nly to bring him to
life. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the
feast."

"You can scarcely be called a skeleton," said Dr. Eames smiling.

"That comes of being so much at the feast," answered the massive
youth. "No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out.
But that is not quite what I meant: what I mean is that I caught a
kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that--the skull and
the crossbones, the _Memento Mori_. It isn't only meant to remind us
of a future life, but to remind us of a present life too. With our
weak spirits we should grow old in Eternity if we were not kept young
by death. Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as
nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers."

_Manalive_ appeared in 1911. Next year came what is perhaps his
best-known single piece of writing, the _Battle of Lepanto_. In the
spring of 1912 he had taken part in a debate at Leeds, affirming that
all wars were religious wars. Father O'Connor supported him with a
magnificent description of the battle of Lepanto. Obviously it seized
Gilbert's mind powerfully, for while he was still staying with Father
O'Connor, he had begun to jot down lines and by October of that year
the poem was published. One might fill a book with the tributes it
has received from that day to this. Perhaps none pleased him more
than a note from John Buchan (June 21, 1915): "The other day in the
trenches we shouted your Lepanto."

_The Victorian Age in Literature_ made many of his admirers again
express the wish that he would stay in the field of pure literature.
His characterisations of some of the Victorian writers were sheer
delight.

Ruskin had a strong right hand that wrote of the great mediaeval
Minsters in tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as their own;
and also, so to speak, a weak and feverish left hand that was always
fidgeting and trying to take the pen away--and write an evangelical
tract about the immorality of foreigners . . . it is not quite unfair
to say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral
except the altar.

Tennyson was a provincial Virgil . . . he tried to have the
universal balance of all the ideas at which the great Roman had
aimed: but he hadn't got hold of all the ideas to balance. Hence his
work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. It was a balance
of whims; like the Brit