to our call. Contingents there were from the 
 Court of the great monarch who heard Bossuet, and 
 from the schools of the religious who knew One only 
 tfcat is great. Deputations there have been from the 
 nobility of the world, ushered by ducal and princely 
 authors. Things splendid and illustrious from every 
 sphere have had their place in it, from the pomps of 
 nature to the chosen of human grandeur, from an order 
 of thoughts all contemplative and spiritual, to the 
 ephemeral joys of our early dreams. And if the idea 
 has not been realized, if the execution has proved only 
 the feebleness and disorder of the mind that was en- 
 trusted with the conduct of this great and, I may add, 
 pious solemnity, at least let the immensity of its pains, 
 conveying an idea of the worth that prompted them, of 
 the beauty of the examples that they were intended 
 to transmit, of the love that they sought to manifest, 
 claim indulgence, and bespeak pity." 
 
 And his aim was " to bestow such honours on the 
 
212 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 beloved dead as might prove not merely gratifying to 
 the heart of those who lamented them, but salutary and 
 efficient in the highest sense — a service to the dead by 
 conferring benefit on the living." 
 
 Perhaps no books do more practical good than those 
 unassuming ones which show by example what a family 
 life can be — the happiness of so many family groups is 
 ruined by the want of an ideal, and by the absence of 
 sweet manners. The Catholic reUgion, at its best, is the 
 great mistress of courtesy, charity, forbearance, and 
 good manners. 
 
 A reviewer, in the Tablet, of the Children's Bower, said 
 that the appearance of a " work by Kenelm Digby is 
 of more importance to Catholics than a change in the 
 Ministry," and went on to make some very true observa- 
 tions on his writings in general, which it is well to quote 
 here. The writer said : 
 
 " Others may exhort, teach and argue — others may 
 establish political maxims, dispel historic doubts, refute 
 polemical calumnies ; some may undertake to defend 
 us against hostile attacks, others to open our eyes to 
 our own shortcomings ; logic, sarcasm and invective may 
 be employed to convince, to sting, and to coerce us, — all 
 may do their parts well, but we do not believe that they 
 will do as much for us as one book from Kenelm Henry 
 Digby. 
 
 " We take the special value of his writings to consist 
 in this, that, whereas others take us as we are, and 
 leave us as they found us, supplying us only with 
 facts, arguments or inducements of which we may, or 
 may not avail ourselves, the author of the Ages of Faith 
 goes to work in a wholly different way. He acts on the 
 individual reader himself, moulding, swaying, and 
 transforming him by an unconscious process. He exalts 
 the mind, ennobles the feehngs, he purifies the hearts 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 213 
 
 of Ms readers. He appeals to nothing that, as Catholics, 
 they do not know to be good and true ; he describes 
 nothing that they do not feel to be beautiful and holy ; 
 he presents them with a standard of excellence as the 
 natural measure of their thoughts, acts, and feelings, 
 which it requires a deliberate exercise of their will to 
 repudiate in favour of something lower and more 
 debased. He exercises a most gentle, but powerfully 
 constraining influence on his readers by setting before 
 them what they recognize instinctively as true types 
 of Catholicity, and leaves them to appropriate them. 
 One of the great praises of the monastic institute, in 
 addition to its effects on those who embrace the reUgious 
 state, is justly said to be that, even for those who do not 
 embrace it, it preserves the ideal standard of virtue, in 
 tlieir minds, and prevents them from lowering it to the 
 level of their own practice." 
 
 Digby's next book was called The CJiapel of St. John, 
 or, a Life of Faith in the Nineteenth Century. It was 
 written after his wife's death, and published in 1861, 
 and her character is its central theme. As he says in it : 
 
 " It is true that we still are presented each year with 
 biographical notices of persons in one way or another re- 
 markable ; of some of whom the words are deemed oracles 
 for mankind, whose science is known to all countries, and 
 whose discoveries are destined to sound through all ages, 
 but, however interesting such records may be in a general 
 manner according to the ideas of the day, it is well, and, 
 even in the interest of the world itself, it is important, 
 to keep up the ancient custom also of leaving to posterity 
 a memory of persons living in the midst of it, practising 
 what a noble French writer lately calls the monotonous 
 life of the Gospel, lest persons hke ourselves should 
 begin to suppose that what used to be called a life of 
 faith/, with the manners consequent upon it, ought to 
 be regarded as merely an ancient theory, or, at the most, 
 
214 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 as a vestige of the past ; for, in fact, such a Hfe spent and 
 practised in the world, has for the last two hundred 
 years been so seldom a theme in England for literary 
 composition, that we might truly say in the style of 
 Tacitus, that within such domains we should have lost 
 the memory of it, if it had been as much in our power to 
 forget as to be silent." 
 
 The Children's Bower and the Chapel of St. John are 
 books of the kind that Ste. Beuve had in mind when he 
 wrote these words : 
 
 " However agitated may be the times we live in, 
 however withered or corrupt you may imagine them, 
 there are always certain books, exquisite and rare, 
 merely in consequence of the materials of which they are 
 composed, which manage to appear. There are always 
 hearts to produce them in the shade, and other hearts 
 to gather them. They are books which are not like 
 books, and sometimes even are really not books. They 
 are simple and discreet destinies thrown upon cross-roads 
 off the great dusty highway of Ufe, and which, when you 
 are wandering yourself off it, when you come up to them, 
 arrest you by their sweet odours, and purely natural 
 flowers, of which you thought the race extinct. The 
 form of these books varies, sometimes it is a collection 
 of letters from the drawer of a person lately dead ; some- 
 times it is a surviving lover, who consecrates himself to 
 a faithful remembrance, seeking to transmit and per- 
 petuate it. So, under an exterior more or less veiled, 
 he gives to his reader a true history. There are examples 
 of other forms among those productions of hearts, and 
 the form is a thing indifferent, provided there is still a 
 simple, naked record of the circumstances experienced, 
 with as httle view as possible to the creation of a novel ; 
 for those sort of treasures should never be turned into 
 romance, according to the notions of those times when 
 the Astree was in vogue, with all their fancies about 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 215 
 
 idealization, and ennobling, and giving the quintessence 
 of real things." 
 
 The R^cit d\ne Sceur, by Pauline de Ferronays, is, 
 perhaps, the best-known instance of books of this kind, 
 which are all too rare. 
 
 Near the close of this very beautiful Chapel of St. 
 John, Kenelm Digby makes a veiled but unmistakeable 
 confession that he had not always, in temper and kind- 
 ness, been worthy of so much love and sweetness, and 
 care for him, and unselfishness and goodness. It is, 
 alas, a confession which most men have to make, at least 
 to themselves, when they look back on married life 
 from a time when it is too late to make amends, except 
 by contrition, to the loved and lost. 
 
 IV 
 
 After the Chapel of St. John, Digby wrote his last book 
 in prose, called Evenings on the Thames, or, Serene Hours 
 and what they require, which was published in two 
 volumes in 1864. During his earlier years at Kensington 
 he was fond of organizing rowing parties on the lower 
 Thames, having tea at such homely places as the " Sun " 
 gardens at Kingston, or the tea-gardens at Kew and 
 Hampton Court, or the " Bells of Ouseley," at Old 
 Windsor, near Kunnymeade, well-known to Etonians. 
 He calls it the " never-to-be-forgotten hostel of the 
 Five Bells " . . . " an old haunted-looking house, that 
 stands solitary with some gloomy elm-trees in front, at 
 a turn of the river, skirting majestic woods." Or his 
 crew might row past the Eton meadows to Surley Hall, 
 or e^ en to Monkey Island. The calm wide reaches by 
 Richmond and Twickenham, or in the level country by 
 
216 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Weybridge and Chertsey, where the Thames seems to 
 be resting from its travels, pleased him too. He loved 
 to let the boat lie amid the tall rushes at the end of some 
 swan-haunted eyot, and even now swam the river 
 sometimes, resuming the favourite exercise of his youth. 
 In this book are many delightful word-pictures of the 
 Thames, the ideal boating river, calm, serene, and well- 
 controlled, of which the poet Gray so truly remarked, 
 " Rivers which have lived in London and its neighbour- 
 hood all their days, will not run roaring and tumbling 
 about. No ; they only glide and whisper." Digbymust 
 have loved, if he knew it, lonica by William Johnson, 
 with the delicious Eton Boating Song and other verse 
 breathing the very spirit of the River. The Thames 
 seems to glide and whisper through Digby's two volumes, 
 bearing on its calm and gentle stream, like so many 
 light craft or swans, a multitude of charming thoughts 
 and quotations. For pleasure in a boat serenity in the 
 company is above all things necessary, especially on so 
 tranquil a river, and this gives the theme. What is it, 
 in thought, and way of life, and religion, that most tends 
 to make men and women serene ? Whom would one 
 choose for companions on a June evening on the Thames ? 
 Would one, for instance, choose an ardent Radical 
 Reformer, a rigid Puritan, an assertor of Woman's 
 Wrongs, a hot argumentative controversialist in any 
 cause, a restless financier, a man to whom " time is 
 money," a pompous plutocrat, a woman of the nothing- 
 but-fashionable world, or one who delights in no con- 
 versation which is not maliciously critical ? Or would 
 one prefer those for river company who are bred in the 
 school of respect for authority and reverence fci' the 
 things of old, the young and simply gay, or perhaps 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 217 
 
 rather silent and dreamy, sometimes, maybe, a quiet 
 old priest, who at intervals, as Digby says, will read his 
 breviary while others are bathing, or wandering a little 
 from the bank ? 
 
 The boat often passed by Petersham, where Kenelm 
 in his boyhood first made the acquaintance of the serene 
 river — how much, by the way, he would have enjoyed 
 Eton as a " wet-bob " — 
 
 " Petersham — who that only navigates on the river 
 knows much about it, hid away as it is among the woods ? 
 And yet, when you have landed, and turned down yon 
 lane where the tall elms are casting their shade over it, 
 you will soon find in that village a place very friendly 
 and favourable as regards the purpose we always have 
 in view. What majestic avenues, all leading to the 
 great house that gives to Ham so historical a character, 
 recalling Thomson and Armstrong, and the good Duke 
 and Duchess of Queensbury, Prior's Kitty, who nursed 
 their friend Gay there when he was ill. Then what 
 sweet meadows down to the river ! and those sloping 
 lawns which front it on the opposite shore, how beautiful 
 are they ! I know a bank on that side where you can 
 pass, with those who like it, a very serene hour. It is 
 fragrant with the hawthorn that blooms behind it." ^ 
 
 A nephew of Kenelm, still living, Mr. John Digby, 
 recollects taking an oar in some of these expeditions. 
 Digby wrote the Evenings on the Thames during the 
 period of comparative cheerfulness between the time 
 when there was hope that his daughter Letitia would 
 recover and the final development of her malady which 
 rapidly ended in her death at the end of 1863, though he 
 did not finish it till after that woe. Its pages, he says, 
 in the preface, 
 
 ^ Evenings on the Thames, vol. ii. p. 310. 
 
218 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 " remind him of the wild, exuberant joy occasioned by 
 what he and others thought was an escape, though it 
 proved to be only, according to their views, a respite ; 
 they constituted his employment amidst the felicity 
 so short to him of a season which was to prove for her a 
 last summer. That is why they are now printed after 
 an overthrow of hopes, otherwise calculated to ensure 
 their suppression and his silence for ever." 
 
 The book is, accordingly, although with interludes of 
 deepest melancholy, of cheerful tone, on the whole, 
 much in the same vein as the Lovers' Seat. It extols 
 pleasures that are simple, natural and popular, the 
 benefits to be derived from a recklessly indolent holiday 
 when days are fine — all this embellished by dehghtful 
 quotations from authors of all ages who wrote in this 
 vein. Digby was still, and to the close of his life, in 
 the mood of protesting against excessive intellectualism 
 and too exalted or serious ideals of the expenditure of 
 time ; and, indeed, those who firmly believe in life eternal, 
 ought not to place too much value on transient time, and 
 thus true Christianity should have a sanction for, among 
 other things, that innocent dissipation upon which 
 Mr. Worldly Wiseman looks with a severe countenance, 
 thinking how the time thus wasted might be spent in 
 improving one's education, or advancing the " Progress " 
 of the race. There is a good deal to be said for mor- 
 tifying in oneself the passion for useful, incessant 
 activity, which is often disastrous to the spiritual being 
 and to peace of the soul. Digby 's books are a noble 
 medicine for those with whom energetic and conscientious 
 action has almost become a painful malady, and may 
 be undoubtingly recommended to such patients, who 
 are said by travellers to abound especially in the United 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 219 
 
 States of America. Without always sitting in the sun 
 like Neapolitan lazzaroni, an occupation never likely 
 to become possible or popular in a northern climate, 
 a sacrifice may often, with much advantage, be made to 
 that bright deity of hours which would otherwise be 
 spent in making money, or harassing our fellow beings 
 with schemes for their improvement. There are not 
 nearly enough bank hoUdays in the EngUsh year, there 
 should be one at least once a month from April to 
 October ; and in this respect we are much worse off than 
 our mediaeval ancestors with their numerous feasts 
 of the Church, and shall probably run faster down the 
 hill into nervous decHne and break-down. A kind of 
 superstitious adoration has grown up in England and 
 America of what poor Charles Lamb calls " that fiend 
 Occupation, that my spirit hath broken," and perhaps 
 the asceticism, or self-deprivation of innocent pleasure, 
 which once found its scope in the life more specifically 
 devoted to religion, has now gone into business, including 
 the " sport " which before the Great War had become 
 so serious and business-like. 
 
 The Evenings on the Thames is delightful for the 
 meditative, full of mellow wisdom, and contains many 
 thoughts that are salutary and reconciling about 
 religion. This forgotten book can be recommended 
 to those who are so fortunate as to be able to pursue 
 wisdom with some degree of leisure. 
 
 After the Evenings on the Thames, Digby published no 
 more prose, and employed the last fifteen years of his 
 fife in writing verse, thus reversing the usual procedure 
 
220 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 of youth and age. His first metrical volume was 
 published in 1865, under the title of Short Poems, and 
 an enlarged edition appeared in 1866. In these poems 
 there is much autobiography. In that called " The 
 Despondent Cured," he describes a certain morbid 
 state in which he himself had lived for some years (no 
 doubt since the flight of Marcella), and from which he 
 had lately emerged. The symptoms had been dark 
 melancholy, cherished anger and irritation, vexation 
 that others did not show more clearly love for him, 
 critical and suspicious thoughts, egotistic desires to 
 engross more of the time and company of the young,, 
 gloomy forebodings of more disasters. 
 
 " Well, here again the cause of his displeasure 
 Was his own love of this life without measure. 
 The fault was not in things that touched his pride 
 But in the selfish love with which were dyed 
 His erring thoughts, so anxiously diffused ; 
 To reap at once what here has been refused 
 By Heaven's own goodness, wishing to impart 
 A bliss more worthy of the human heart 
 Than ever could be found in this poor vale. 
 Where tears must flow, and richest blessings fail. 
 The culprit here again stood self-confessed, 
 And thus once more his spirit found its rest. 
 Oh ! happy moment, truly wondrous cure, 
 That might through endless ages still endure ; 
 The fault acknowledged, felt to be his own ; 
 No blame on circumstance, or others thrown, 
 And the result a calm, contented soul, 
 Pleased with each part, and ravished with the whole." ^ 
 
 Another poem called " The Remedy for Human 
 Sadness " is on the same theme, and contains a fine 
 passage upon the mortality of books, once living and 
 admired, and the vanity of literary ambitions. In old 
 
 » Shyirt Poems, p. 101. 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 221 
 
 age, too, he says, " historic lore " and " letters " begin 
 to weary. They have lost their freshness for minds 
 that have become " permanently tired." Nothing 
 endures to the end but religion. As Manzoni, the 
 Itahan, said, when a friend reproached him for not 
 writing more novels, " We must all come to theology 
 at last." 
 
 Here, too, from the same volume, are reminiscences 
 of the loveliest period of his family life : 
 
 " A fund of new, delightful themes, 
 To gild and charm a poet's dreams. 
 What strolls through Tunbridge rocks and slopes, 
 When every morning brought new hopes ! 
 What boating in fair Pegwell Bay ! 
 What songs, what tricks, each night and day ! 
 
 And then to think of graver things 
 
 All fled as if with swallow wings ! 
 
 The sense, the skill, the constant prayer, 
 
 For piety with grace was there. 
 
 The tutor learned, ever kind. 
 
 The chaplain with his holy mind. 
 
 The house so full, so well ordained. 
 Where all was peace, and none complained ; 
 The altar and observance bright, 
 That daily graced the morning light. 
 The friends, the mirth, the evening songs, 
 And what to sweetest home belongs. 
 
 Ah well ! — 'tis bootless now to sigh ; 
 For we, and all once ours, must die. 
 All must still change and pass away, 
 To grow up, fall, or else decay. 
 Rejoining things already past. 
 Followed by what no more will last." 
 
 I had meant to end my quotation here, but some 
 verses which follow are, to me, so affecting, that I must 
 ask the reader to let me quote them also. Digby's books 
 
222 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 are not at all easy to obtain, and this is my excuse for 
 long quotations. 
 
 " Let fates of monarcMes be known, 
 Their grandeur we, too, freely own ; 
 Let Memory's dim, mysterious hall 
 Present their rise, and growth, and fall ; 
 But let there be a chamber too 
 For what more moves both me and you. 
 
 In which is kept for tender hearts 
 That which a deathless peace imparts, 
 The thought of those no longer here, 
 Whose image fadeth year by year. 
 Once like a part of your own being. 
 And now each day still further fleeing ; 
 
 And leaving only for your stay 
 
 Just that which cannot pass away. 
 
 The shadows in your mental eye 
 
 Of those you know can never die. 
 
 Whose lives, though short, were rightly spent, 
 
 Who, leaving earth, to Heaven went. 
 
 There, in that vague and silent store 
 Where nought distinct is figured more, 
 Midst years and chances all rolled by, 
 Midst thoughts of mirth that yield a sigh, 
 You find a help, a hope, a power 
 To guard you in your final hour. 
 
 For what will seem this mortal span 
 So little consonant "with man. 
 Its hopes, its evils, or its end. 
 When elsewhere Heaven may intend 
 To finish for you that which seems. 
 And grant realities for dreams ? 
 
 That life which nothing more can sever. 
 From those you love, to last for ever, 
 That guiltless state in heaven blest, 
 Where ransom yields the joyful rest. 
 Where the forgiven, happy, free. 
 Reap bliss and immortality." 
 
 After another smaller volume of verse in 1867, entitled 
 A Day on the Muses' Hill, Digby published in 1869 that 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 223 
 
 called Little Low Bushes. This contains, among other 
 pieces, the poem on Sauston Hall, near Cambridge, 
 already mentioned, and a charming narrative of a little 
 tour in the Loire country, ending with a visit to his 
 friends the d'Esgrignys, in the Vendean land. Then he 
 wrote an alarmingly long poem of twenty cantos, and 
 550 pages, published by Longmans in 1872, entitled 
 Ouranogaia, or Heaven on Earth. 
 
 In this, as in all his later volumes, he assails those 
 who, as he thought, like the Port Royal school in France 
 or the English Puritans, divide too absolutely the sphere 
 of religion from that of the general life of the world. 
 He held that Heaven was present in all the good and 
 innocent joys of earth, which were raised to a higher 
 level by this divine influence. His design, he says in 
 the Preface, is to 
 
 " represent the happiness, comparable in some degree 
 to what reigns in Heaven, which results from taking a 
 cheerful, sympathetic, tolerant, and Catholic view of 
 human Hfe, as being on the confines of our celestial 
 country, with constant means of access to it. . . . The 
 object is also to suggest that human pleasures in this 
 world, even those which are deemed most strictly 
 confined to earth, and to our two-fold formation in the 
 present state of existence, are enhanced immeasurably 
 when associated in a general way with such higher 
 thoughts as may be said, without extravagance, to 
 culminate in Heaven, being tempered and coloured, as 
 it were, by an all-pervading tone of trust in that forgive- 
 ness which constitutes an article of the Christian Creed. 
 
 " The whole is so arranged as to show in detail that 
 some of the bliss of Heaven, as far as we can conceive 
 it, may be enjoyed by mankind in this life by means 
 of the spectacle of Creation, and in particular of Beauty, 
 as also Mirth, Admiration, Friendship, Love, Goodness, 
 
224 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Peace, Poetry, Learning, Philosophy, and Festivals of 
 the Church, as developing, even by the rites attend- 
 ing them, those internal dispositions which render man 
 what a theologian calls ' animal carissimum Deo,' and, 
 in fine, through sanctity, untroubled and unaffected by 
 human follies, while ignoring rather than trying to 
 extirpate the inevitable. There is an attempt to show 
 likewise with what effect Heaven may be said to descend 
 especially on youth and age, and on those who have 
 gone astray. . . . Poverty and a low social rank are 
 shown to present no obstacle to this vision of two worlds ; 
 and, lastly. Heaven is represented as brought down to 
 the sick and to the dying." 
 
 It was, in fact, a metrical essay upon the same theme 
 as inspired his Compitum. The line of division of 
 temperament which in the days of Greece and Rome 
 made some thinkers Stoics and others Epicureans, also 
 runs through the history of the Christian Religion. On 
 one side of the line are the Puritans, and men like the 
 author of the Imitation, and the weighty and sad 
 St. Cyran, Pascal, and others of the Port Royal school. 
 To these the thought of God, union with God and separa- 
 tion by sin from God, is so overwhelming, that they 
 incline to abstract that idea from all the joys and beauties 
 of this life, and to look upon these rather in the light of 
 temptations. Perhaps the most extreme exposition of 
 this view is given by old Isaac Watts in his naive verses : 
 
 " Nature has soft but powerful bands, 
 Our reason she controls, 
 And children with their little hands 
 Cling closest to our souls. 
 
 Thoughtless they play the old Serpent's part, 
 What tempting things they be ! 
 They wind themselves about our heart, 
 And keep it far from Thee." 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 225 
 
 On the other side of the line are men like Francisco di 
 Assisi and Francois de Sales, who see God in all that is 
 innocent and beautiful in life and nature. The summum 
 honum, the heata vita, lies for them, also, in love of, and 
 union with, God, but to them God shines through all 
 the Universe. They are not ascetics, although they 
 find the greatest joys in the simplest and least artificial 
 pleasures, and fly from wearisome pomps and corrupting 
 vanities. Digby was upon this side of the line ; he was, 
 if one may use the expression, a Christian Epicurean, 
 not a Christian Stoic. Nothing could have been more 
 remote from his way of thinking than those lines of 
 Isaac Watts. To him all pleasures were good, and of 
 divine nature and origin, when they were pure. Those 
 who broke away from the Catholic Church had done, 
 he thought, their utmost to divorce religion from the 
 natural joys of life, and had even, to some degree, 
 infected with this false view the Catholic Church itself. 
 
 After Ouranogaia, published in 1872, came another 
 book of verse called Last Year's Falling Leaves, published 
 in 1873, and including some poems out of a shorter book 
 called Hours with the First Falling Leaves, which was 
 printed in 1872. In the Preface he says : 
 
 " The general object of these Poems is to show in con- 
 junction the greatest and the smallest things of life, 
 the highest and the lowest, the greatest and the least 
 formally wise, the spiritual and the corporeal, reason 
 and affection, faith and nature. Perhaps the bare 
 mention of such a design, with many of the terms 
 employed to express it, may, for some minds, afford 
 sufficient proof that the author who entertains it, and 
 uses such words, is incapable of thought. Of course, 
 if they choose, they are free to conclude that whoever 
 
226 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 thinks differently from them cannot think at all. But 
 be that as it may, such was his object." 
 
 One of these poems in Last Year's Leaves, called 
 " Luzencay," describes life in the Breton chateau of 
 his dear friends the d'Esgrignys : 
 
 " Oh ! manners of old noble times 
 As musical as distant chimes ; 
 Oh ! gift of Heaven's benignity, 
 When their last traces we can see. 
 I care not if my verse offends 
 In saying that these grace my friends, 
 D'Esgrigny's cheerful, happy pair. 
 Who wearied, wounded hearts repair, 
 Gentle and gracious, constant, true. 
 Who make life wholesome thus for you." 
 
 In another poem he gives a most excellent account 
 of Inns in various lands and ages, with stories old and 
 new connected with them, not forgetting his humble 
 but dear " Sun " at Kingston, " Swan " at Thames 
 Ditton, " Bells of Ouseley," and the " Spaniards " of 
 Hampstead. In the prelude he expresses his hope for 
 a few kindred souls to read his poems, even one, not a 
 hurried, flurried, excitement-hunting reader, but 
 
 " one with leisure, thoughtful made. 
 Who can enjoy both sun and shade. 
 With that fine, exquisite, deep sense 
 Of things for which hard minds are dense. 
 Who has his fancies for retreat. 
 His favourite, accustomed seat. 
 Whom old familiar corners please. 
 As one who loves pure Nature's ease. 
 Thus I would have my audience free 
 From worshipping Publicity ; 
 One who can trust himself to judge. 
 Not always after others trudge ; 
 In heart who condescends to herd 
 With one of whom he never heard. 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 227 
 
 Pro\dded he is found to say 
 Things that will suit our common clay, 
 Our common heart, our common soul. 
 And never boast to know the whole." 
 
 Alas ! is not the scanty band of the serene still further 
 diminished since Digby wrote, and with good reason, 
 too ? No wonder that the circulation of his books was 
 small, if he wrote for a Public so limited in the busy 
 Victorian England. 
 
 One long poem in Last Year's Leaves is in praise of 
 London and its suburbs, its various pleasures, and the 
 good manners of those, especially the poor and simple, 
 who dwell therein. Kenelm Digby had come to love 
 London more and more. His joy in the country had 
 been connected with journeys on foot and horseback, 
 swimming, and climbing, pursuits unfit for a man now 
 past seventy. He had always disliked the rural sports 
 which take the form of depriving fellow creatures of 
 the joy of life. In this poem he says : 
 
 " I hate to hear the shot 
 Echoed by men who stray to hunt and kill, 
 Or shouts resounding still 
 Of those whose temper, stern, unyielding, hot. 
 Will burst to awe their dogs," 
 
 He might still row a little, or at any rate sit in a boat, 
 and there is certainly no river on earth for rowing like 
 the Thames. I will quote the last three stanzas of 
 another long poem in this volume, called " Faith with 
 Nature," because I love them and their theme, the 
 Litany of Our Lady. 
 
 " Loretto's song is sweet, 
 To utter love most meet ; 
 
 The words, though drawn from Scripture's deepest lore. 
 Seem but like children's play. 
 
228 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Gathering flowers in May, 
 
 Each fairer still than what was culled before ; 
 
 When cries of artless joy so bland 
 
 Denote that more is there than they can understand. 
 
 Than this no sweeter flower 
 
 E'er grew in earthly bower, 
 
 And, if the heart must rise to heaven above. 
 
 Its grace descends to greet 
 
 These offerings so meet. 
 
 The beams of pure although a human love ; 
 
 Lost in effulgence of that fire 
 
 Which Faith bestows on men all goodness to acquire. 
 
 'Tis music of the sky 
 
 When thus we sing and cry. 
 
 It is to bask in smiles all joy above. 
 
 To float through domes of air, 
 
 To leave the earth and dare 
 
 Enjoy the waves of deepest rest and love, 
 
 The breath of that eternal day, 
 
 Where Joy, and morning air, and Love for ever stay." 
 
 Another long piece in the unambitiously charming 
 volume of light and careless verse called Last Year's 
 Falling Leaves is a philosophic poem on " The Super- 
 natural," a sphere which Digby would never separate 
 from the Natural, through which it shines, he believed, 
 with real and heavenly rays. 
 
 In about his seventy-eighth year, in 1875, rather a feat 
 for that age, Digby published The Temple of Memory, 
 a poem in twelve cantos covering 426 pages. The 
 motto is drawn from St. Augustine's Confessions : 
 " Magna vis est Memoriae, nescio quid horrendum, 
 profunda, et infinita multiplicitas ; et hoc animus est, 
 et hoc ego ipse sum." " Great is the force of Memory, 
 a terrible, indescribable thing ; profound and infinite 
 multiplicity ; and this is the mind, and this I myself 
 am " ; for what, indeed, is personality, identity, with- 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 229 
 
 out the binding chain of memory ? Digby says in his 
 Preface : 
 
 " The object of this poem was to visit, with the aid 
 of St. Augustine, some of the wonders of Memory. There 
 are added, autobiographical sketches comprising various 
 remarkable characters, public events, artistic scenes, 
 and even personal incidents connected with them, in 
 which it was thought the general reader might take 
 an interest." 
 
 This poem, so useful to those who wish to know 
 Kenelm Digby as their friend, is, like the preceding 
 Ouranogaia and the rest, written in rhyming couplets, 
 mostly decasyllabic, but sometimes, for a change, 
 octosyllabic or other, in a careless and rapid and artless 
 way that recalls the later poems of George Crabbe ; 
 there are no high pretensions, but now and then, under 
 influence of emotion, it becomes for a space really good 
 poetry of the old fashion. Kenelm Digby would have 
 made the answer which Crabbe made to Wordsworth 
 when the latter wished him to spend more time in 
 elaborating and polishing and condensing his verse : 
 " It is not worth while." The easiest and most diffuse 
 verse must yet by its more difficult nature be less 
 diffuse than prose by the same author, and as he grew 
 old Kenelm Digby may have found verse useful for 
 this reason. He says that one can say in verse things 
 which one cannot say so well in prose, because verse 
 is the proper medium of the faculty of Imagination. 
 
 In the following year, 1876, Kenelm Digby, as inde- 
 fatigable a writer to the extreme Hmits of life as his 
 favourite Father, St. Augustine, or as Landor, published 
 the last of all his thirty-eight volumes, entitled Epilogue 
 to Previous Works in Prose and Verse. It was intended 
 
230 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 to resume once more his Christian-Epicurean doctrine 
 " de beata vita." He devotes the sixth canto of the 
 Epilogue to the " use of authority in rehgion," as a 
 source of happiness, and real freedom of mind, a subject 
 to which he had given many admirable pages in the 
 Evenings on the Thames, and, indeed, in all his works. 
 If you accept Authority in religion, he says, you need not 
 waste your reasoning power in the pursuit of that kind of 
 knowledge which is not attainable by reasoning, nor will 
 you be befooled by other men's (or women's) reasoning, 
 but can attend serenely and with all your mind to the 
 common matters of life, which do fall within the scope 
 of reason and experience. The kind reader will, I am 
 sure, forgive me for quoting a little more from the 
 unambitious verse of an old man whose wisdom was, 
 at least, based upon an immense study of the wise of all 
 times, which, after all, leads one in the end to the 
 philosophy of life always embraced by the unreasoning 
 simple. These are the last citations I have to make, 
 from the last book. Accept Authority in these matters, 
 he says, and — 
 
 " To common matters you can then attend, 
 Of controversy you have found the end ; 
 But what can be more pleasant, or more wise 
 Than so to rest where no one wins who tries ? 
 For 'tis the will, not knowledge, that's required 
 When by this ancient Faith men are inspired. 
 Only in part we know of all that's there ; 
 And to know more now none of us need care ; 
 What's wanted is an humble, full submission, 
 And of the Faith that's prompted an admission ; 
 With which we can be free to leave the whole 
 For future knowledge that awaits the soul." 
 
 By means of such living and central Authority, he 
 adds, men can agree as one family having religion in 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 231 
 
 common. Even if some results of the Authority are, 
 as he says, " rather queer," this gives ground for harmless 
 and loving amusement, just as peculiar characteristics 
 of a father or mother do in private families. He says 
 of the Faith as embodied in the Catholic and Roman 
 Church : 
 
 " Its unobtrusive force leaves you so free 
 That none besides seem blest with liberty. 
 Dear Heart ! it is not a Procrustean bed, 
 Whate'er by foes, or silly friends, is said ; 
 The very name denotes it is for all. 
 And not more for the great than for the small, 
 With adaptations infinite for each, 
 And more, perhaps, than 'twill expressly teach. 
 Although so varied in their tastes and views 
 Men find that it will serve them like the Muse, " 
 
 Receiving with the mildest condescension 
 The homage e'en of thoughts they dare not mention ; 
 So like a wise and tender mother stiU 
 Regarding less the action than the wiU, 
 Which, when it is in harmony with truth. 
 For all Faith cares may have its freaks in sooth. 
 Of utterances it makes no parade. 
 It seeks to work its purpose in the shade ; 
 And one result of its great Presence there. 
 Of which, or soon or late, men are aware, 
 Is that it tends to happiness on earth. 
 And to serene and constant thoughts gives birth." 
 
 That true freedom comes from a reasoned and final 
 submission to true and real Authority was the theme 
 of Thomas Carlyle, although he never found the Autho- 
 rity. It was also one argument of a great cotemporary 
 who did find it, the Dominican Lacordaire. Those who 
 have been born and bred outside the Catholic Church 
 and, led by Reason, acting through both heart and mind, 
 submit to its authority, are aware of a singular and 
 new sense of intellectual and moral freedom and emanci- 
 
232 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 pation — to their surprise — for usually it is exactly that 
 fear of loss of freedom which long holds back those whose 
 hearts and minds are already convinced. Why this 
 new sense of freedom ? It is because he who has made 
 the definite act of faith and surrender is saved from a 
 multitude of opinions, and from imprisonment in the 
 narrow bounds of his own mind and notions. Often, 
 also, because he is saved from the yoke of sensual and 
 other temptations which had held him in slavery. The 
 service of God through the Church is perfect freedom. 
 He stands, like Dante at the end of his journey through 
 Purgatory, " libero, dritto, e di sano arbitrio." 
 
 The French historian, Michelet, remarks, " What were 
 the Protestants, in substance ? The transition from 
 Christianity to the new birth of liberty, under a form 
 still Christian." And what comes next after the 
 realization in the last two centuries of this kind of 
 Hberty ? Return, surely, to a higher order, securing 
 higher freedom, and not now received merely because 
 it exists, as by children, but accepted of deUberate 
 choice, as an act of will, on its merits, as by grown men. 
 The events of the sixteenth century were the manifesta- 
 tion of restless and vigorous adolescence. But without 
 order there is no tranquillity, and without tranquillity 
 there is no happiness. The great decisions of the 
 Catholic Church, given at long intervals, have all been 
 in the nature of judgments intended to determine long 
 and bitter controversies, on subjects which can never 
 be solved by controversy, and so to restore or extend 
 the realm of peace. As the old Roman orator said : 
 " Proprium est Romani hominis nemini servire." 
 CathoUcs, indeed, serve and obey, but they do not follow 
 and obey individual thinkers or prophets. A Catholic 
 
LATEST WRITINGS 233 
 
 accepts the decisions of the Church, from those of the 
 Council of Nicea down to 'those, equally valid, of the 
 Council of Trent and the Vatican Council, retaining 
 freedom to discuss all undecided questions, and he is 
 safe from being enslaved in mind by any Luther or 
 Calvin, of some new species, perhaps feminine. Like 
 the Imperial Government in India, the Church, in its 
 own sphere, keeps the peace against intellectual and 
 moral marauders. 
 
 Woman, says Digby in this same poem, in her normal 
 state, agrees with the old Faith and is naturally CathoHc, 
 and she is the more powerfully beautiful if she really 
 holds it, because she then has something, not elsewhere 
 to be found, added to and deepening her natural 
 charms ; and, he adds, " that which can win unspoiled 
 woman's heart, must be the true supreme good for 
 all." Is not this the noblest homage that man can pay 
 to woman ? 
 
 Men, he says, to be fair, ought not to confound with 
 the ways of her true sons and daughters the ways of 
 fools or bad and worldly-ambitious men who may chance 
 to belong nominally to the Catholic Church, nor ought 
 they to judge the whole character of the Church through 
 history by concentrating attention upon some particular 
 age in which that character may have been perverted or 
 relaxed in some degree, for a space. 
 
 After much else Kenelm Digby refers in this poem to 
 those who accept all that is said in praise of the CathoUc 
 Church, but give to that name their own meaning, so 
 that it has been necessary in modern England, since the 
 Oxford Movement began, in writing about the CathoUc 
 Church, to introduce a guard on one's words, for fear 
 of misinterpretation. He says, very gently, here : 
 
234 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 " MetMnks I hear the plaudits as we go 
 Of some consenting whom we love and know, 
 More natural e'en now they cannot be, 
 Nor good in common things that Faith can see. 
 But yet is there submission to display, 
 Like all religious grandeur passed away ? 
 Submission to the plans ordained on high 
 By Him who made and rules the earth and sky ? 
 To that great law, our highest thoughts beyond. 
 They'll find at length their minds will correspond." 
 
 So be it ! Till then, as Browning says : 
 
 " A little more, and how much it is, 
 A little less and what worlds away." 
 
 After the Epilogue Kenelm Digby published no more, 
 though he lived for four years, and saw the fine edition 
 in five volumes of the Broadstone of Honour which Mr. 
 Quaritch, "by his own desire, brought out in 1877. He 
 must have turned over the pages of this work of his 
 enthusiastic Cambridge youth with the sad and far-away 
 feeling which he would have had in strolling once more, 
 old and weary, through the spacious courts of Trinity 
 and King's, or down those avenues of limes, and across 
 the ancient bridges, or in gardens where the nightingale 
 sings in May to fleeting generations. To read a book 
 which one wrote long ago is to feel that it was written 
 by some one like oneself, yet not oneself. " So sad, so 
 strange, the days that are no more." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 CLOSE OF LIFE 
 
 " Atnsi toujours pousses vers de nouveaux rivages, 
 Dans la nuit eternelle emportes sans retour, 
 Ne pouvons nous jamais siir I'ocean des ages 
 Jeter I'ancre vin seul jour ? " 
 
 Lamartine. 
 
 Kenelm Digby's " public " had never been large, even 
 in his earlier days, and no man who continues to write 
 in old age can expect much appreciation from younger 
 generations, bred in a new atmosphere of style and ideas. 
 The Mores Catholici was his great work. The Broadstone 
 of Honour was its prologue, the Compitum its epilogue. 
 His later works were mostly received with silence. 
 Reviewers deemed his poems to be beneath criticism, 
 and, perhaps, from a technical point of view, they were 
 not wrong. A pleasing volume might be condensed 
 from the best of them, but they do not pretend to be 
 works of art, and are mainly of interest from an auto- 
 biographical point of view. Besides, a man who writes 
 to express his own convictions and not to voice current 
 opinions must pay the price of independence. Digby 
 was one of that valuable class of authors who supply 
 the public with the kind of literature which it does not 
 want. He was a little melancholy, all the same, when 
 he looked back on his whole career as an author. In 
 some verses, ironically called " The Pleasures of Author- 
 
 235 
 
236 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 ship," in the volume of 1866, he humorously but sadly 
 
 describes the experiences of an invariably unsuccessful 
 
 author, the accumulating mass of unsold copies of 
 
 previous works which must at last be destroyed to relieve 
 
 the warehouse, the irresistible or inveterate passion or 
 
 habit which makes him time after time rush into new 
 
 publication, the embarrassed and unsuccessful attempts 
 
 of friends to disguise or palliate the fact that they have 
 
 not yet looked at the presentation copies, or have been 
 
 fearfully bored by them, the heavy bills for bringing out 
 
 books which publishers would not dream of printing at 
 
 their own risk. Such are the troubles sometimes of 
 
 incapacity to write well, but sometimes also of incapacity 
 
 to adapt oneself to the taste and style and way of 
 
 thinking, political or religious ideas, and particular 
 
 sentimentality of the Age to which one nominally 
 
 belongs. As Voltaire said, using " age " in the simpler 
 
 sense, or, perhaps, in a double sense, in one of his own 
 
 old-age poems : 
 
 " Qui n'a pas I'esprit de son age 
 De son age a tout le malheur." 
 
 It matters little, after all, and if a writer can deeply 
 touch, or influence, a few people in his own time and 
 after his death, he has done more than the author whose 
 popular writings amuse thousands for a season or two, 
 and are then straightway forgotten. Digby sometimes 
 had the real pleasure of knowing that he had moved a 
 heart. So, for instance, in August, 1875, when he was 
 not far from eighty, he received this letter from Father 
 T. E. Bridgett : 
 
 " Dear Sir, 
 
 •' I must apologise for the delay in thanking you 
 for your beautiful present. I was conducting the clergy 
 
CLOSE OF LIFE 237 
 
 retreat of the diocese of Beverley at Ampleforth when 
 the books arrived, and afterwards spent a day or two 
 at Middleton Lodge in Yorkshire ; and though I was 
 told that a parcel had come I wished to have a glance 
 at least at the books before thanking you for them. 
 
 " In those two beautiful spots — Ampleforth and Ilkley 
 • — which are probably familiar to you, I had most of 
 the conditions which you enumerate for the enjoyment 
 of ' serene hours ' : but for whatever I possess of the 
 interior qualifications I am in no small measure your 
 debtor. For brought up as I was in my boyhood in 
 a Puritan atmosphere, and amid the incessant janglings 
 of controversy, I have always looked on it as the most 
 happy day in my life when in a bookseller's shop in 
 Cambridge I took up the first volume of Compitum. 
 The few pages I there read caused such a strange joy 
 that I carried the book home, and soon made acquaint- 
 ance with your previous writings. From you, my dear 
 Sir, I learnt to know and love the Church ; and now 
 after five and twenty years of very intimate acquaint- 
 ance with the modern workings of that Church whose 
 ancient works you had taught me to admire, I feel that 
 joy as fresh as ever though far more deep. I remember 
 well how in 1850 I walked down the Strand wet with 
 the water of my conditional baptism in the oratory of 
 King William St. Pushing my way through that 
 busy crowd I could have almost laughed in their faces 
 that I was now in communion with those great and brave 
 and holy men whom I had first learnt to love in the 
 pages of Compitmn and the Broad Stone of Honour. 
 
 " When after some years' absence from England I made 
 acquaintance with your books of the second period (if 
 I may so call them) I found that I could sympathise 
 with your cheerful views about modern things no less 
 than with your admiration and regrets of the old days. 
 
 " I make these remarks because I have just been 
 reading your ' Pleasures of Authorship.' You tell of 
 many disappointments ; and though I have no doubt 
 
238 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 that you have somewhat exaggerated the indifference of 
 the pubhc to your more recent works, yet I think you 
 will be glad to know — what is better than a literary 
 triumph — that you have been the means of giving joy 
 and peace to one poor soul. 
 
 " In one of Byron's letters to Moore he writes, ' Heigho ! 
 I believe all the mischief I have ever done or sung, has 
 been owing to that confounded book of yours ' (viz. 
 Little's poems) ; and I can say, my dear Mr. Digby, 
 that if I have done any good in my missionary Hfe in 
 England and Ireland, though alas ! it is too little, it is 
 all owing to those delightful and holy books of yours. 
 
 " In the volume which you have sent me. The Chapel 
 of St. John, I find your own writing, by which I see that 
 you gave this copy 'on the 10th May 1861 to Mary Anne 
 Letitia Digby.' If this is the same Letitia whom I find 
 at p. 30 of the Short Poems mentioned among the dear 
 ones departed, then I suppose that it is the very copy 
 over whose pages a loving daughter must have shed 
 many a tear while recalling the graces of her mother. 
 But I think you must have sent me this copy by mistake ; 
 and if so, however much I should have prized it, I will 
 hasten to restore it. 
 
 " Please let me know this ; and in the meantime 
 accept my grateful thanks and believe me, 
 " Yours most sincerely, 
 
 " T. E. Bridgett, C.N.R." 
 
 During the last fifteen years of his life, after his 
 youngest daughter, Mary, had married, and lived at 
 Shaftesbmy House with her husband and children, 
 Kenelm Digby stayed almost entirely in London. 
 Almost every year, however, while the rest were away 
 on autumn holidays, he went for a few weeks to Paris, 
 and to stay with the Count d'Esgrigny at Pouliguen, 
 and the Marquis de Montaigu at La Bretesche, both in 
 West Brittany. La Bretesche is a grand old feudal 
 
CLOSE OF LIFE 239 
 
 castle with moat, portcullised gate, towers and ramparts. 
 He did not care for the life of English country houses, 
 and rarely went to any, except, while his old friend 
 Ambrose Phillips de Lisle still lived, to his charming 
 homes at Garendon and Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire. 
 He thought that de Lisle was the best type of an English 
 country gentleman. A true Aristocracy, he says in 
 Evenings on the Thames, is the strength of a country, 
 
 " as can be witnessed now, to quote but one instance, 
 at Gracedieu and at Garendon. It may be, as there, 
 the education of the country's youth, the civilizing of 
 its manners, the diffusion of enjoyment by throwing 
 open green glades and inviting paths to its juvenile 
 population, a source of patriotic heroism of the right 
 stamp, by its own domestic examples ; it may be, even, 
 as there, the direction of all to the final end of man, 
 the propagation of the true faith, the extension of order, 
 comfort, and temporal happiness through the masses, 
 and, what is no doubt mysterious, though we might say 
 incontestable, their guidance and that of generations 
 yet unborn, to everlasting happiness. Such is the work 
 of a Christian Aristocracy, the natural and supernatural 
 results of a vast territorial property in the right 
 hands." 
 
 Digby often went to concerts on Saturdays, and some- 
 times to good plays. As to churches, he was much 
 attached to the Dominican Church on Haverstock Hill, 
 also to the little old French Chapel in King Street, 
 Portman Square, and often attended the Carmelite 
 Church in Kensington, on Campden Hill, and the then 
 small parish chapel of Kensington. 
 
 He passed all his days, while indoors, in writing, 
 reading, and painting. He rose very early, and was 
 engaged long hours in these occupations. A Kttle 
 
240 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 before dinner he would come into the drawing-room 
 and have some music, if possible, and he liked also to 
 have music after dinner. He never was tired of hearing 
 music, and his daughter, Mrs. Dormer, would play to 
 him in the evening till she was too tired to play more. 
 He devoted to music a canto of his Ouranogaia, or 
 Heaven on Earth poem. The following few stanzas 
 show his thought concisely : 
 
 " The charm of music lies not in its sound, 
 As if in its reception by the ear ; 
 But deep within the human heart 'tis found 
 Kevealed, when thus its melodies we hear. 
 Thence, not from strings or wind it draws those tones, 
 Which the moved soul so acted upon owns. 
 
 There is the wondrous magic of its power, 
 
 When, instantly descending thus below, 
 
 It draws from hearts, as from a mystic bower, 
 
 What causes thought, and joy, or tears to flow, 
 
 What would without it ever dormant lie 
 
 In these strange depths of our humanity. 
 
 But what is drawn thus, whether grave or gay, 
 
 Belongs unto the wings with which we soar, 
 
 Comes not from earth, though in our hearts it lay, 
 
 But tells of what we lost in days of yore, 
 
 Of what we may more fully here regain 
 
 Whether to dance or mourn should prompt the strain. 
 
 Yea, tells it too of what we have regained. 
 The moment that we catch the potent sound ; 
 For joy, however short, is there maintained. 
 Such bliss as re-unites this mortal ground 
 With that mysterious and transcendent whole 
 For which, we feel, was made and tuned the soul. 
 
 Superfluous does Music seem to be ; 
 
 All other gifts on earth will serve mankind ; 
 
 Yet this, of noble inutility. 
 
 Can the inost deeply move the human mind, 
 
 For here, the more it seems without an end. 
 
 The more to boundless good it seems to tend." 
 
CLOSE OF LIFE 241 
 
 Kensington Gardens and even Hyde Park were in 
 the 'sixties and 'seventies far more rural and less 
 densely populated than they are now, though even now, 
 at the right days and hours, they are a fair refuge from 
 thoughts and sights of town. Here Kenelm Digby often 
 sat, or lay on the grass, or paced the long avenues. He 
 liked also suburban commons Hke Barnes or Hampstead, 
 where he could see young lovers or playing children. 
 He sometimes gazed across Middlesex and Hertfordshire 
 from the " Spaniards " garden at Hampstead, or 
 watched the noble landscape from Richmond Hill, with 
 his beloved Thames ghding down towards him in the 
 midst. These scenes replaced for him the gardens of 
 Paris, or the wooded heights of St. Germain, or St. 
 Cloud above the Seine, so dear to his younger days. 
 
 Digby did not belong to any club and cared little to 
 dine out, but he liked to have friends to dine at his house. 
 His memory and knowledge made him a good talker 
 and narrator of stories. He disliked critical discussion 
 of the characters of Uving persons, or mere gossip. 
 " Why talk personaHties, when there are such infinitely 
 better topics for conversation? " he used to say. 
 
 One of his chief friends in London was Mrs. George 
 Marlay, the lady whom he had known in his boyhood, 
 as a bright vision of a child, at the castle of Lord Charle- 
 ville in Ireland. Her house, St. Catherine's Lodge, 
 Regent's Park, was a social centre, and garden parties 
 there in the summer were renowned and select, Mrs. 
 Marlay, now a widow, was the hostess, as her son, Mr. 
 Charles Brinsley Marlay, never married. She was 
 a " grande dame " of the old school, and lived to a great 
 age. She was Digby 's best adviser about his domestic 
 and other affairs. 
 
242 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 Digby's own ideas were always rather those of the 
 " grand seigneur," although in his dress and regard for 
 small appearances he was a little careless, and his tastes 
 were simple. He liked to keep horses, and provided his 
 daughter, Mrs. Dormer, with a stately carriage and pair. 
 She wished to change this equipage for a brougham drawn 
 by a single good horse. Her father resisted for some 
 time this decline in standard, but at last yielded, saying, 
 " Now, my dear, you will look like a doctor's wife using 
 his professional brougham when he does not want it." 
 
 I owe the following recollections to Kenelm Digby's 
 eldest granddaughter. Miss G. Dormer, who was a 
 child of thirteen when he died. 
 
 " There are in my memory of childhood's days few 
 pictures so vivid as one or two that centre round my 
 grandfather Kenelm Digby. I see him at his easel 
 painting hard, early and late. When we children 
 cascaded downstairs in the morning and gathered 
 round to see what he was doing, he had as usual been 
 at work since soon after six, or half-past, and the large 
 dining-room, half his studio and sitting-room, had rows 
 of pictures either waiting to be finished, or ready to be 
 sent away to the churches and convents for which 
 they had been painted. I believe most of the poor 
 Catholic churches and chapels in Great Britain had 
 gifts from him. He had in earlier days met with 
 encouragement for his painting. His landscapes and 
 the copies of religious pictures from many a gallery 
 hung, mostly unframed, close together, covering the 
 walls of Shaftesbury House. 
 
 " Still more clearly do I remember in the long evenings, 
 when he could no longer paint, or read, how sad and 
 lonely he seemed as he sat in his armchair near 
 the green reading-lamp. Sometimes he wrote, or 
 seemed to be correcting, pages that were very closely 
 
CLOSE OF LIFE 243 
 
 written over ; they were his last Poems I think. The 
 pages were bound in a green book, but they fell down 
 like a map in folds from their bulging covers. I used 
 to wonder how he could ever fold them back again. 
 My mother woidd send me in to keep him company, if 
 she could not go herself in that children's hour when 
 we came down from our lessons after tea. He would 
 sometimes go into the drawing-room to hear her sing 
 to us. He loved her singing. But whether he was 
 writing or just sitting still, with that look of profound 
 melancholy ; shading his eyes from the light with his 
 hand that had such long fingers, the impression he gave 
 was always one of activity and life. His was not a 
 passive old age. His step was light, and he was slender 
 and very tall, erect, his head with long, rather thin, 
 white hair, stooped very little. He never used a stick, 
 my father told me, till the last year or two of his life. 
 He would go for long walks nearly every day, often to 
 see old friends, such as Mr. Brinsley Marlay, and his 
 sister Lady John Manners.^ I remember Mr. Brinsley 
 Marlay, a picturesque figure in high stock and with 
 fobs on his chain, coming fairly often to Shaftesbury 
 House. Also old Mr. Herbert, who painted the frescoes 
 in the House of Lords, and Mr. Shadwell, in skull-cap, 
 bringing us children ' lollipops ' in a little black silk 
 bag. John Cashel-Hoey - and his literary wife he also 
 often went to see. Cardinal Manning I remember 
 several times at Shaftesbury House. My grandfather 
 retired to rest early, but he loved having little dinner- 
 parties, and was the life and soul of them. I have been 
 told he was full of good stories and humour. He was 
 always a very early riser, and at one time he used to 
 swim every morning in the Serpentine, breaking the 
 ice in winter to do so. He had dived in off the bridge. 
 I suppose this must have been when he first came to 
 live at Shaftesbury House in 1857. In those days there 
 
 ^ Mother of the present Duke of Rutland. 
 
 - Editor of the Duhlin Review about 1846. 
 
 q2 
 
244 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 was still the toll-gate in Kensington and market-gardens 
 between there and Brompton. 
 
 " The gardens at Shaftesbury House covered between 
 five and six acres. They ended in a meadow and an 
 orchard, where we children ran wild, and before our 
 day, my mother had driven her team of goats and small 
 coach round it, and my uncle Kenelm used to keep 
 himself in training. I just remember seeing him tramp 
 round the garden to get in so many miles exercise. This 
 uncle used to drive his four-in-hand down to Shaftes- 
 bury House sometimes before he and his family went 
 to live in the country. He was a great sportsman and 
 a good boxer ; which was lucky, as during an election in 
 Ireland when he would not stand for Home Rule, he 
 was attacked by the crowd. He challenged them all 
 to come on singly but they refused. 
 
 " An old master-builder and carpenter, Mr. Hussey, 
 still living, told me that when working at Shaftesbury 
 House he often saw Mr. Digby writing by the hour in 
 the garden. He had an ink-pot that fastened on to 
 his waistcoat somehow, and he would drag some old 
 log into the shade, to sit on, or an overturned flower-pot. 
 My grandmother he rarely saw, as her mother Mrs. 
 Dillon, ' a very witty and imperious old lady,' ordered 
 everjrthing. But once when he was working outside a 
 room, Mrs. Digby called him in, and laughing, showed 
 him some empty shelves. She had discovered, said old 
 Mr. Hussey, that Mr. Digby had not a shirt left ! He 
 had just confessed that he had given them all away to 
 the poor on his way to mass in the mornings. Mr. 
 Hussey, when I questioned him about those days, kept 
 referring to the characteristic that struck him most about 
 Mr. Digby : his hohness. '• He was a saint, and he was 
 so humble. I remember seeing him often kneel in the 
 porch all through mass sooner than disturb the con- 
 gregation if he came in a bit late. And he was the very 
 soul of honour. If it was for Mr, Digby you were 
 working, ... no need to look out ! Your interests were 
 
CLOSE OF LIFE 245 
 
 quite safe with him. He was fine to look at too ! ' Canon 
 Fanning said the same, ' he was so holy.' Just two or 
 three years before my grandfather died, Canon Fanning 
 had come to the Pro-Cathedral as a young priest. He 
 had heard much of Kenelm Digby, and he remembered 
 how deeply impressed he was the first time he saw 
 him. It was on a Maundy Thursday at communion. 
 Canon Fanning told me that in a crowd you could 
 not help noticing Digby. ' He was so noble a figure, 
 he looked the very embodiment of one of his own 
 knights. If a poet, if Tennyson, had seen him, he would 
 have written an ode to him ! ' exclaimed the Canon. 
 ' To read his books is like reading one of the Fathers 
 of the Desert. They are redolent of the piety and spirit 
 of the Middle Ages.' 
 
 " These two eye-witnesses of Kenelm Digby 's last 
 years gave their tributes with glowing enthusiasm. 
 My grandfather would be teased sometimes by our 
 rampagious spirits. There were eight of us when he 
 died. He was particular about our Enghsh, and dis- 
 liked, I remember, for instance, the indiscriminate use 
 of the adjective ' big.' An ugly Americanism, he called 
 it. He was the gentlest and most unexacting of grand- 
 fathers. 
 
 " I only remember his being angry with us once, when 
 he had caught us in his precious library upstairs clamber- 
 ing up the over-crowded book-shelves to the ceiling. 
 We had let him in for a lively visit once from Mr. Walter 
 Severn, who told me about it in after years. He had 
 been pelted from behind the high wall of Shaftes- 
 bury House. Most indignantly he rang the bell and 
 insisted on seeing the owner of the house. Grandpapa 
 received him most courteously, and when he insisted 
 on having the servants in to find out who the culprit 
 was, beyond assuring him that none of the servants 
 would be guilty of such discourtesy, he said nothing 
 about us. Only when Mr. Severn got home and told 
 Ruskin of his adventure, Ruskin laughed and said, 
 
246 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 ' Oh, that is my old friend Kenelm Digby,' and Mr. 
 Severn learnt about tlie other denizens of Shaftesbury 
 House ! It was on the strength of this old friendship 
 that I had the privilege of visiting Mr. Euskin when 
 I was at Coniston, a year or two before he died. Mr. 
 Coventry Patmore, the Catholic poet, spoke to me of 
 his admiration for Kenelm Digby, and impressed on 
 me the duty of living up to being his grandchild. He 
 urged so earnestly that young Catholic women should 
 use their influence on all around them for good, that 
 I have never forgotten that visit he paid me in the Isle 
 of Wight. 
 
 " Often, when visiting some monastery abroad, the 
 mention of Kenelm Digby's name would win the 
 friendliest of welcomes. At the Benedictine monastery 
 of Subiaco near Rome, the monks told me that he 
 stayed in the monastery some time to read in their 
 library. My mother has had letters from strangers who 
 wrote to express their gratitude and devotion to his 
 books. Amongst them, I remember one from a dis- 
 tinguished professor of hterature who wished to write 
 about him ; and one from a clergyman, who wrote her 
 the story of a strange coincidence. When his father 
 read the Broadstone of Honour, in his enthusiasm he 
 had resolved that if ever he married and had a son, 
 that son should be called Kenelm. This resolve was 
 also made independently by his future wife ; and so 
 their son was christened after the author whom they 
 loved. He it was who wrote. Every summer my 
 grandfather went to his beloved France, to Le PouHguen 
 to stay with his friends, when we all went to the sea. 
 I have a letter written to me about a year before he 
 died, from London. He writes : ' Here it does nothing 
 but rain and you want me to start for a holiday ! Not 
 if I know it ! So Sunday is your birthday. Well, 
 that fact proves that I have been in London as late- as 
 this in August, for I was painting my pine-forest here 
 when you came into this world of ours. I feel it is 
 
CLOSE OF LIFE 247 
 
 very dull just now, but I have begun a large Picture 
 for Belmont Abbey in Hertfordshire.' So his pictures 
 indeed companioned his old age. He was over eighty 
 years then. The day he was taken ill he was at his 
 easel painting for some poor church. I remember the 
 call for help, the haemorrhage that could not be stopped. 
 Then they put him to bed in the room downstairs, that 
 had been the chapel in my great-grandmother's life-timiC 
 when the chaplain, the Abbe Bontier, lived in the 
 house and had said daily mass there. The Blessed 
 Sacrament had been kept in that chapel room where 
 he died.^ 
 
 '' He appealed strongly to my childish sympathy that 
 instinctively had recognised the lonely aloofness of 
 this life among us, that looked back so far, and that 
 was passing on into the dimmess . . . beyond. I used 
 to watch and try to distract him. 
 
 " When I read his books, I recognise him. in them. 
 Children apprehend more than they can realise at the 
 time, and the after years unfold meanings and memories. 
 Mr. Holland has wondered that the subject of his 
 memoir has not been more mentioned amongst the 
 records of the men of letters of his day, many of whom 
 he certainly knew and prized, and was by them prized. 
 But is not holiness and piety, and ' other- worldHness,' 
 often accompanied by the gift of elusiveness, as if even 
 the admiration and enjoyment of the noblest men and 
 women were shielded off ? Then, as no hght is to 
 remain hid under a bushel, does it not seem truly 
 provided for and deliberately brought about that a 
 kindred spirit should eventually make for it a beautiful 
 candlestick, and the light that seemed to burn so low 
 and uncared for, should suddenly rekindle when the 
 right torchbearer comes along. Thus now, may it be ! " 
 
 ^ My father, who collected and pasted into a book the letters and many- 
 Press notices about him, was much distressed when it was lost in the 
 upheaval of our moving, alas ! into another London house, — without a 
 garden. 
 
248 KENELM HENEY DIGBY 
 
 The year 1879 was tlie last complete year of Kenelm 
 Digby's long life. He had for some months grown visibly 
 weaker, but he went in the autumn once more to his 
 beloved France, to the Breton chateau of the d'Esgrignys. 
 
 On the 13th March, 1880, Kenelm Digby was visiting 
 a lady, an old and constant friend, who lived in Seymour 
 Street, Portman Square. He seemed to her very 
 feeble and depressed, and said, " All my friends are 
 gone." She said, " Oh ! they will come back." " That," 
 he replied, with a smile, " is hardly to be wished, as 
 they are all in Kensal Green, and the best thing I can 
 do is to follow them." She said that he ought to be 
 buried at Ramsgate, but he shook his head, and said 
 that it must be Kensal Green. He had always had a 
 liking for this cemetery, and had made it the subject 
 of one of his poems, called " All Souls' Day." About 
 the same time he wrote a long letter to the Marquis de 
 Montaigu, sad in tone, but saying nothing as to his 
 health. It must have been about this time also that 
 he received that last tender and beautiful letter from 
 his long-lost Marcella, if indeed it came before his death. 
 
 A day or two later he fell ill, and died on the 22nd 
 March, 1880. He was buried, as he had desired, in the 
 cemetery of St. Mary, at Kensal Green, where so many 
 CathoHcs lie, some of them old friends of his own. A 
 lime-tree shadows his grave. The tomb is a very simple 
 one, and the inscription runs : 
 
 In Memory of Kenelm Henry Digby 
 Who died 22nd March 1880 
 
 R.I.P. 
 
 This Cross is erected by 
 
 HIS LOVING daughter. 
 
CLOSE OF LIFE 249 
 
 Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, wrote 
 on the 24th March to Mrs. Dormer : 
 
 " What would you wish for your dear Father better 
 or more beyond this, to fall asleep without pain after 
 a life of preparation ? As your husband said, he who 
 has converted so many to God, and has led so many up 
 the hill of a holy life is surely with his Master. May 
 God bless and console you and all dear to you." 
 
 The Comte d'Esgrigny wrote from Paris on 25th 
 March, 1880, to Mr. Hubert Dormer, Digby's son-in-law : 
 
 " La douloureuse nouvelle que vous me donnez me 
 revient aujourd'hui de Pouliguen. Elle me frappe au 
 coeur. Le voila done disparu ce vieux compagnon de 
 toute ma vie ; nul n'a ete plus fidelement aime, et nul 
 ne m'a ete plus fidele. ' Moi qui ai tant aime mes 
 amis,' m'ecrivait il dans sa derniere lettre. J'eprouve 
 un amer chagrin de m' avoir pu serrer une fois encore 
 cette main toujours tendue, ainsi qu'il me temoignait 
 le desir depuis plusieurs mois. Quelle ame d' elite 
 etait la sienne, douce entre toutes, affectueuse, elevee, 
 devouee, I'une des plus simplement belles et nobles 
 que j'ai rencontrees ici-bas. Sa chere Mary doit savoir 
 combien je la plains, combien je m'unis a elle dans cette 
 cruelle epreuve. Pauvre Mary, quel dechirement pour 
 elle, et pour vous aussi mon cher Hubert, la perte est 
 bien grande. Digby vous aimait ; il vous appreciait ; 
 il ne parlait de vous qu'avec une veritable affection et 
 une parfaite estime ; toujours je I'ai entendu se louer 
 de vos precedes a son egard ; cette pensee doit meler 
 quel que douceur a vos regrets. Quant a moi je vous 
 garderai un sentiment de gratitude pour toutes les 
 satisfactions que vous a dues mon vieil ami. 
 
 " Je vous remercie des details que vous m'avez donnes. 
 Digby avait ete si doux a la vie qu'il meritait bien que 
 la mort lui fut douce. C'etait d'ailleurs un Chretien 
 toujours pret, et je ne doute pas que Dieu ne I'ait re9u 
 
250 KENELM HENRY DIGBY 
 
 paternellement et comme un de ses enfants le plus 
 fidele. 
 
 " Jeanne a vivement ressenti le coup qui vous frappe. 
 Raoul en a ete tres affecte aussi. Comment ne pas 
 aimer Digby des qu'on le connaissait ? " 
 
 The Marquis de Montaigu wrote to Mr. Dormer : 
 
 "On ne pouvait connaitre Digby sans I'estimer, et 
 Faimer fidelement. Tout en lui inspirait une confiance 
 que d'autres n'acquerent qu'avec le temps. On se 
 sentait en presence d'une ame si simple, si noble, si 
 exempte des miserables petitesses de I'humanite, qu'on 
 etait attire sans resistance. II fallait se livrer a I'affec- 
 tion qu'inspirent les saints ; on se sentait appuye, 
 protege, comme dans un port, sous I'influence de cette 
 ame grande comme celles que Dieu forme et prepare 
 pour le gloire du ciel. A cela se joignait une candeur 
 d'enfant, un esprit des plus fins, une instruction profonde, 
 une haute intelligence, et I'originalite de son caractere, 
 si bienveillant toujours, c'etait un charme de plus. 
 Mes regrets se melent a vos regrets, mes esperances a vos 
 esperances ; notre cher ami est heureux ; Dieu I'a 
 prepare par bien des epreuves et I'appele a I'heure ou 
 la recompense immediate pouvait lui etre accordee. 
 Son souvenir est pour moi chose sacree. Je prie avec 
 vous, car nous devons toujours prier, et I'afEection que 
 je portals a votre beau-pere revient naturellement a vous 
 et a sa chere fille qu'il aimait." 
 
 Little public notice was taken of Kenelm Digby' s 
 death. The Times devoted barely ten lines to his 
 obituary. The newspapers, at the moment, were 
 absorbed in the electoral campaign which ended in the 
 overthrow of Lord Beaconsfield, almost the exact 
 cotemporary of Digby, the man who in his early days 
 had played with the ideas which to Digby were sacred. 
 Liberalism, in all spheres, had almost obliterated with 
 
CLOSE OF LIFE 251 
 
 its utilitarian spirit the chivalrous and romantic move- 
 ment, and, in its turn, declining rapidly after its culmina- 
 tion, is giving way to Social Democracy. But neither 
 will this, by itself, satisfy the deepest needs and aspira- 
 tions of men. Content and social peace, so far as they 
 can be found at all in this world by the " exiled sons 
 of Eve," will nowhere be found save in that Catholic 
 religion in its fullest inner spirit and outward form, to 
 whose defence Kenelm Digby devoted his life. 
 
 To the individual soul the Catholic Church is not in 
 itself the final end or place of repose, although it is an 
 immense guidance, protection and assistance. Fecisti 
 nos ad te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum donee 
 requiescat in te. The Church is the true highway that 
 leads us to our country. Other paths to the far end may 
 be found by chosen souls, but this central road through 
 life and death is best for the ordinary wayfarer. This 
 is the argument and theme of all that Kenelm Digby 
 wrote, from the Broadstone of Honour of his youth to the 
 latest poem of his old age. 
 
 Requiescat in pace. 
 
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