The popular game of archaeology is played with bucket and spade. Some things are dug up, and others are buried away out of sight. It is an easy game, for the exhumations and interments proceed simultaneously. The rubbish removed from one spot has to be tipped somewhere else; so that a hole and a mound are engineered in a single process. While you are discovering new wonders in the hole, you are covering up old wonders under the mound. In the hole you find Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros merckii, Ran gif er tarandus, Ursus spelaeus and other worthies, whose names and dignified bearing invite you to give them a place in or near the middle line of your genealogical tree. Under the mound you bury Parentes protoflasti, Pomum noxiale, Proditor multiformis, Opus salutis, Virgo mater, Agmina coelitum, Apostolorum chorus, Prophetarum numerus, Martyrum exercitus, Sumtna Trias, Verbum incarnatum, Salutaris hostia and every other legendary name that has hitherto made your ancestral stock a laughing stock.

Being only a game, archaeology cannot be expected to lead to any profitable end, or to arrive at any natural conclusion. If art is long, sport is longer. The only way of getting to the end of it is to call ‘Time.’ And even time cannot end sport; it merely marks an interval, after which every game begins again. The only end of sport is recreation. A really good game wrecks creation over and over again; and over and over again re-creates creation.

There has just left the Grotto at Lourdes, never to return to it, an old man who has been inseparable from it for over fifty years, and who will always be inseparable from it in the thoughts of countless pilgrims from every part of the world who have visited it in that long period. Perhaps no contemporary Catholic layman has had so many personal friends. This old man, who has just died in his ninetieth year, is Jean-Marie Laffont, the elder of the two Guardians of the Grotto, ‘the old candleman,’ he whose majestic head reminds one so forcibly of portraits of our own Cardinal Newman.

He was born at Poueyferré, a little village on the summit of a hill a few kilometres to the north-west of Lourdes. His family were well-to-do peasant proprietors, with a charming property which went down to the Lac de Lourdes. He was the eldest of a family of twelve children, and he and his brothers and sisters grew up in sight of the town with which he will be eternally associated. In those days village children were not worried with much instruction. If they learned to read and write, it was something of a marvel, but they certainly knew their catechism. Jean-Marie would spend most of his time helping about his father’s land, driving the cattle and the pigs to pasture, leading the sheep, going to market with the ox-waggon, and becoming astute in barter and rich in wisdom. He took the abundant corn from their rich lands to be ground in Lourdes by a miller named Soubirous— rather a slack and undependable but amiable person and one in need of help for the sake of his wife and children. The eldest child, Bernadette, was an asthmatic little thing, needing care and getting little of it.

For over one hundred and five years the memoirs of that decidedly acid female, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, have served as a quarry from which writers on the eighteenth century have dug their best anecdotes and extracted their sourest and most spiteful criticism. But not until this present year of grace did anyone think of reproducing the original book; and even now that reproduction comes to us in an extremely abridged and compressed form, and with a large and much-needed attempt at re-arrangement. For never was there a work more devoid of method and order, or more stuffed and padded with extraneous matter— unless, indeed, it be the ‘official’ Life of Dr. Johnson perpetrated by the fair author’s father, Sir John Hawkins, Knight, that ‘most unclubbable’ of men!

Sir John Hawkins, who claimed descent from the famous Elizabethan admiral of the same name, began life as an attorney with literary tastes. A fortunate marriage enabled him to retire by the time he was forty, and to settle down as a wealthy country gentleman at Twickenham, with a town house at Queen Square, Westminster, and to devote his leisure to literature, music, angling, the formation of a fine library, and the duties of a magistrate. He wrote a tedious History of Music in five volumes quarto, and a number of other books which no one nowadays ever reads; he knew in a certain way almost everybody worth knowing; he was an original number of the famous ‘Club’ in Ivy Lane, and he was Dr. Johnson’s executor, and selected by the publishers to edit his works and write his Life. He lies buried in the cloisters of the Abbey, and very few would ever have heard of him had it not been for his rather grudging inclusion in the great ‘Johnsonian Circle.’ Boswell hated him, and Johnson just tolerated him.

The visits of Our Lady to a poor native Mexican in the early years of the Spanish occupation of New Spain, and her gift through him of the miraculous painting, now venerated under the title of ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe,’ have often been recounted, but none of the early traditions, it would seem, bear a greater impress of truth and scrupulous investigation than the account left by the Spanish chronicler Fray Luis Becerra Tanco, Professor of Native Languages in the University of Mexico, and dated in 1666. He says that in the previous year he was invited by the Cathedral Chapter to depose on oath all that he knew on the subject, and he now commits to writing an accurate and circumstantial record of this evidence.

In the first place, he says he has a very clear recollection of the incident as related to him in his youth by three Spaniards of note, one of them his uncle, who had known contemporaries of the Bishop Fray Don Juan de Zumarraga and other personages concerned in the event, and were themselves born within a few years of the date of the miracle. Further, his knowledge of the native language and customs—his favourite study—-has enabled him to examine the native records of this happening before they had disappeared, for he says that, under the influence of Spanish education, the natives are losing the art they possessed of transmitting their traditions by pictures and chants. He adds that it cost him many vigils to correlate their reckoning with his own and separate exaggerations from reality: . . . . y a mi me costó mucho desvelo el ajustar su computo a el nuestro y aportar lo supersticioso de lo natural.’

For a long time we have admired Mr. Penty’s subtle argument for the necessity of the Guild of Experts based on the fundamental necessity of the Just Price. As a work of economic craftsmanship, this argument has long seemed to us to have few rivals, and no answer.

Yet we were never without our misgivings that somewhere in the subtle-simple ratiocination there was something akin to what the metaphysicians would call ‘a passing from the ideal order to the real.’ An uncomfortable feeling that there was a fly in Mr. Penty's translucent amber left us little or no intellectual rest.

We were not concerned to deny the ultimate conclusions drawn by Mr. Penty from his ultimate premisses. Indeed, for a long time, we hesitated to discuss even with ourselves our doubts about his reasoning, lest we should throw doubts upon his conclusions and eventually about his premisses. But in the end our thoughts have taken such definite shape that we cannot withold them from ourselves and even from Mr. Penty himself.

Above the col at Saanenmoser there is a mountain called the Hornberg, which the skiers love. The beginners practise all day on its lower fields of snow—’ the nursery slopes they call it, where it is steep straight going and no traps or pitfalls. Higher up there are the dark green fir-forests, and above them again the highest fields slope upwards towards the summit, dazzling white against the blue. On either side below the col the valleys wind away among a sea of mountains, on one side into the heart of Switzerland, on the other towards the Lake of Geneva and the mountains of Savoy.

I had often climbed the hard snowy track up the Hornberg in the early afternoon and run down on skis across the wide easy slopes. It was a jolly friendly mountain, its snow alive with skiers, its silence broken by voices, the upward path marked by occasional huts and chalets, the snow crossed and re-crossed all the way up with the tracks of innumerable skis. The skiers have familiarly named certain places: such as ‘Devil’s Gap,’ slippery with ice under the trees, through which the beginners slither and slide, and ‘Major’s Corner,’ the difficult path through the wood which some old Major was supposed to have made famous with his perpetual falls. It seemed to be a mountain entirely dedicated to mankind, too good-natured to resent the invaders, and appearing to achieve a perfect friendliness by sacrificing something of its dignity. The neighbouring peaks were too high for frequent ascents, and kept their terrors and austere secrets apart.

The thirteenth century was without a doubt the golden age in the history of the Order of Friars-Preachers. Great men in the Order were so numerous that you could not possibly tick them off on your fingers as you might the eminent names in any other sphere or age. You might just as well try to sort out the leaves that strew the brooks of Vallombrosa, or count the waves in the sea or the stars in the sky. Perhaps that is why so many great names are so little remembered. Memory breaks down under its burden. The thickly-clustered constellation creates one luminous blaze and the single stars are lost in the glare.

Perhaps you have never heard of John of Vercelli precisely because his brilliance has been—no, not eclipsed, but absorbed in the steady glow of his shining contemporaries. Who, then, you may well ask, was this Dominican star?

The Blessed Father John of Vercelli was the sixth Master General of the Order. Both time and place of his birth are doubtful, and, indeed, very little is known of his early years. But we know that he died at Montpellier in 1283, and we gather, therefore, that, even if he ever set eyes on St. Dominic, it must have been unreflecting baby eyes or the solemn eyes of very eariy boyhood. Anyhow, if he had never met St. Dominic in person, he early came under the spell of Dominic’s sons, and was caught up in the stupendous movement Dominic had started. We know for certain that, before he became a Friar, John taught Canon Law in the University of Paris. Now, no man at any university in the Middle Ages could by any possibility help seeing and hearing Friars-Preachers.

Once upon a time a clerk in Holy (Roman) Orders was ipso facto a professional man of letters—even in England. Nowadays, the profession of letters is become a secular luxury for which English Catholic priests, though amply endowed with the requisite talents, rarely have opportunity, inclination, time or energy. They do not, any more than other classes of Englishmen, lack ambition to enrich the literature of which they are the heirs, and to win it back to the service of Catholic Truth in which it was begotten. But as a class they are disciplined to selfdenial. Though devotion to letters may be urged upon them as a duty—which indeed it is—there are other more pressing and less romantic duties, in sacristy, confessional, class-room and slum, which most of them would consider it a treason to postpone to the delights of reading and writing in a well-appointed study. Here and there, however, circumstances make it possible, or even necessary, to develop a vocation along the line more agreeable to nature. Such circumstances are becoming more normal nowadays than they were formerly. The discipline of self-denial is as necessary for young priests to-day as ever it was—perhaps more necessary than ever it was. But there are certain external conditions, as well as certain internal dispositions generated by modern education in many candidates for the priesthood, which make the old-time discipline of parochial life, with its paucity of pens and books, and its plenitude of accounts, bazaars, and committee-meetings, as dangerous to some individuals as it would be unprofitable to the community if those individuals were condemned to it.