thinking Teresa is at her best in her _Way of
Perfection_ with its bursts of impassioned eloquence; its shrewd and
caustic irony; its acute and penetrating knowledge of human character,
the same in the convent as in the world; above all in its sympathetic and
tender instinct for the needs and difficulties of her daughters. _The
Perfection_ represents the finished and magnificent fabric of the
spiritual life. Her words ring with a strange terseness and earnestness
as she here pens her spiritual testament. She points out the mischievous
foibles, the little meannesses, the spirit of cantankerousness and
strife, which long experience of the cloister had shown her were the
besetting sins of the conventual life. She places before them the
loftier standard of the Cross. Her words, direct and simple, ring out
true and clear, producing somewhat the solemn effect of a Commination
Service.' Strong as that estimate is, _The Perfection_ deserves every
word of it and more.

Teresa thought that her _Mansions_ was one of her two best books, but she
was surely far wrong in that. _The Mansions_, sometimes called _The
Interior Castle_, to me at any rate, is a most shapeless, monotonous, and
wearisome book. Teresa had a splendid imagination, but her imagination
had not the architectonic and dramatic quality that is necessary for
carrying out such a conception as that is which she has laid in the
ground-plan of this book. No one who has ever read _The Purgatorio_ or
_The Holy War_ could have patience with the shapeless and inconsequent
_Mansions_. There is nothing that is new in the matter of the
_Mansions_; there is nothing that is not found in a far better shape in
some of her other books; and one is continually wearied out by her utter
inability to handle the imagery which she will not let alone. At the
same time, the persevering reader will come continually on characteristic
things that are never to be forgotten as he climbs with Teresa from
strength to strength on her way to her Father's House.

To my mind Teresa is at her very best, not in her _Mansions_ which she
made so much of, but in her _Letters_ which she made nothing of. I think
I prefer her _Letters_ to all her other books. A great service was done
to this fine field of literature when Teresa's letters were collected and
published. What Augustine's editor has so well said about Augustine's
letters I would borrow and would apply to Teresa's letters. All her
othe