that enemies were already in the town, and that the enormous oaken doors were groaning under their hammers.  Then I seemed to suppose that the town itself had been destroyed by fire, and effaced, as it may be thousands of years hence, and that if I opened the door I should come out on a wilderness as flat and sterile as the sea.  Then the vision behind the veil of stone and slate grew wilder with earthquakes.  I seemed to see chasms cloven to the foundations of all things, and letting up an infernal dawn.  Huge things happily hidden from us had climbed out of the abyss, and were striding about taller than the clouds.  And when the darkness crept from the sapphires of Mary to the sanguine garments of St. John I fancied that some hideous giant was walking round the church and looking in at each window in turn.

Sometimes, again, I thought of that church with coloured windows as a ship carrying many lanterns struggling in a high sea at night.  Sometimes I thought of it as a great coloured lantern itself, hung on an iron chain out of heaven and tossed and swung to and fro by strong wings, the wings of the princes of the air.  But I never thought of it or the young men inside it save as something precious and in peril, or of the things outside but as something barbaric and enormous.

I know there are some who cannot sympathise with such sentiments of limitation; I know there are some who would feel no touch of the heroic tenderness if some day a young man, with red hair, large ears, and his mother’s lozenges in his pocket, were found dead in uniform in the passes of the Vosges.  But on this subject I have heard many philosophies and thought a good deal for myself; and the conclusion I have come to is Sacrarterumbrrar pour la Pattie, and it is not likely that I shall alter it now.

But when I came out of the church there were none of these things, but only a lot of Shops, including a paper-shop, on which the posters announced that the negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily.

THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS

It is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led by some special sort of lunatic.  A mild touch of madness may even keep a man sane; for it may keep him modest.  So some exaggerations in the State may remind it of its own normal.  But it is bad when the head is cracked; when the roof of the commonwealth has a tile loose.

The two or three cases of this that occur in history have always been gibbeted gigantically.  Thus Nero has become a black proverb, not merely because he was an oppressor, but because he was also an aesthete—­that is, an erotomaniac.  He not only tortured other people’s bodies; he tortured his own soul into the same red revolting shapes.  Though he came quite early in Roman Imperial history and was followed by many austere and noble emperors, yet for us the Roman Empire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman.  The populace or barbarians from whom we come could not forget the hour when they came to the highest place of the earth, saw the huge pedestal of the earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar, and looked up and saw a statue without a head.