appeal should have been ever to the past. "That inestimable debt of reverence, of fidelity, of under-standing" which modern scholarship owes antiquity—less a debt, after all, than "a grace sought and received"—was never far from his consciousness. Classicist he always was, from those days at old Winchester; "purist and precisian" in style, with slight interest in spelling-reform or other utilitarian devices. Inevitably then, past greatness, the best that had been known and thought, became for him, as for Arnold, the touchstone by which to try all present achievement, "About contemporary voices there is an element of uncertainty not undelightful, but forbidding the perfection of faith." Johnson wrote in one of his sage little articles in the Academy: "We prophesy and wait." Yet, although the personal equation inclined thus to the "serene classics," the critic's attitude toward a living genius was one of wistful appreciation. His every sense was keen in the search for beauty, and he welcomed it in whatever guise: Lucretius and Fielding, Pope and Wordsworth, Renan and Hawthorne—all of these shared his sympathy and his comprehension.
The discerning had great hopes of Johnson, with his Celtic dreams, his scholarly and exquisite methods, his unwavering faith in spiritual realities. And they were never fully realised. Without pain—at least, without protest—he passed on to the mansion prepared from eternity for these "inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Of that supreme work which he had contemplated, a beautiful, final, reconciling study of Catholic art and Catholic life, a philosophy merging ethics and æsthetics into one harmonious whole, no word whatever remains. But is there not a danger of carrying this regret too far—of urging the artist's possibilities at the expense of his actual achievement? The work Johnson has
