o gave themselves with violence to a surfeit of
knowledge and a riot of action. He was a humanist of the type of the
fifteenth century, soldier, scholar, and man of pleasure, such as we
read of in Vespasiano's famous book. Everything he did was done in the
service of St. Epicurus, it was done to _darsi buon tempo_, as the
Tuscans used to say. But this was only the superficial direction taken
by his energy; if he was imperious in his pleasures, he was earnest in
his pursuit of learning; there was a singular harmony in the exercise of
the physical, intellectual, and emotional faculties at his disposal.
Julian Grenfell was a master of the body and of the mind, an unrivalled
boxer, a pertinacious hunter, skilled in swimming and polo, a splendid
shot, a swift runner, and an unwearying student. That an athlete so
accomplished should have had time left for intellectual endowments is
amazing, but his natural pugnacity led him to fight lexicons as he
fought the wild boar, and with as complete success.

The record of the brief and shining life of Julian Grenfell has been
told in an anonymous record of family life which is destined to
reverberate far beyond the discreet circle of friends to which it is
provisionally addressed. It is a document of extraordinary candour,
tact, and fidelity, and it is difficult to say whether humour or courage
is the quality which illuminates it most. It will be referred to by
future historians of our race as the most vivid record which has been
preserved of the red-blooded activity of a spirited patrician family at
the opening of the twentieth century. It is partly through his place at
the centre of this record that, as one of the most gifted of his elder
friends has said, the name of Julian Grenfell will be linked "with all
that is swift and chivalrous, lovely and courageous," but it is also
through his rare and careless verses.

Julian Grenfell, who was born to excel with an enviable ease, was not a
poet by determination. In a family where everything has been preserved,
no verses of his that are not the merest boyish exercises are known to
exist previous to the war. He was born in 1888, and he became a
professional soldier in India in 1911. He was on his way home from South
Africa when hostilities broke out, and he was already fighting in
Flanders in October 1914. After a very brilliant campaign, in the course
of which he won the D.S.O. and was twice mentioned in despatches, he was
shot in the he