Blessed Edmund Campion

no less tender hospitality. The great house was in a beautiful and remote situation. Running in and out of it was a ho

and my very breath,-yes, breath is just the word! for they who succumb to these persecutors are wont to be thrust into dismal dungeons, where they inhale filthy fogs, and are cut off from wholesome air. But now, through you and your children's kindness, I shall live, please God . . . most happily." The stress laid, in this affectionate letter, upon the writer's appreciation of personal care, of the privacy dear to students, of good diet and pure air, tells its own tale of physical delicacy.[29] Campion was slight in build, and like many another tireless and quenchless spirit known to history, at no time really strong. He ends by asking that his St. Bernard may be sent on to him, and encloses a lively page for his friend Richard, recalling the service rendered in snatching him from danger, and conveying him to Turvey House. "Is it not hard," Campion breaks out, "that beholden to you as I am, I have no way of showing it? . . . Meanwhile, if these buried relics have any flavour of the old Campion,

tened to him. But this book, like the View of the Present State, written some seventeen years later by another gentle-hearted Englishman, the poet Spenser, is all wrong in its theory that to get any footing in the modern world the "mere Irishry" must be Anglicized. Campion did not know the Celts, their laws, nor their literature; he never came nearer to them than through chronicles written in scorn of them, or the daily table-talk, wide of the mark, of the English Pale. Yet, according to his opportunity, he loved the country and the people, and deplored that the descendants of a race of medi?val scholars should be cut off from education. Afterwards he felt that his rather helter-skelter pamphlet represented limited knowledge and unformed opinion; he speaks of it as "premature," and wished, when he[32] los

returned[33] to the Church. For Parsons, his earliest biographer, whose facts concerning these years were supplied by Richard Stanihurst, says of Campion that his purity and devoutness in Irelan

r him; and one day he recognized with a shock of horror the penalties to which he was exposing the generous friends, so far unmolested, who were giving him shelter. His conscience would not allow him to come out with a flat denial of Catholic tenets or sympathie

the national Saint, and adopting his name, Campion boarded the ship as "Mr. Patrick." Officers of the law promptly appeared on the track of the quasi-Papist, delaying the weighing of the anchor, annoying the crew, upsetting the cargo, and questioning every passenger on deck except the harmless-looking person who stood "in a lackey's weed" behind Hussey. Edmund Campion was a born actor. He pu

Southwark, posted a copy of it upon the palace gates of the Bishop of London, on the morning of May 25, the Feast of Corpus Christi: by August he was to pay for the bold act with his life. The Queen of Scots had newly arrived in England. London, by the time Campion reached it, was in a ferment. "Nothing was to be found there but fears, suspicions,

f Civil Law. Dr. Storey was very feeble for his years, which were sixty-seven. By a wretched breach of international law he had been trapped at Antwerp, carried away from his wife and family to England, and arraigned for having "feloniously and traitorously comforted Richard Norton," his own friend, the old hero of the Pilgrimage of Grace. But the real cause of his[37] arrest and execution was a much larger matter. He was a troublesomely co

s Good Queen Bess not only dealt out death very much more liberally, but invented a poison for all the springs of life. Her statutes, terribly oppressive[38] from the first, ended in what Burke calls the most hateful code framed since the world began: Penal Laws which, especially from 1585 on, struck without mercy at Catholics in their rights of worship, property, inheritance,

ady for the utmost hazard of war." There was a cause to which he could run[39] home; there was a vocation to which he could climb: these opened out before him as he stood in the surging indoor crowd. "He was animated by that blessed man's example," says Parsons, "to any danger and peril for the same faith for which the Doctor died." Edmund Campion