Like many effeminate natures, he was glad of opportunities to prove
himself a good fellow. In spite of no heel-taps when the port went
round, he won the Hertford in 1907, the Ireland and Craven in 1908, and
in 1910 took a first in Greats.
He became a Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College for two years, then
its Chaplain for five years, and, after leading a life of extravagant
and fighting ritualism as an Anglican priest, at the end of that period,
1917, he retired from the Church of England and was received into the
Church of Rome.
The consolations of Anglo-Catholicism, then, were insufficient for the
spiritual needs of this scion of the Low Church.
What were those needs?
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.
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