st critical years in boyhood. It never failed
him, and he never questioned it. But when that trial was over, and after
an illness which shook up his body and mind, he came under the influence
of a matron who held with no little force of character the views of the
Anglo-Catholic party. These views stole gradually into the mind of the
rather effeminate boy, and although they did not make him question the
theology of his father for some years, he soon found himself thinking of
the religious opinions of his uncles and aunts with a certain measure of
superiority.

"I began to feel," he told me, "that I was living in a rather provincial
world--the world described by Wells and Arnold Bennett."

This restlessness, this desire to escape into a greater and more
beautiful world, pursued him to Oxford, and, for the moment, he found
that greater and beautiful world in the life of Balliol. Bishop Ryle, a
good judge, has spoken to me of the young man's extraordinary facility
at turning English poetry at sight into the most melodious Greek and
Latin, and of the remarkable range of his scholarship. He himself has
told us of his love of port and bananas, his joy in early morning
celebrations in the chapel of Pusey House, his tea-parties, his delight
in debates at the Union, of which he became President, and of his many
friendships with undergraduates of a witty and flippant turn of mind.
Like many effeminate natures, he was glad of opportunities to prove
himself a good fellow. In spite of no heel-taps when the port went
round, he won the Hertford in 1907, the Ireland and Craven in 1908, and
in 1910 took a first in Greats.

He became a Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College for two years, then
its Chaplain for five years, and, after leading a life of extravagant
and fighting ritualism as an Anglican priest, at the end of that period,
1917, he retired from the Church of England and was received into the
Church of Rome.

The consolations of Anglo-Catholicism, then, were insufficient for the
spiritual needs of this scion of the Low Church.

What were those needs?

Were they, indeed, _spiritual_ needs, as he suggests by the title of his
book _A Spiritual AEneid_, or _aesthetic_ needs, the needs of a
temperament?--a temperament which used wit and raillery chiefly as a
shield for its shrinking and quivering emotions, emotions which we must
take note of if we are to understand his secession.

He was at Eton when a fire occurred in one of