t
waste of time, since the said flesh showed the least possible
inclination of revolt. The earlier diaries contain pathetic
exaggerations of the slightest indiscretion. Innocent and virtuous
persons have ever been prone to such little manias of self-accusation!
Later, the flesh did assert itself, though in a hardly licentious
manner. Oxford fogs and damp, along with plain living and high
thinking, acting upon a constitution naturally far from robust,
produced a commonplace but most disabling nemesis in the form of colds,
coughs, and chronic asthma. Julius did not greatly care. He was in that
exalted frame of mind in which martyrdom, even by phthisis or bronchial
affections, is immeasurably preferable to no martyrdom at all. Perhaps
fortunately his relations, and even his Oxford friends, took a quite
other view of the matter, and insisted upon his using all legitimate
means to prolong his life.

Julius left Oxford with intense regret. It was the Holy City of the
Tractarian Movement; and at this moment the progress of that Movement
was the one thing worth living for, if live indeed he must. He went
forth bewailing his exile and enforced idleness, as a man bewails the
loss of the love of his youth. For a time he traveled in Italy and in
the south of France. On his return to England he went to stay with his
friend and cousin, Sir Richard Calmady. Brockhurst House had always
been extremely congenial to him. Its suites of handsome rooms, the
inlaid marble chimneypieces of which reach up to the frieze of the
heavily moulded ceilings, its wide passages and stairways, their carved
balusters and newel-posts, the treasures of its library--now
overflowing the capacity of the two rooms originally designed for them,
and filling ranges of bookcases between the bay windows of the Long
Gallery running the whole length of the first floor from east to
west,--the chapel in the southern wing, its richly furnished altar and
the glories of its famous, stained-glass windows, all these were very
grateful to his taste. While the light, dry, upland air and near
neighbourhood of the fir forest eased the physical discomforts from
which, at times, he still suffered shrewdly.

He found the atmosphere of the place both soothing and steadying. And
of precisely this he stood sorely in need just now. For it must be
admitted that a change had come over the spirit of Julius March's great
ecclesiastical dream. Absence from Oxford and foreign travel had te