The, news about China doled out to the man in the street by our daily and weekly newspapers, even the best, is but scanty, and all of the same monotonous type. Civil wars, and rumours of civil wars, make up the bulk of it. The struggle of one Tu-chun against another, the march of Southerners against Northerners, captures of cities, surrenders, betrayals, flights of leaders, and re-appearances of defeated generals, and what seem to him aimless expeditions and useless fighting fill up the picture of the present state of the Middle Kingdom. It is quite incomprehensible to the ordinary Englishman; and those who have lived in the Far East and have had some dealings with the Chinese are often asked by their friends what is the meaning of it, and how it is all going to end. If wary, they will remember the wise saying ‘Never prophesy unless you know,’ for he would indeed be a rash person who professed to foresee with any certainty the final outcome of the present turmoil in that distant land. One thing is to be remembered, that the Chinese have a long history, that they have passed through many periods of worse disorder than the present, but that the ship of state has righted herself, and the country settled down again to the cultivation of the soil and the other arts of peace. There is no reason to suspect they will not eventually do so once more—if left to themselves.

In an article in The Morning Post (Nov. 6, 1926) it was stated that ‘the interested Foreign Powers in China were agreed upon one point, which is that there shall be no joint intervention in the internal affairs of that distracted country.’

The younger generation is having an immense amount of attention paid it by the novelists of today. School stories abound, foot the jolly old-fashioned school stories, with their idealist friendships, their thrilling game contests, and their appeal to the boy reader, but problem school stories, full of desperate purpose, critical, ‘contributions to the literature of the subject,’ as the commercial jacket grimly records. They afford psychological material for Freud, Jung, and their more unpleasant followers. They are not books for boys, but about boys written for the purpose of improving the education of youth.

Then there are the young-man books, not the old-fashioned type even of Father Benson—who died in 1914, and whose characters are, therefore, pre-war and out of fashion—but the newer type, full of complexes and inhibitions with enormous elaboration of unnecessary detail, due to a pelmanistic capacity for observation, searching out and remembering the irrelevant. We notice in them the sex-impulse as a substitute for careful writing, the decay of life thus providing a rather more effortless way of book-making than painting ‘a true and perfect image of life indeed.’ The young-women problem books are, of course, even nastier. That is to be expected. A good young woman is apparently a most uninteresting subject, more uninteresting than a good young man—and that in the view of the novelists is saying a very great deal.

It is not quite that our authors wish us to believe the world is worse than it was, but only that now it doesn’t mind anyone knowing how bad it is.

In an ancient south country city with a great past behind it, and nothing whatever in front of it, there exist cheek by jowl a vast Norman cathedral and a small Catholic church. The church, oddly enough, is of the eighteenth century, and it is not known how the St. Lull Catholics of that era found the means to build it, still less what spirit of effrontery prompted them to rear it so close to their lost cathedral. There it is, off a bye-street of Georgian hou'ses and spiked garden-walls, its whereabouts indicated by a furtive notice at the incidence of an alley. Pursue this alley in the spirit of faith, and you come abruptly up to a dwarfish stucco building submerged in the morning shadow of the cathedral, its graveyard, planted with classical trees of the family of the willow in a mourning ring, terminated by the west transept of the fane itself.

The stucco interior is anything but architecturally impressive, and so damp that flourishing outcrops of fungus uproot the tiles in untrodden parts of the floor. But there is a clear fairway to the altar, and a frequented one. You seldom find Our Lord without one or two kneeling adorers if you look in at any time between sunrise and” sunset, and I have looked in myself at all hours of the day. I have a liking for the church, apart from my ardour for its Lord; and my liking extends to the quiet graveyard in its rear.

I was winding up a summer holiday in St. Lull: staying on at my rooms there, after my children had gone back to their convents, to meet an American friend before returning to my husband in Italy. It was the first week in October, and the friend, a greyhaired priest on leave for literary work, had come down to visit the cathedral and me.

Lord—at a mountain tomb in Bethany

Once Thou didst stand, and with the word ‘Come forth’

Raised Lazarus to the quick. And stumbling he Pathetically raised protecting hands Because the sun was strong. They loosed the bands That bound his buried limbs. Before their eyes In wonder, jealousy, or fear that gazed Young Lazarus stood, and heard their startled cries, And saw his Lord smile welcome, and with dazed Senses he wondered what new dream was this;

Then the world faded as he knelt to kiss Thy feet . . .

Lord—see this sepulchre that keeps my soul And call forth the dead self that tarries there,

Send angel hands, that they in pity roll The stone away, and at Thy word let rise This buried self, that with new life and care May learn to kiss Thy feet, and meet Thine eyes.

Rupert Croft-Cooke.

There are some Catholics who claim that the Church is not making the progress that it should in this country; they point to the scarcity of churches in some places, the shortage of schools in others, the slow growth of our numbers, the lack of Catholic influence in matters of public importance, and other signs from which they draw doleful conclusions.

Whilst our progress is never so rapid as we should wish, and while there still exist disabilities and other circumstances which we may deplore, a rapid survey of some of the changes that have come over Catholic England since the year Queen Victoria came to the throne will show what truly remarkable progress we have made in a period which may seem a long time but which is actually within the lifetime of many still living.

In 1837 there were several counties in England and Wales with no Catholic church or chapel of any kind, and eleven with only one chapel for the spiritual needs of a parish which sometimes extended far beyond the county boundary. In Scotland, of course, the position was far worse; eleven chapels had to serve the needs of twenty-four counties, thirteen being entirely devoid of any place wherein Mass could be said. Think what this means, you who have only to step across the road to a fine church in which you can hear two or three Masses every day of the week if you are so inclined.

In London there were twenty-five ‘chapels’ ; churches, and, of course, cathedrals, were unknown. In the whole of England there were 433 chapels; Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Middlesex accounting for nearly half.

Only the other day, we stood looking at the desolate spot in St. Martin’s Street, once occupied by the happy home of the Burneys, and Dr. Johnson’s dictum about that gifted family came to our mind : I love all of that breed whom I can be said to know, and one or two I hardly know, I love on credit.’ And lo! on returning from our stroll, we found this new and valuable volume of Burneyana with those very words inscribed on its title-page. Mr. Brimley Johnson, who has already delved to such good purpose in eighteenth century quarries, here gives us a delightful miscellany. It is made up of hitherto unused material from manuscript journals and correspondence, and from contemporary newspapers, and the result is a ‘full-length family group’ of all the Burneys. By far the best part of the book consists of a reproduction of the suppressed passages in Madame d’Arblay’s Journal during her stay in France in 1802 and the succeeding years. These are full of interest, and in their vividness are well worthy of one who was at once the greatest diarist and all but the greatest novelist of her period.

The editor in his introduction rightly praises Fanny Burney’s incomparable literary picture-painting, and extols her as perhaps the shrewdest observer of human nature who ever created fictions in the likeness of man. In 1802, Bonaparte was on the eve of the Consulate for Life, and Paris presented a curious spectacle, of which we are here given many glimpses. While some of the entries are of a very intimate character, others were written to be read to Queen Charlotte and her daughters at Windsor, and are therefore of the full-dress order.

Friendship, according to the philosophers, is founded on resemblance. The more two persons have in common, the easier for them to be friends.

‘Pares cum paribus facillime congregantur.’ In the absence of books and a reliable memory I venture to think that this is Cicero expounding the foundation of friendship with Laelius for mouthpiece.

St. Thomas I am happily able to quote. He is emphatic and explicit.

‘Is likeness a cause of love? It seems not. Potters, says Aristotle, quarrel with one another. A man, says Augustine, loves in another what he would not be himself : he loves an actor, but would not himself be one. Sick men love health and poor men riches. We all love those who give us money and health; and those who continue friends of their dead. So likeness cannot, it seems, be a cause of love.

‘On the other hand, however, it is written in Eccle-siasticus : Every beast loveth his like.

’ My own answer is that likeness, properly speaking, is a cause of love. But there are two kinds of likeness. Actual presence of the same quality in two things make them alike. Thus two white things are alike. But presence and absence of the same quality in two things can also make them alike, when the thing that lacks the quality tends to it. Thus a body at rest and a body in motion are alike in respect of rest and motion, which are the same fundamentally, since related as act to potency.

‘The first kind of likeness begets the love of friendship ; the second, the love of concupiscence, or friendship based on usefulness or pleasure.

We were on Isola Pescatore. The heat of the day had iessened. It was six o’clock. Odours of garlic, fish and unwashed drains, drifted after us as we made our way through crazy alleys. Houses lolled towards each other; steps rose to join erratic arches, or give access to crooked balconies. The cobbled way played tricks with one’s step.

We reached the limit of the island and were about to turn back, when we discovered a wooden stall, set out with peasant’s ware.

There were mementoes displayed of every kind: little vases of Venetian glass; pots made of local marble; boxes of olive wood, and trays garnished with coloured inlaid designs; bronzes and beads. From the cross-bar supporting the white canvas awning hung rosaries of nuts gathered in the woods and dried in the sun.

Everything was attractive, though much would look tawdry enough away from its setting. I admired a number of trinkets, but saw no gift that would please my friends.

I was moving on, when I heard music and saw the Fiddler. He stood on a rough block of wood, the large black, worn-out boot on his right foot nosing round to the left. His trousers, coarse and biscuit-brown, creased voluminously about his legs, and were secured round his waist by a thin scarlet belt. His coat, blue, a little shrunken, a little faded, was unbuttoned, and revealed his white shirt, open at the neck; his cuffs were rolled back from bis brown wrists.