Were they, indeed, spiritual needs, as he suggests by the title of his book A Spiritual AEneid, or aesthetic needs, the needs of a temperament?—­a temperament which used wit and raillery chiefly as a shield for its shrinking and quivering emotions, emotions which we must take note of if we are to understand his secession.

He was at Eton when a fire occurred in one of the houses, two boys perishing in the flames.  He tells us that this tragedy made an impression on him, for it fell at a time in his life when “one begins to fear death.”  Fear is a word which meets us even in the sprightly pages of A Spiritual AEneid, a volume perhaps more fitly to be termed “An AEsthetic Ramp.”

He loved to dash out of college through the chill mists of a November morning to worship with “the few righteous men” of the University in the Chapel of Pusey House, which “conveyed a feeling, to me most gratifying, of catacombs, oubliettes, Jesuitry, and all the atmosphere of mystery that had long fascinated me.”

He tells us how his nature “craved for human sympathy and support,” and speaks of the God whom he “worshipped, loved, and feared.”  He prayed for a sick friend with “both hands held above the level of my head for a quarter of an hour or more.”  He was a Universalist “recoiling from the idea of hell.”  He believed in omens, though he did not always take them, and was thoroughly superstitious.  “The name of Rome has always, for me, stood out from any printed page merely because its initial is that of my own name.”  “At the time of my ordination I took a private vow, which I always kept, never to preach without making some reference to Our Lady, by way of satisfaction for the neglect of other preachers.”  He was a youth when he took the vow of celibacy.  He had the desire, he tells us, to make himself thoroughly uncomfortable—­as Byron would say, “to merit Heaven by making earth a Hell.”  His superstitions were often ludicrous even to himself.  On one occasion in boyhood, he was trying to get a fire to burn:  “Let this be an omen,” he said.  “If I can get this fire to burn, the Oxford Movement was justified.”

A visit to Belgium hastened the inevitable decision of such a temperament: 

     . . . the extraordinary devotion of the people wherever we went,
     particularly at Bruges, struck home with a sense of immeasurable
     contrast to the churches of one’s own country. . . .

He did not apparently feel the moral contrast between Belgian and English character.

. . .  The tourist, I know, thinks of it as Bruges la Morte, but then the tourist does not get up for early Masses; he would find life then . . . he can at least go on Friday morning to the chapel of the Saint Sang and witness the continuous stream of people that flows by, hour after hour, to salute the relic and to make their devotions in its presence; he would find it hard