Today my degree certificate arrived with the post. I intend to have it framed. After the not infrequently hard time I have had over the last several years, I am pleased. I hope it will be a reminder to me of what can be achieved through hard work and the endurance of hardship.

It is something of a consolation that this life is so short. But heaven is eternal.

I am reading Dr Johnson's poem, "The Vanity of Human Wishes."

A solitary man was walking along the beach as the waves on his right crashed against the shore. He was lost in thought. To his left, on a level above him, some ramblers were walking along footpaths between a links golf-course and the beach. He was a couple of miles, by his own estimation, from the last village on the coast and he was not sure how far it was to the next one. He did not have a map, nor even a bottle of water.
He sat down on a conveniently situated rock, and gazed soulfully toward the horizon. His mind turned to thoughts of the past. Lines of Tennyson's came into his head:

"Break! break! break!
On thy cold gray stones, O sea,
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."

He spoke the words to himself, quietly. "Break! break! break!..."
I cannot break, he thought. I wish I could.
The man was quite young, though he did not feel young: on the contrary, he felt incredibly old. Whether by the time he actually grew to be an old man, he would feel young, or seem to grow even older within himself, or whether yet he would remain then even as he was now, it was impossible to say. Those who really know him, and there were few who did, knew that he was older, much older, in his soul, than a mere reckoning of years would give away. And those few were for the most part of a mind in some aspect like to his own: for only to such as these did he feel able to impart the very essence of himself, which was himself. He knew that he was not alone in the world, though he knew well what solitude was. He knew the wilderness: he knew the desert. He knew the darkest places of the human mind. He knew the silence of the soul; he knew stillness; he knew the deep sorrow. His own soul was of a depth unknown to those who had only a superficial knowledge of him; and these were the many. Not only wise beyond his years, there was something that lay hid within him, something for which he himself did not yet have a name.

James Hannam's book is extremely informative in some respects, but when he calls St Robert Bellarmine (neglecting to call him Saint) a "religious fundamentalist," I do tend to find I am driving somewhat up the wall.

The more you read of those expeditions - as of William's two years later - the more difficult you will find it to estimate what measure of support the invaders had. What may be called the legend - the sort of rodomontade you get in the clear, if obvious, rhetoric of Macaulay - may be left aside with contempt. It is not historical, and it is not intended to be historical; it is pamphleteering for a prepared audience; a flattery of ignorant complacency: written not to examine or to inform, but to sell. The picture of a whole England, ardently opposed to James, desiring nothing more than his dethronement, is as false as would be to-day a picture of an England ardently desiring prohibition. But there were elements present which made it worth while to risk the throw; and (as we know), with the aid of a group of very wealthy men, and of plenty of hypocrisy and foreign subvention, the second invasion, the Dutch invasion, succeeded.
I think the real reason we find it difficult to-day to estimate the forces of that society, is that we have a false way of thinking in terms of exact measurement; a habit we have borrowed from the more advanced physical science of our time, but not one applicable to political factors. We think in terms of majorities, and ask ourselves how many men were on one side and how many men on the other.
Now things did not stand like that at all in 1686, or in 1688, and they hardly ever so stand in any national crisis. The bulk of men will accept an event, unless it be quite outrageously opposed to their daily habits. Furhter, the bulk of men are moved by tradition and custom and nearly always incline, very vaguely, to a continuance of what they have known. And at the same time, paradoxically, all men have an appetite for something now and are more or less adventurous for a change. In the main issue of the Revolution of 1688, we can be pretty clear on two large majorities, not dividing men into groups, but dividing the mind of each man within himself.
There was a very large majority in general sympathetic with the Protestant culture which had gradually triumphed, since the pivot-date of the Gunpowder Plot. What proportion of this was ardent, and in what degree, no one can establish; but you may safely say that throughout England as a whole, there was, by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, not more than about one-seventh definitely Catholic in confession and open adherence, and hardly as manay again indifferent, or slightly sympathetic with that one-seventh. But, on the other hand, the number of people who believed that James II. was attempting the impossible task of upsetting what had become the national religion, cannot have been large. It is true that popular illusion is capable of anything - witness "the Russians in England" during the War. But I see no sign of that absurd accusation against James having taken place in the masses. The number who objected to his policy of toleration and to his proposal that Catholic should have the same rights as their fellow-subjects was large; but it certainly was not, and could not have been, an enthusiastic majority. On the other hand, the number who objected to the idea of their national king belonging to what was to them an alien religion, was certainly very large indeed: nearly three-quarters of England.
But then you get another cross category: the number who desired to see the Stuart dynasty extinguished was insignificant. Charles II. had been immensely popular and deservedly so, and James, the reigning king, represented legitimacy. Had not the two princesses remained to carry on the idea of the royal house - the symbol of it at least - I think one can safely say that the nation would have tolerated a change; as for those who desired the reign of William, who were attached to his character and who respected, let alone loved him as a leader, there were none. Monmouth, if he had the money, if the moment of his attack had come after the birth of the Prince of Wales, if he had intrigued at length and with skill to get the full support of the small wealthy group which was conspiring against the King, would have had a better chance of success than William.

Belloc, Hilaire, The Cruise of the "Nona", Constable & Co., Ltd., 1955, pp. 189-90 (first pub. 1925)

University in 1269

Studying at a university during the Middle Ages was not for the faint-hearted. The congregation of so many young men in a single town without parental authority was a recipe for trouble. Drunkenness, violence and prostitution were facts of life, with the students acting as both the victims and the instigators. The records show frequent complaints about riotous students from the put-upon townsfolk. In 1269, we hear that

a frequent and continual complaint has gone the rounds that there are in Paris some students and scholars...who under the pretence of leading the scholarly life, more often perpetrate unlawful and criminal acts relying on their weapons, by day and night, to atrociously wound or kill many persons, rape women, oppress virgins, break into inns, also repeatedly commit robberies and other enormities hateful to God.[2]

[2]Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 78

Hannam, James, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, Icon Books Ltd, 2009, p. 154.

I apologize for not regaling you with verbiage yesterday; the connection was Turned Off before I had expected.

For those of you following the old calendar, today is the Feast of the Visitation. Three years ago on this day I wrote a poem entitled "To the Mother of God," which I reproduce here:

TO THE MOTHER OF GOD

O Mary, deign to look on me with pity,
A weak and troubled sinner gone astray,
Help me to reach your Son's celestial city
Where His Light shines in endless tireless day.

Pray for me, Tower of Ivory,
Pray for me, House of Gold,
Pray for me, Cause of All Our Joy,
And lead me to joys untold.

I see you, Mary, with your Infant Son,
The God whom all my sins have crucified;
I shudder at the evil I have done,
And know that there is nowhere I can hide.

Pray to your Son for me, Morning Star,
Pray for me, Mystic Rose,
Pray for me, though I have wandered far
From the grace your Son bestows.

Mary, the child you carried in your womb
Is God, and came to expiate our crime;
Your Baby Boy, who overcame the tomb
Will come to judge me at the end of time.

Pray for me, Holy Mother of God,
O Virgin most renowned;
Help us to reach your Son's abode
And as His Saints be crowned.

(Monday,2nd July,2007.)