Happy Birthday to Saint Newman; New Edition of "Anglican Difficulties"

Today is the 220th anniversary of Saint John Henry Newman's birth in the City of London. Our local Lovers of Newman group will meet this afternoon and read together (out loud) a Parochial and Plain Sermon: "Fasting a Source of Trial". We will, however, also celebrate his 220th birth anniversary with a cake: a red velvet cake (appropriate for a Cardinal I think), so our fasting won't be that much of a trial!

"And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He was afterward an hungered." Matt. iv. 2.

THE season of humiliation, which precedes Easter, lasts for forty days, in memory of our Lord's long fast in the wilderness. Accordingly on this day, the first Sunday in Lent, we read the Gospel which gives an account of it; and in the Collect we pray Him, who for our sakes fasted forty days and forty nights, to bless our abstinence to the good of our souls and bodies.

We fast by way of penitence, and in order to subdue the flesh. Our Saviour had no need of fasting for either purpose. His fasting was unlike ours, as in its intensity, so in its object. And yet when we begin to fast, His pattern is set before us; and we continue the time of fasting till, in number of days, we have equalled His.

There is a reason for this;—in truth, we must do nothing except with Him in our eye. As He it is, through whom alone we have the power to do any good {2} thing, so unless we do it for Him it is not good. From Him our obedience comes, towards Him it must look. He says, "Without Me ye can do nothing." [John xv. 5.] No work is good without grace and without love. . . .

I also have news of a volume being added to the Newman Millennium Edition: his lectures on Anglican Difficulties from Gracewing Publishers:

Originally published in 1850 and revised in 1876, John Henry Newman's Lectures on Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Submitting to the Catholic Church is a series of twelve talks that the convert gave at the London Oratory in King William Street before an audience of Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, Protestants and intrigued sceptics. The stated purpose of the talks might have been "to clear away from the path of an inquirer objections to Catholic truth," especially Anglo-Catholic inquirers, but the book is also a witty meditation on the Church and the World, a ruthlessly satirical study of the Oxford Movement, or what Newman called "the Movement of 1833"; an autobiographical dress rehearsal for the Apologia pro Vita Sua; and a piece of masterly prose. Richard Holt Hutton, Newman's finest contemporary critic regarded it as marked "in manner and style... by all the signs of his literary genius... the first of his books... in which the measure of his literary power could be adequately taken."

Neglected for over a century by many who regarded its hard-hitting criticism of the National Church of England as unforgivable, the book can now be seen as profoundly cautionary. If one of its animating themes is to show how worldly establishments travesty "the Ark of Salvation," Newman's Anglican Difficulties has perennial appeal. Indeed, it is an anatomy of the false and brazen things that lie at the heart of all such establishments.

This is the first critical edition of the book to include an editor's introduction with an overview and summaries of the lectures, the book's critical reception, a definitive text of the 1876 edition, textual variants, annotations explicating the text's historical, theological, and literary references, and a comprehensive index.

“Edward Short's critical edition of Anglican Difficulties sheds fascinating new light on John Henry Newman's lectures of 1850. This is a lively, well-researched, well-written edition, which all faithful readers of Newman will enjoy." – Ian Ker, author of John Henry Newman: A Biography (1988)

The Editor, Edward Short, sent me a link to this excerpt from his introduction to this volume, explaining why it is an important book today, and not just as an example of Newman's great skill and style as a writer:

. . . First and foremost, it is a far-ranging meditation on one of Newman's most abiding and insistent themes, the Church and the World, a theme which he would take up not only in his sermons but in Arians of the Fourth Century (1832), An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Loss and Gain (1847), Callista (1850), and The Idea of a University (1875). It is a reaffirmation of the unity of the Church. It is an inquiry into the varieties of Erastianism, which, as Newman shows, presents a continual threat to the integrity of the Church's unique mission in the world.

It is a meditation on the nature of history, proof that the best historians are not always those who call themselves historians. "History is at this day undergoing a process of revolution; the science of criticism, the disinterment of antiquities, the unrolling of manuscripts, the interpretation of inscriptions, have thrown us into a new world of thought," Newman wrote in Lecture V, "characters and events come forth transformed in the process; romance, prejudice, local tradition, party bias, are no longer accepted as guarantees of truth; the order and mutual relation of events are readjusted; the springs and the scope of action are reversed."

Please read the rest there.

Short has also promised me a review copy!

Happy birthday, Saint John Henry Newman--and pray for us!

Francis Parkman, Jr. on the Jesuits and Freedom

The American historian Francis Parkman, Jr. was born on September 16, 1823 and died on November 8, 1893. He is best known for his work The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life (1849) and his seven-volume work France and England in North America (1865–1892). He's also known for his opposition to Women's Suffrage and indeed the extension of suffrage to anyone other than white males.

His interpretation of the colonial era as both England and France settled in North America has been challenged for its anti-Catholicism, as in this biography by W.J. Eccles in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography:

Parkman brought to his study of the French and British empires in North America certain preconceived beliefs and a priori assumptions that gave his work cohesion but resulted in a depiction of colonial society and events that bears little relation to fact. His work perhaps compares best to that of his contemporary, George Alfred Henty, the British writer of jingoistic historical novels for a juvenile audience. The British have long since shrugged off Henty, but the Americans, and many Anglo-Canadians, cling to Parkman’s version of their history. The past he judged by the values of a mid-19th-century Boston Brahmin, which, of course, he was. He believed, fervently, in the concept of progress, in American manifest destiny, and in the inevitability of the British conquest of New France since that last had been essential to ensure the subsequent independence of the United States. Thus he committed the mortal sin for a historian: because it happened, it therefore had to happen.

Britain’s struggle with France in the colonial wars was, to him, a Manichæan conflict between the forces of light and of darkness: between the fledgling American nation, representing progress and Anglo-Saxon Protestant liberty, and New France, embodying Roman Catholic absolutism. As Parkman put it in Montcalm and Wolfe (1884): “It was the strife, too, of the past against the future . . . of barren absolutism against a liberty, crude, incoherent, and chaotic, yet full of prolific vitality.” Thus the New Englanders were possessed of an “uncommon vigor, joined to the hardy virtues of a masculine race.” The Canadians, on the other hand, exhibited serf-like subordination to their feudal lords: brave soldiers and explorers, certainly, but foreordained to give way before the disciples of progress. This basic concept gave his works the dramatic force of a Greek tragedy.

Yet Parkman was no believer in democracy and he spoke out vigorously against it. He regarded the granting of the suffrage to the lower classes, white or black, as “the most dangerous enemy of liberal government.” He was also bitterly opposed to women’s suffrage and the temperance movement. With the anti-slavery movement he had no sympathy. He was an ardent proponent of what came to be known as Social Darwinism. Nothing succeeds like success, and success is justification enough of the means used to achieve it.

If one believed in the "cancel culture" of our era, one could say that the Society for American Historians should stop awarding the Francis Parkman Prize for the best work of American History each year because of these ideas. He was a man of his era, obviously--the real problem that Eccles cites is that Parkman may misused primary sources, especially in French, because of his lack of facility in that language--and his works may be more suitably admired for their style, but not for their substance.

Just a dip into his second volume of France and England in North America, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, displays the common animus of Protestant America against Catholic authority and those who represent it, including the French of the colonial era:

From the Preface: 

Few passages of history are more striking than those which record the efforts of the earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians. Full as they are of dramatic and philosophic interest, bearing strongly on the political destinies of America, and closely involved with the history of its native population, it is wonderful that they have been left so long in obscurity. While the infant colonies of England still clung feebly to the shores of the Atlantic, events deeply ominous to their future were in progress, unknown to them, in the very heart of the continent. It will be seen, in the sequel of this volume, that civil and religious liberty found strange allies in this Western World.

And from the last chapter, "The End":

With the fall of the Hurons, fell the best hope of the Canadian mission. They, and the stable and populous communities around them, had been the rude material from which the Jesuit would have formed his Christian empire in the wilderness; but, one by one, these kindred peoples were uprooted and swept away, while the neighboring Algonquins, to whom they had been a bulwark, were involved with them in a common ruin. The land of promise was turned to a solitude and a desolation. There was still work in hand, it is true,—vast regions to explore, and countless heathens to snatch from perdition; but these, for the most part, were remote and scattered hordes, from whose conversion it was vain to look for the same solid and decisive results. . . .

The cause of the failure of the Jesuits is obvious. The guns and tomahawks of the Iroquois were the ruin of their hopes. Could they have curbed or converted those ferocious bands, it is little less than certain that their dream would have become a reality. Savages tamed—not civilized, for that was scarcely possible—would have been distributed in communities through the valleys of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, ruled by priests in the interest of Catholicity and of France. Their habits of agriculture would have been developed, and their instincts of mutual slaughter repressed. The swift decline of the Indian population would have been arrested; and it would have been made, through the fur-trade, a source of prosperity to New France. Unmolested by Indian enemies, and fed by a rich commerce, she would have put forth a vigorous growth. True to her far-reaching and adventurous genius, she would have occupied the West with traders, settlers, and garrisons, and cut up the virgin wilderness into fiefs, while as yet the colonies of England were but a weak and broken line along the shore of the Atlantic; and when at last the great conflict came, England and Liberty would have been confronted, not by a depleted antagonist, still feeble from the exhaustion of a starved and persecuted infancy, but by an athletic champion of the principles of Richelieu and of Loyola.

Liberty may thank the Iroquois, that, by their insensate fury, the plans of her adversary were brought to nought, and a peril and a woe averted from her future. They ruined the trade which was the life-blood of New France; they stopped the current of her arteries, and made all her early years a misery and a terror. Not that they changed her destinies. The contest on this continent between Liberty and Absolutism was never doubtful; but the triumph of the one would have been dearly bought, and the downfall of the other incomplete. Populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal monarchy, and controlled by a hierarchy profoundly hostile to freedom of thought, would have remained a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the way of that majestic experiment of which America is the field.

The Jesuits saw their hopes struck down; and their faith, though not shaken, was sorely tried. The Providence of God seemed in their eyes dark and inexplicable; but, from the stand-point of Liberty, that Providence is clear as the sun at noon. Meanwhile let those who have prevailed yield due honor to the defeated. Their virtues shine amidst the rubbish of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent.

But now new scenes succeed, and other actors enter on the stage, a hardy and valiant band, moulded to endure and dare,—the Discoverers of the Great West.

Those passages also exemplify the power of Parkman's style, which Eccles acknowledges while warning the reader against falling under its spell. This is exactly the view of American Freedom against Catholic Authority described in Maura Jane Farrelly's Anti-Catholicism in America! Parkman had obviously grown up with this view and was never challenged.

More on Francis Parkman's The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century here and here from The Dawson Newsletter, via EWTN.

Elizabeth I's Birthday Today; the Blessed Virgin Mary's Tomorrow

Elizabeth Tudor, Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII's daughter and future Queen of England, Ireland, and Wales, was born on September 7, 1533--the day before the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Professor Helen Hackett of  University College London wrote Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 1995. I admit I cannot afford to buy the book but she deals with the common statement I've often read that Elizabeth's Virgin Queen identity was used to replace veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary--even to replacing the celebration of the Mother of God's Nativity on September 8 with the celebration of the Queen's birthday.

According to the publisher:

Was Elizabeth I worshipped by her subjects? Many twentieth-century scholars have suggested that the Virgin Queen was a cult-figure who replaced the Virgin Mary. But how could this be in a Protestant state officially opposed to idolatry? Helen Hackett examines these issues through readings of a wide variety of Elizabethan texts. She traces some of the cross-currents in Elizabethan culture, and considers both Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary in terms of the history of representations of gender, sexuality and power.

From the reviews I've read, Hackett makes a distinction between secular and religious images. When Elizabeth the Queen was depicted in the Pelican portrait by Nicholas Hilliard (above) the imagery of the mother pelican who fed her young from her breast could have a religious meaning (the Queen as the mother and not just the governor of the Church of England) but could also symbolize her maternal, though virginal, care for her country and her subjects. 

Reading the introduction to the book in a preview, however, I was stunned by Richard Topcliffe's twisted view of the Mother of God--he says that her milk is poison to those who drink it (those Catholics who venerate her image and honor her as the Mother of God)--and while he calls her "our Lady" he considers the religious image a horrific idol. Queen Elizabeth orders the beautiful image of Our Lady cast into the fire, just as she casts her host at Euston Hall into jail in August 1578 during her progress through Suffolk and Norfolk. Her host at Euston Hall was Edward Rookwood and he was a recusant Catholic.

Matthew Lyon describes his arrest on his blog:

There was politics behind the choice of East Anglia for Elizabeth’s summer progress in 1578. During the course of the summer, Elizabeth stayed twice with Philip Howard, Earl of Surrey – heir of the foolish traitor Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk – just turned 21 that June. Kenninghall, Norkolk’s (sic) great palace, had been shuttered since his execution in June 1572. It was reopened now – restored to life – for the queen’s visit, a symbolic restoration. Surrey spent lavishly in pursuit of Elizabeth’s favour: her visits to Kenninghall and another mansion in Norwich were said to have left him £10,000 in debt.

It was no doubt for the benefit of adherents to Norfolk’s former cause that the government stage-managed the humiliation and arrest of a young catholic gentleman named Edward Rookwood as the court made its way from Bury to Kenninghall. Being entertained at Euston, his family’s house, on Saturday August 9th, Elizabeth received Rookwood and gave him her hand to kiss. It was discovered – a piece of theatre – that Rookwood had been “excommunicated for papistry” and he was called before Sussex, the lord chamberlain, who demanded of him “how he durst presume to attempt [the queen’s] real presence, he, unfit to accompany any Christian person”. Rookwood was ordered out of his own house and, further, committed to the town prison in Norwich.

By the way, Philip Howard, the Earl of Surrey, was the future Saint Philip Howard.

What a guest--invite yourself to a house you know is owed by a recusant Catholic, mock his hospitality, arrest him, send him off to prison, and then stay at his house and destroy his property! Rookwood died in jail in 1598.

But back to Helen Hackett's view of this comparison between the Mother of God and the Queen of England, this blog has some comments summarizing an article by Hackett (“Rediscovering shock: Elizabeth I and the cult of the Virgin Mary.” Critical Quarterly 35: 30-42. Web. 12 June 2014.):

Elizabeth’s court deliberately appropriated Marian iconography in order to promote their cause, Queen Elizabeth I. The “Virgin Mary was simply a convenient female symbol to be appropriated and made use of by the Elizabethan regime, just as all symbols are available for appropriation in the circulation of power between ruler and ruled.” (33-34). Not only that, but they also tarnished the image of the Virgin Mary to the people. They destroyed her image both literally, through public burnings, and through word of mouth. They pit the Virgin Queen and the Virgin Mary against each other, in favor of the Queen. Elizabeth represented the English Church and the Protestant English nation and was, therefore, the image of the one true faith. The Virgin Mary, on the other hand, was seen as a false icon, a seductive distraction from the true, the direct worship of God. The image of a nurturing mother was used to further this, Elizabeth was shown as the nurturing mother of the entire nation, working hard to keep her people happy and safe. The Virgin Mary was presented as poisonous, the “milk” she gave was deadly to those who took it. . . .

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

More about the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary tomorrow.

Robert Southey: The Three Bears and Sir Thomas More

“In the name of God,” I exclaimed, “who are you, and wherefore are you come?” 

“Be not alarmed,” he replied.  “Your reason, which has shown you the possibility of such an appearance as you now witness, must have convinced you also that it would never be permitted for an evil end.  Examine my features well, and see if you do not recognise them.  Hans Holbein was excellent at a likeness.” 

I had now for the first time in my life a distinct sense of that sort of porcupinish motion over the whole scalp which is so frequently described by the Latin poets.  It was considerably allayed by the benignity of his countenance and the manner of his speech, and after looking him steadily in the face I ventured to say, for the likeness had previously struck me, “Is it Sir Thomas More?” 

“The same,” he made answer, and lifting up his chin, displayed a circle round the neck brighter in colour than the ruby.  “The marks of martyrdom,” he continued, “are our insignia of honour.  Fisher and I have the purple collar, as Friar Forrest and Cranmer have the robe of fire.” 

A mingled feeling of fear and veneration kept me silent, till I perceived by his look that he expected and encouraged me to speak; and collecting my spirits as well as I could, I asked him wherefore he had thought proper to appear, and why to me rather than to any other person?--from Sir Thomas More, or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society

Today is the anniversary in 1774 of the birth of Robert Southey, the Romantic Poet who at first embraced the spirit of the French Revolution and then like William Wordsworth and other Lake Poets became more conservative: from Radical to Tory! As the Poetry Foundation notes:

Of his fellow Romantics he was perhaps the most versatile, as well as one of the most prolific. As poet—and eventually poet laureate—he produced epics, romances, and metrical tales, ballads, plays, monodramas, odes, eclogues, sonnets, and miscellaneous lyrics. His prose works include histories, biographies, essays, reviews, translations, travelogues, semi-fictional journalism, polemical dialogues, and a farraginous work of fiction, autobiography, anecdote, and omnium-gatherum that defies classification. His bent was inherently encyclopedic; and, while his writings lack both moral profundity (as distinct from moral fervor) and “natural magic,” they compensate by their vigor and abundance for their dearth of genius. Coleridge rightly called him the complete man of letters.

Among those encyclopedic works are two wonderful inventions: the story of The Three Bears and his imaginary dialogue with Sir Thomas More, cited above.

Southey wrote a narrative version of a well-known fairy story and published it in his 1837 volume, The Doctor. Instead of  girl named Goldilocks entering the three bears's house, "an impudent, bad old woman . . . set[s] about helping herself" and says wicked words when the chairs, porridge, and beds don't suit her.

Of Sir Thomas More, or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, the Poetry Foundation opines:

More’s historical Catholicism, in fact, gets in the way—Southey turns him into an embryonic Protestant—and the fiction of a visitation by and dialogue with a ghost becomes bizarre after the first encounter and irritating after the second or third. The work has often been praised for its limpid prose style. But that style is generally at its best in the numerous descriptive and anecdotal digressions—about local scenery, local legends, or Southey’s library holdings—interspersed with the more portentous dialogues, rather than in the dialogues themselves.

Southey died on March 21, 1843, having been appointed Poet Laureate of England in 1813; William Wordsworth succeeded him the next month.

"Love You More" Photo copyright Stephanie A. Mann, February 14, 2015.

Poetry for Autumn from Hopkins and Keats

Spring and Fall
to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Christopher J. Scalia offered a reflection on John Keats' poem to Autumn in The Wall Street Journal last week:

. . . Every September I read John Keats’s “To Autumn.” That tradition has special significance this season, the ode’s 200th anniversary.

I’ve loved “To Autumn” since I first read it in college. I was entranced then, as now, by the way in which the poem captures this season’s fleeting beauty. From its famous opening line (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”) to the quiet music of its final image (“gathering swallows twitter in the skies”), it evokes the delicate abundance of these weeks. Keats’s writing affects me the way the season itself does: I wish the poem would last longer even as I know its power lies in its brevity.

He compares the poem's brevity to the brevity not only of Keats's life, but of his creative period in 1819 when he wrote "To Autumn" and other great odes:

But 1819 would be his last year of writing poetry. The following February, Keats coughed up some blood. He knew what that meant. He wrote to a friend, “That drop of blood is my death-warrant;—I must die.” Keats moved to Rome in the hope that the climate would mitigate his tuberculosis. He died there in February 1821.

Keats had asked to have his headstone inscribed, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” An epitaph full of beauty—but, as 200 years have shown, not truth. The seasons turn, yet Keats reminds me still that fleeting splendor has a captivating power of its own.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Mark and I took these pictures during our November 2015 trip to the Ozarks. He loved the beauty of fall colors. Today is the anniversary of his birth in 1956. Like John Keats, last year he knew that he must die; he said he would not live to see this birthday anniversary. He felt "the soft-dying day". 

Coincidentally: Three Births on October 14

On October 14, 1630, Sophia of Hanover,  the twelfth child of Frederick V, the Elector Palatinate and Elizabeth, the Queen of Bohemia (and James I/VI's daughter) was born.

On October 14, 1633, James, the Duke of York, and future King James II, second son of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria,  was born.

On October 14, 1644, William Penn, son of Sir William Penn and his wife Margaret, was born.

All very coincidental at the time when each of these three were born, but portentous for the future, especially in matters of the English succession and religious toleration.

Sophia of Hanover replaced the direct descendants of James II in the line of succession after his daughter Mary and son-in-law William invaded England and he was declared deposed. She is pictured on the right (wikipedia source) in an Indian costume, painted by her older sister Louise. Sophia of Hanover was chosen by Parliament in 1701 because she was the closest Stuart heir who was NOT Catholic--even her elder brother Edward's children could not succeed to the throne because they were Catholic (he had married a Catholic princess and converted). This Act of Succession was necessary because William and Mary had no children (and Mary was dead by 1701 and William would not remarry), and Princess Anne Stuart's only child to survive infancy, William, Duke of Gloucester, died in 1700. James II's son, James Francis Edward, considered by his supporters to be the Prince of Wales and by his detractors, the Old Pretender, were completely shut out, of course, because what had the Glorious Revolution of 1688 been for, after all! (BTW, Sophia's elder sister Louise, the artist, had also become Catholic and a Cistercian nun and abbess!)

James II converted to Catholicism in about 1668; he succeeded his brother Charles II because Charles had no legitimate heirs. The English Parliament was opposed to his succession from the start and his son's birth and fears of another Catholic Stuart succeeding led to the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. His connection with William Penn comes because they were allies in King James' efforts to promote the Declaration of Indulgence and religious toleration in England for dissenters from the Church of England.  As this book explored the issue:

This is a critical study of the astonishing friendship between William Penn and James II—"two cardinal personalities of the modern era, authoritative men who deflected the political current of their time and left lasting influences that still can be felt on both sides of the Atlantic." Their friendship is no mere sidelight to seventeenth-century English history; indeed, it is not so much the friendship of a Quaker and a Catholic that intrigues us but, rather, the closeness of a Quaker leader and a Catholic monarch, standing together at the center of power in England for three decisive years.

Vincent Buranelli introduces his problem thus: "Nothing else in the life of William Penn has puzzled the biographers and historians so much as his persistent loyalty to James II. The antithesis between Catholic monarch and Quaker subject would seem to make any real understanding between the two men improbable; their presumed inability to speak to one another is compounded by the customary interpretation of James as a would-be tyrant and of Penn as an apostle of religious liberty; and yet Penn was not only a courtier throughout his reign but also a friend, possibly the best friend, of the King. . . . James II is one of the most reviled figures of modern history. William Penn is one of the most revered. How is their steadfast friendship to be explained?"

"Penn was loyal to James II, and he was right," argues Buranelli. His book texts (sic) this hypothesis and, in doing so, makes sense of a hitherto baffling side of William Penn.

Happy Birthday to Mary Sidney Herbert

Mary (Sidney) Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, was born on October 27, 1561. According to the Poetry Foundation:

Mary Sidney was the most important non-royal woman writer and patron in Elizabethan England. Without appearing to transgress the strictures against women's writing, she composed a sizable body of work, evading criticism by focusing on religious themes and by confining her work to the genres thought appropriate to women: translation, dedication, elegy, and encomium. Even more important to her success was her identity as the sister of Sir Philip Sidney. She began her public literary career after his death by encouraging works written in his praise, publishing his works, and completing his translation of the Psalms. Except for some business correspondence, all of her extant works were completed or published in the 1590s. Tantalizing later references indicate that she continued writing and translating until her death, but all subsequent works have been lost, probably to fire; her primary residences of Wilton and Baynards Castle burned in the seventeenth century. The extensive family correspondence mentioned by her brothers and other contemporaries has also been lost; her only surviving personal letters were written to her uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1578; and to Robert Sidney's wife, Barbara Gamage, in 1591, offering the services of a nurse.

The daughter of Sir Henry Sidney and Mary Dudley, Mary Sidney was born on 27 October 1561 at Tickenhall near Bewdley, Worcestershire, on the Welsh border while her father was serving as lord Governor of the marches of Wales. He had been a companion of King Edward, who died in his arms. Her mother, a well-educated woman who was a close friend of Queen Elizabeth, was the daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, who was virtual ruler of England in King Edward's final years, and the sister of Elizabeth's favorite, Robert Dudley. Lady Sidney was badly scarred by smallpox after nursing the queen, and thereafter rarely appeared at court.

Describing her work on the psalter, the Poetry Foundation states:

Sometime in the early 1590s, probably while she was completing her Petrarch translation, the countess had begun the work for which she is known, her metric translation of Psalms 44-150 that completes and revises a project that her brother Philip had begun in his final years. Although the Psalms have always been an important part of Judeo-Christian worship, translating them into the vernacular for private meditation and public singing had become a particularly Protestant activity in the sixteenth century. When the countess first began her metric versions, she remained fairly close to the phrasing and interpretation familiar to her from Miles Coverdale's prose version in the Great Bible, incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer. Her more polished versions, transcribed by Sir John Davies of Hereford in the Penshurst manuscript, evidence a scholarly process of revision, however. Choosing Protestant scholarship based on the original Hebrew, the countess revised her Psalms to be closer to the Geneva Bible than to the Great Bible, with considerable reliance on Théodore de Bèze (in the original Latin and in Anthony Gilby's English translation), on John Calvin, and on Les Psaumes de David mis en rime Françoise, par Clément Marot, et Théodore de Bèze (1562). References are also made to other continental versions and to earlier English metrical Psalms, such as those by Anne Lok and Matthew Parker.

The countess used 128 different verse forms for the 107 Psalms she translated (Psalm 119 has twenty-two sections), making her achievement significant for metrical variety as well as for the content, Like her Genevan sources, the countess used the Psalms to comment on contemporary politics, particularly the persecution of "the godly," as Protestants called themselves. By expanding metaphors and descriptions present in the original Hebrew, Sidney also incorporated her experience at Elizabeth's court, as well as female experiences of marriage and childbirth.

Sir Philip Sidney offered this translation of the most famous psalm, number 23:

The Lord, the Lord my shepherd is, 

And so can never I 

Taste misery. 

He rests me in greene pasture his: 

By waters still, and sweete 

He guides my feete. 

He me revives : leades me the way, 

Which righteousnesse doth take, 

For his names sake. 

Yea though I should through valleys stray, 

Of deathes dark shade, I will 

Noe whitt feare ill. 

For thou, deere Lord, thou me besett'st: 

Thy rodd, and thy staff be 

To comfort me; 

Before me thou a table sett'st, 

Even when foes envious eye 

Doth it espy. 

Thou oil'st my head thou fil'st my cup: 

Nay more thou endlesse good, 

Shalt give me food. 

To thee, I say, ascended up, 

Where thou, the Lord of all, 

Dost hold thy hall.

Mary wrote this translation of Psalm 90:

Thou our refuge, thou our dwelling, 

O Lord, hast byn from time to time: 

Long er Mountaines, proudly swelling, 

Above the lowly dales did clime: 

Long er the Earth, embowl'd by thee, 

Bare the forme it now doth beare: 

Yea, thou art God for ever, free 

From all touch of age and yeare. 

O, but man by thee created, 

As he at first of earth arose, 

When thy word his end hath dated, 

In equall state to earth he goes. 

Thou saist, and saying makst it soe: 

Be noe more, O Adams heyre; 

From whence ye came, dispatch to goe, 

Dust againe, as dust you were. 

Graunt a thousand yeares be spared 

To mortall men of life and light: 

What is that to thee compared? 

One day, one quarter of a night. 

When death upon them storm-like falls, 

Like unto a dreame they grow: 

Which goes and comes as fancy calls, 

Nought in substance all in show.

John Donne praised this work highly in this poem:

UPON THE TRANSLATION OF THE PSALMS BY SIR
PHILIP SIDNEY, AND THE COUNTESS OF
PEMBROKE, HIS SISTER

ETERNAL God—for whom who ever dare
Seek new expressions, do the circle square,
And thrust into straight corners of poor wit
Thee, who art cornerless and infinite—
I would but bless Thy name, not name Thee now
—And Thy gifts are as infinite as Thou—
Fix we our praises therefore on this one,
That, as thy blessed Spirit fell upon
These Psalms' first author in a cloven tongue
—For 'twas a double power by which he sung
The highest matter in the noblest form—
So thou hast cleft that Spirit, to perform
That work again, and shed it here, upon
Two, by their bloods, and by Thy Spirit one ;
A brother and a sister, made by Thee
The organ, where Thou art the harmony.
Two that make one John Baptist's holy voice,
And who that Psalm, "Now let the Isles rejoice,"
Have both translated, and applied it too,
Both told us what, and taught us how to do.
They show us islanders our Joy, our King ;
They tell us why, and teach us how to sing.
Make all this all three choirs, heaven, earth, and spheres ;
The first, Heaven, hath a song, but no man hears ;
The spheres have music, but they have no tongue,
Their harmony is rather danced than sung ;
But our third choir, to which the first gives ear
—For Angels learn by what the Church does here—
This choir hath all. The organist is he
Who hath tuned God and man, the organ we ;
The songs are these, which heaven's high holy Muse
Whisper'd to David, David to the Jews ;
And David's successors in holy zeal,
In forms of joy and art do re-reveal
To us so sweetly and sincerely too,
That I must not rejoice as I would do,
When I behold that these Psalms are become
So well attired abroad, so ill at home,
So well in chambers, in Thy Church so ill,
As I can scarce call that reform'd until
This be reform'd ; would a whole state present
A lesser gift than some one man hath sent ?
And shall our Church unto our Spouse and King
More hoarse, more harsh than any other, sing ?
For that we pray, we praise Thy name for this,
Which, by this Moses and this Miriam, is
Already done ; and as those Psalms we call,
—Though some have other authors—David's all,
So though some have, some may some Psalms translate,
We Thy Sidneian psalms shall celebrate,
And, till we come th' extemporal song to sing
—Learn'd the first hour that we see the King,
Who hath translated those translators—may
These their sweet learned labours all the way
Be as our tuning, that when hence we part,
We may fall in with them, and sing our part!

Mary Sidney died on September 25, 1621.

Happy Birthday, Sir Kenelm Digby!

Kenelm Digby, Catholic convert and son of one of the Gunpowder plotters, was born on July 11, 1603--almost three years before his father's execution. From Cambridge University:

A dark shadow lay over his family name when, aged 24, Sir Kenelm Digby raised a fleet to sail against the enemy French in the multicultural world of the Mediterranean. In his new book, Joe Moshenska (Faculty of English) looks at the intellectual, political and culinary life of a man driven by a thirst for knowledge. . . .

Sailing south in January 1628, Digby left behind a beloved wife and two sons, the youngest just a few weeks old. He was a man on the make. Despite being well-connected and highly educated, he had a black mark against his name. His father, Everard Digby, had been hung for treason against the crown. Revealed to be a co-conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, Everard was subjected to the most grisly of executions. In front of approving crowds, his heart was ripped out and his genitals sliced off.

Everard Digby maintained his dignity right up to the moment he lost consciousness. He professed that he “deserved the vilest death” and made an impassioned plea that wife and sons not be punished for his crime. Everard’s fortitude became legendary but his family lived with a sense of disgrace. The blood stain in the title of Moshenska’s book is a reference to a wound cut deep into a man with an extraordinary thirst for knowledge and experiences.

Seventeenth century England was layered in complexity. Raised as a gentleman and a Roman Catholic in a country that had officially broken its ties with Rome, Kenelm Digby learned early on to tread a delicate line between faith, politics and expediency. As a practising Catholic student at Oxford, he was unable to “weare a gowne” (matriculate) and each November endured the bonfire celebrations that reminded him of his father’s death. But Digby had friends in high places and the means to travel.

Trips to Europe, the first when he was aged just 14, helped Digby to develop the worldly ease and diplomatic skills so vital to him later in life. In Italy, his nimble mind won admiration in philosophical debates. In France, his handsomeness gained the (embarrassing) attention from the older and powerful Queen Regent. Visiting Spain, he socialised with the future Charles I – and became dangerously entangled in negotiations for a royal marriage bringing two disparate nations together.

The single voyage that allowed Digby to establish himself as a loyal subject was almost derailed by those who sought to discredit him as papist. The 1620s saw England engaged in an expensive war with its Roman Catholic neighbours. When he finally got the commission he sought from the king, it gave him permission to sail wherever he chose and to take as prizes any ships belonging to enemies of England. He was empowered to undertake any action “tending to the service of the realm and the increase of his knowledge”.

More about the book here; looks fascinating!

Happy Birthday, Dorothy L. Sayers!!

Dorothy Leigh Sayers, novelist, translator, and Anglo-Catholic Christian apologist, was born on June 13, 1893; she died on December 17, 1957, one year and three days before I was born. She was born at the Christ Church Cathedral headmaster's house in Oxford because her father was chaplain. She attended Somerville College, the women's college in Oxford and received an MA degree in 1920. Sayers worked in the advertising field as a copywriter for several years, working on Guinness and Colman's Mustard accounts. She also worked in publishing, at Blackwell's of Oxford.

The Dorothy L. Sayers Society provides more detail about her life and works and her alma mater is proud of its influence on her life and work.

Although she is better known for her Lord Peter Wimsey series of mystery novels, I have always appreciated her more for the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (particularly her introductions to Hell and Purgatory) and her Christian apologetics and other works. Like C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, she stands high in my short-list of 20th century Anglo Catholics. 

I am very sorry that Penguin diverted her from completing the translation of Paradise to translate The Song of Roland! I know that her translation of the Divine Comedy, left incomplete at her death, is not considered the best--but I thought her introductions displayed an excellent understanding of Catholic doctrine and medieval culture.

Creed or Chaos, The Mind of the Maker, and The Whimsical Christian all offer good orthodox Christian doctrine and a valid theological viewpoint. Her emphasis -- her insistence -- on the importance of doctrine and the Creeds of the Church, especially the Athanasian Creed, called Blessed John Henry Newman's Oxford Sermons to mind. Real Words; Strong Meat.

I went through a Dorothy L. Sayers phase when I was working for Eighth Day Books after being laid off from an advertising firm in the 1980's--I read the mysteries, the essays, the translations, nearly everything she wrote--and books about her and her achievement.

Happy Birthday, Rumer Godden

One of my favorite authors, Rumer Godden, was born on December 10, 1907. According to her literary trust website:

Rumer Godden, now a well established Virago Modern Classics author, is considered by many to be one of the foremost English language authors of the 20th century.

Nine of her books have been made into films.

She won The Whitbread Award for Children's Literature in 1972 and was awarded the OBE in 1993.

Her last book, "Cromartie versus The God Shiva Acting through the Government of India" was published by Macmillan in November 1997 and she died in 1998 aged ninety-one.

In 2007 Cambridge University honoured her by holding a Symposium of her work to celebrate her Centenary.

Rumer Godden wrote some 60 works during her life, drawing on her experiences of life in India and Britain.

The influence of India is reflected in "Black Narcissus", "The River", "Kingfisher's Catch Fire", "Breakfast with the Nikolides" and recently republished, "The Lady and the Unicorn". . .

and her interest in the religious life is shown in "In This House of Brede" and "Five for Sorrow Ten for Joy".

My favorite is In This House of Brede, the writing of which brought her to Stanbrook Abbey and the Catholic Church:.

According to her New York Time's obituary:

To do research on ''In This House of Brede,'' Ms. Godden lived for three years near Stanbrook Abbey. Her experience with the nuns there contributed to her decision to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1968. In many of her stories and novels, Ms. Godden would write about the rewards and perils of the contemplative life.

When she went to live near Stanbrook Abbey, she was in touch with both the legacy of the English Reformation and the French Revolution, for the Benedictines at Stanbrook had been exiled nuns from England, having established a convent in Cambrai. The foundress of the Cambrai house was none other than Helen More, the great-great-granddaughter of St. Thomas More. Her name in religion became Dame Gertrude More. The Benedictines at Cambrai were exiled to England just before the Carmelites of Compiegne were condemned to death--the Benedictines came to England wearing the secular clothing of the Carmelites!

It is a marvelous book, demonstrating Godden's interest in the passage of time depicted in fiction (see Take Three Tenses or China Court) and her great sense of drama and conflict in the midst of order and control.

Happy Birthday, Hugh Blair!

Hugh Blair, minister and rhetorician, was born on April 7, 1718. After his sermons, he is best known for his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, in which he argued against sophistry (defending a position you don't believe in yourself) and analysed works of literature from the ancient Greeks and Romans to eighteenth century French and English plays.

The University Bookman posts an appreciation:

One of the most successful of all nineteenth-century textbooks was Hugh Blair’s weighty Rhetoric. Between 1783 (the date of their first publication) and 1911 (the last full edition before that here under review) at least one hundred and thirty issues of this memorable course of lectures saw the light. Where English was spoken, Blair and rhetoric became almost synonymous; and in many another tongue translation brought similarly high repute. Now, thanks to the University of Southern Illinois’ “Landmarks in Rhetoric and Public Address” series, it is once again possible for the teacher and apprentice in this most civil and public of disciplines to inquire why his predecessors thought so well of the Edinburgh cleric-professor’s handiwork and to re-examine with Blair’s “original” in facsimile before them, the grounds and normative (i.e., historical) implications of their (ordinarily) very different preferences. . . .

Blair’s Rhetoric was by his own admission not a revolutionary, experimental, or speculative book, not a scholar’s treatise designed to rival George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric or Whately’s Elements of Criticism; instead (and most simply) it was intended as a useful tool—an adaptation of classical rhetoric and rhetorical criticism to suit the purposes of post-Augustan gentlemen, an affirmation of certain constants in the conduct and relations of civilized men and (by implication) of the “ethics” that belong to both: in the terms of two of its present-day admirers, a “rhetoric of belles lettres” for “all comparing in and judging of language.”

Blair knew very well what ends he would serve. For he was among the leading citizens of the old Scots capital in some of its greatest days, a friend of Lord Kames, Hume, and Robertson, a familiar of Boswell, Dr. Johnson, and Adam Smith; and for forty years he gave himself to the local university, to the perpetuation of his kind. As the first Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh—and even before—the rector of the High Kirk of St. Giles practiced upon Scotland’s future leaders and spokesmen what his own education, pulpit experience, and conversations with men of parts and learning convinced him was the art of rhetoric—of both the spoken and written word when considered as purposive, “designed.”

Please read the rest there.

The Southern Illinois University Press describes their latest (2005) edition of Blair's Rhetoric thus:

This new edition of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, edited by Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran, answers the need for a complete, reliable text. The book seeks to generate a renewed interest in Blair by provoking new inquiries into the tradition of belletristic rhetoric and by serving as both aid and incentive to others who may join in the project of improving understanding of this landmark rhetorical scholarship.

This edition contains forty-seven lectures and remains faithful to the text of the 1785 London edition. The editors contextualize Hugh Blair’s motivations and thinking by providing in their introduction an extended account of Blair’s life and era. The bibliography of works by and about Blair is an invaluable aid, surpassing previous research on Blair.

Although the extent of its influence cannot be measured fully, Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres was undoubtedly a primary vehicle for introducing many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars to classical rhetoric and French belletristic rhetoric—its success due in part to the ease with which the lectures combine neoclassical and Enlightenment thought, accommodating emerging social concerns. Ferreira-Buckley and Halloran’s extensive treatment revives the tradition of belletristic rhetoric, improving the understanding of Blair’s place in the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse, while finding him relevant in the twenty-first century.

Coincidences: Mary I, Fra Angelico, and Martin Luther

Mary I, eventually Queen Regnant of England, was born on February 18, 1516. Clare Ridgway of The Anne Boleyn Files writes:

On this day in history, in the early hours of Monday 18th February 1516, at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, Catherine of Aragon gave birth to a healthy daughter. It was Catherine’s sixth pregnancy (some say fifth) and it must have been a relief to hear the baby cry and see her wriggle, even if she was ‘just’ a girl.

Anna Whitelock describes how, three days after her birth, this baby girl was baptised at the nearby Church of the Observant Friars with Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, standing as her godmother.* At the end of the ceremony, heralds proclaimed:-

“God send and give long life unto the right high, right noble and excellent Princess mary, Princess of England and daughter of our most dread sovereign lord the King’s Higness.”

The little girl had been named Mary after her father’s favourite sister, Mary Tudor, and Linda Porter writes of how the baby princess was “small but pretty” and “already showed signs that she had inherited the red-gold hair of both her parents and the clear Tudor complexion.” She had also inherited her parents’ pride, intelligence and strength of character. As her parents gazed at their daughter, breathing sighs of relief that she seemed fit and healthy, they would have had no idea that this tiny girl would one day be Queen of England, that she would face many challenges with courage and would fight for her throne and win.

*Other sources note that: "Her godparents included her great-aunt the Countess of Devon, Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, and the Duchess of Norfolk.[5] Henry VIII's cousin once removed, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, stood sponsor for Mary's confirmation, which was held immediately after the baptism.[6]"

Thirty years later, the Reformer, Martin Luther, died on February 18, 1546. As this site briefly describes his last years and death:

During his last years of life Luther fought against many physical ailments. The death of his daughter Magdelena, in 1542, was also very difficult for him.

Luther's relationship to people with different beliefs, especially the Jews, deteriorated drastically during these years. His 1523 work Jesus was born a Jew showed a concilliatory (sic) attitude; however, in later years the aging reformer sentenced all who did not want to convert to his beliefs. The strongly anti-semetic (sic) work Jews and their Lies (1543) came out during this period.

Luther continued to lead the Reformation in its fight against its enemies even in the last years of his life. With his 1545 work Against the Papacy at Rome Founded by the Devil! he performed his last blow against the Roman Church.

Luther continued his preaching duties despite his various disappointments and ailments.

Luther continued to teach at Wittenberg University until the end of his life; his last lecture ended with the words: "I am weak, I cannot go on."

Luther set off on his last trip on January 17, 1546, to his birthplace Eisleben (only in German).

Although he was drawn with illness, he went to settle a dispute among the Mansfeld Counts. The negotiations ended successfully.

Luther did not have the energy to return to Wittenberg. He died on February 18, 1546 in Eisleben. On his death bed, he prayed "Into your hands, I command my spirit. You have saved me, Father, you faithful God."

After the coffin was displayed for two days in Eisleben, Luther's body was transported through Halle and Bitterfeld back to Wittenberg.

On February 22 Luther was laid to rest in the Castle Church in Wittenberg; Johannes Bugenhagen held the funeral oration.

And today is also the feast of Blessed Fra Angelico, a great Dominican saint and Renaissance artist:

Bl. John of Fiesole, popularly known as Bl. Fra Angelico, was a Dominican painter in the mid-fifteenth century known for the beauty of his paintings and the holiness of his priestly life. Nicknamed “Angelico” by his brothers, his Dominican consecration and life are worthy of imitation as he preached Jesus Christ by his life, his words, and his paintings.

Given the name Guido at Baptism, this saint was born near Vicchio, in the vicinity of Florence, at the end of the 14th century. From his youth he practiced the art of painting. Having entered the Dominican convent in Fiesole, he was given the name Brother Giovanni (Brother John). After ordination he held various responsibilities, one of which was that of prior of the convent in Fiesole.

Faithful to the promises he made as a Dominican, to preach the Gospel after having contemplated it in prayer, Fra Angelico put his creativity at the disposal of the Lord. With brush and paint in hand, he used his talents to transmit to all people the sublimity and the redemptive strength of the divine mysteries.

Between 1425 and 1447, Fra Angelico carried out his activity for the Dominican convents and other ecclesiastical institutes at Fiesole, Florence (most especially at the convent of San Marco), Cortona and Orvieto. The fame of his genius merited him the esteem of the Sovereign Pontiffs Eugenio IV and Nicolas V, who contracted him for the task of frescoing several rooms in the Vatican Palace (1445-1449).

Fra Angelico died on February 18, 1455, in the convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome and was buried in the adjoining Basilica, where his body was covered by a simple slab on which was carved his portrait. With a personality that was uncomplicated and clear, Brother Giovanni had lived a poor and humble life, refusing honors and positions.

The virtue and the profound religious spirit which characterized the life of this artist and Dominican is reflected in his spirituality, his purity, and the luminosity of his art. Even before his official recognition as a blessed of the Church, he had been given by the faithful the title “Beato Angelico.” In a moving ceremony on October 18, 1984, Pope John Paul II, on his knees in front of Fra Angelico’s tomb, proclaimed him solemnly to be the universal patron of all artists.

Happy Birthday, G.K. Chesterton!

The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive….But there is a second fact about Birthdays, and the birth-song of all creation, a fact which really follows on this; but which, as it seems to me, the other school of thought almost refuses to recognize. The point of that fact is simply that it is a fact. In being glad about my Birthday, I am being glad about something which I did not myself bring about.

--from G.K.’s Weekly, 21st March, 1935

Happy Birthday to J.R.R. Tolkien: A Toast Tonight!

According to The Tolkien Society website:

The name “Tolkien” (pron.: Tol-keen; equal stress on both syllables) is believed to be of German origin; Toll-kühn: foolishly brave, or stupidly clever – hence the pseudonym “Oxymore” which he occasionally used. His father’s side of the family appears to have migrated from Saxony in the 18th century, but over the century and a half before his birth had become thoroughly Anglicised. Certainly his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, considered himself nothing if not English. Arthur was a bank clerk, and went to South Africa in the 1890s for better prospects of promotion. There he was joined by his bride, Mabel Suffield, whose family were not only English through and through, but West Midlands since time immemorial. So John Ronald (“Ronald” to family and early friends) was born in Bloemfontein, S.A., on 3 January 1892. His memories of Africa were slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider, and influenced his later writing to some extent; slight, because on 15 February 1896 his father died, and he, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England – or more particularly, the West Midlands.

The Tolkien Society celebrates his birthday with a toast:

Each year on 3 January, the Tolkien Society encourages Tolkien fans from across the world to celebrate the Professor’s birthday with a simple toast-drinking ceremony.

At 9pm your local time, we invite Tolkien fans to raise a glass and toast the birthday of this much loved author. The toast is simply: 

The Professor!

Happy birthday, Beren.

Happy Birthday to Gilbert Keith Chesterton!

As our Wichita chapter of the American Chesterton Society continues to read Chesterton, we've appreciated how he looks at historical events from a different perspective. This short article from Lunacy and Letters, posted on the American Chesterton Society's website, shows why Chesterton offers those different views--he does not want to read what the historian thinks about history; he just wants to read history:

In my innocent and ardent youth I had a fixed fancy. I held that children in a school ought to be taught history, and ought to be taught nothing else. The story of human society is the only fundamental framework outside of religion in which everything can fall into its place. A boy cannot see the importance of Latin simply by learning Latin. But he might see it by learning the history of the Latins. Nobody can possibly see any sense in learning geography or in learning arithmetic – both studies are obviously nonsense. But on the eager eve of Austerlitz, where Napoleon was fighting a superior force in a foreign country, one might see the need for Napoleon knowing a little geography and a little arithmetic. I have thought that if people would only learn history, they would learn to learn everything else. Algebra might seem ugly, yet the very name of it is connected with something so romantic as the Crusades, for the word is from the Saracens. Greek might be ugly until one knew the Greeks, but surely not afterwards. History is simply humanity. And history will humanise all studies, even anthropology.

Since that age of innocence I have, however, realised that there is a difficulty in this teaching of history. And the difficulty is that there is no history to teach. This is not a scrap of cynicism – it is a genuine and necessary product of the many points of view and the strong mental separations of our society, for in our age every man has a cosmos of his own, and is therefore horribly alone. There is no history; there are only historians. To tell the tale plainly is now much more difficult than to tell it treacherously. It is unnatural to leave the facts alone; it is instinctive to pervert them. The very words involved in the chronicles – “Pagan”, “Puritan”, “Catholic”, “Republican”, “Imperialist” – are words which make us leap out of our armchairs.

No good modern historians are impartial. All modern historians are divided into two classes – those who tell half the truth, like Macaulay and Froude, and those who tell none of the truth, like Hallam and the Impartials. The angry historians see one side of the question. The calm historians see nothing at all, not even the question itself.

But there is another possible attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest form, my proposal is this: That we should not read historians, but history. Let us read the actual text of the times. Let us, for a year, or a month, or a fortnight, refuse to read anything about Oliver Cromwell except what was written while he was alive. There is plenty of material; from my own memory (which is all I have to rely on in the place where I write) I could mention offhand many long and famous efforts of English literature that cover the period. Clarendon’s History, Evelyn’s Diary, the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Above all let us read all Cromwell’s own letters and speeches, as Carlyle published them. But before we read them let us carefully paste pieces of stamp-paper over every sentence written by Carlyle. Let us blot out in every memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the dead men on their living topics.

Read the rest here. Happy birthday, G.K.C.! (May 29, 1874).