last into the belief that
Christ was an ugly man."

"I know nothing of the monks of the eighth century and their poetry,
but I do know something of Tertullian, and you mean to tell me that
you admire his style--those harsh chopped-up phrases and strained
antitheses."

"I should think I did. Phrases set boldly one against the other; quaint,
curious, and full of colour, the reader supplies with delight the
connecting link, though the passion and the force of the description
lives and reels along. Listen:

"'Quae tunc spectaculi latitudo! quid admirer? quid rideam? ubi gaudeam?
ubi exultem, spectans tot ac tantos reges, qui in coelum recepti
nuntiabantur, cum ipso Jove et ipsis suis testibus in imis tenebris
congemiscentes!--Tunc magis tragoedi audiendi, magis scilicet vocales in
sua propria calamitate; tunc histriones cognoscendi, solutiores multo
per ignem; tunc spectandus auriga, in flammea rota totus rubens, &c.'

"Show me a passage in Livy equal to that for sheer force and glittering
colour. The phrases are not all dove-tailed one into the other and
smoothed away; they stand out."

"Indeed they do. And whom do you speak of next?"

"I pass on to St Cyprian and Lactantius; to the latter I attribute the
beautiful poem of the Phoenix."

"What! Claudian's poem?"

"No, but one infinitely superior. After Lactantius comes St Ambrose, St
Jerome, and St Augustine. The second does not interest me, and my notice
of him is brief; but I make special studies of the first and last. It
was St Ambrose who introduced singing into the Catholic service. He took
the idea from the Arians. He saw the effect it had upon the vulgar mind,
and he resolved to combat the heresy with its own weapons. He composed a
vast number of hymns. Only four have come down to us, and they are as
perfect in form as in matter. You will scarcely find anywhere a false
quantity or a hiatus. The Ambrosian hymns remained the type of all the
hymnic poetry of succeeding centuries. Even Prudentius, great poet as he
was, was manifestly influenced in the choice of metre and the
composition of the strophe by the Deus Creator omnium....

"St Ambrose did more than any other writer of his time to establish
certain latent tendencies as characteristics of the Catholic spirit.
His pleading in favour of ascetic life and of virginity, that entirely
Christian virtue, was very influential. He lauds the virgin above the
wife, and, indeed, he goes so far as to tell parents