There are some poetical personalities who disdain the heroic equipment to such an extent that to all but a few intimates who care to penetrate below the mask, they must remain imcomprehensible, and therefore, in an age that has no use or time for reticence, uninteresting. A Hugo or a Wilde catch the eye of the crowd, a Lionel Johnson never.

He was an Epicurean in the finer meaning of the word, and if it were not common knowledge now that Pater drew his hero from R. C. Jackson one might be tempted to imagine that he took for model his most distinguished pupil. Not an Epicurean in the popular sense of ‘Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie/ but one to whom ‘les roses’ meant all that survives of what was finest in Mediaeval art and life in our age. In the cool-shadowed cloisters of Winchester and Oxford he found his natural environment, and brought to such an environment a white passion for the literature of Greece and Rome, and that ‘native instinct for devotion’ which finally found a resting place in the Catholic Church.

He spent six years at Winchester and then passed on to New College, Oxford, and for both these places he felt the deep personal adoration that is usually given to friend or mistress. He loved the peace and the traditions of Winchester, and young though he was, his vibrating appreciation was keenly awake to the architectural and spiritual beauty of that ancient school.