· The Poets' Chantry ·
"As the highest Gospel was a biography, so," asserts Carlyle, "is the life of every good man still an indubitable gospel." It is, indeed, the simplest and first of all evangels, the evangel of fact: and when by happy consummation it becomes also the evangel of beauty the crown is assured. The world is hungry for inspiration, and sooner or later will capitulate. The meek shall possess the land, the martyr shall reign, even the poet shall be listened to at last.
There is Robert Southwell, for instance—onetime priest of the Society of Jesus, onetime prisoner in the Tower of London town, onetime laureate of the Elizabethan Catholics—whose story no one can read to-day without more than an intellectual interest. To say that he is best worth knowing for the sublimity of his personal character is to indicate the chasm separating him from the great body of Elizabethan songsters. His memory is not, as so frequently happens, sanctified by his art; rather is his art sanctified by the life which produced it. And yet one would not willingly forget that the young priest's immortality is mainly due to the unique charm of his literary work. "It marks not only the large Roman Catholic element
