aid that he had no further interest in the Bible!"

Hugh was very happy at Llandaff. He says that he began to read John
Inglesant again, and explored the surrounding country to see if he could
find a suitable place to set up a small community house, on the lines of
Nicholas Ferrar's Little Gidding. This idea was thenceforth much in his
mind. At this time his day-dream was that it should be not an ascetic
order, but rather devotional and mystical. It was, I expect, mainly an
aesthetic idea at present. The setting, the ceremonial, the order of the
whole was prominent, with the contemplation of spiritual beauty as the
central principle. The various strains which went to suggest such a
scheme are easy to unravel. Hugh says frankly that marriage and
domesticity always appeared to him inconceivable, but at the same time
he was sociable, and had the strong creative desire to forth and express
a definite conception of life. He had always the artistic impulse to
translate an idea into visible and tangible shape. He had, I think,
little real pastoral impulse at this, if indeed at any time, and his
view was individualistic. The community, in his mind, was to exist not,
I believe, for discipline or extension of thought, or even for
solidarity of action; it was rather to be a fortress of quiet for the
encouragement of similar individual impulses. He used to talk a good
deal about his plans for the community in these days--and it is
interesting to compare with this the fact that I had already written a
book, never published, about a literary community on the same sort of
lines, while to go a little further back, it may be remembered that at
one time my father and Westcott used to entertain themselves with
schemes for what they called a _Coenobium_, which was to be an
institution in which married priests with their families were to lead a
common life with common devotions.

But I used to be reminded, in hearing Hugh detail his plans, of the case
of a friend of ours, whom I will call Lestrange, who had at one time
entered a Benedictine monastery as a novice. Lestrange used to talk
about himself in an engaging way in the third person, and I remember him
saying that the reason why he left the monastery was "because Lestrange
found that he could only be an inmate of a monastery in which Lestrange
was also Abbot!" I did not feel that in Hugh's community there would be
much chance of the independent expression of the individualities of his