to be done in the given conditions.]

[Footnote 8: P. 272 in Richardson's Edit., from which I usually quote as
being the readiest available.]

[Footnote 9: On another occasion, by looking down to the right of His
Cross, He brought to her mind, "where our Lady stood in the time of His
Passion and said: 'Wilt Thou see her?'" leading her by gesture from the
seen to the not seen.]

XIV.

POET AND MYSTIC.

A biographer who has any other end in view, however secondary and
incidental, than faithfully to reproduce in the mind of his readers his
own apprehension of the personality of his subject, will be so far
biassed in his task of selection; and, without any conscious deviation
from truth, will give that undue prominence to certain features and
aspects which in extreme cases may result in caricature. A Catholic
biographer of Coventry Patmore would have been tempted to gratify the
wish of a recent critic of Mr. Champneys' very efficient work, [1] and
to devote ten times as much space as has been given to the account of
his conversion, and a good deal, no doubt, to the discussion and
correction of his eccentric views in certain ecclesiastical matters;
thus giving us the history of an illustrious convert, and not that of a
poet and seer whose conversion, however intimately connected with his
poetical and intellectual life, was but an incident thereof. On the
other hand, one less intelligently sympathetic with the more spiritual
side of Catholicism than Mr. Champneys, would have lacked the principal
key to the interpretation of Patmore's highest aims and ideals, towards
which the whole growth and movement of his mind was ever tending, and by
which its successive stages of evolution are to be explained. Again,
with all possible respect for the feelings of the living, the biographer
has wisely suppressed nothing needed to bring out truthfully the
ruggednesses and irregularities that characterize the strong and
somewhat one-sided development of genius as contrasted with the regular
features and insipid perfectness of things wrought on a small scale. If
idealizing means the filing-away of jagged edges--and surely it does
not--Mr. Champneys has left us to do our own idealizing. The faults that
marred Purcell's _Life of Manning_ are here avoided, and yet truth is no
whit the sufferer in consequence.

In speaking of Patmore as a thinker and a poet, we do not mean to
dissociate these two functions in his case, but only to cl