The Henson Journals

[140]

Saturday, January 26th, 1924.

Wordsworth & Coleridge had found inspiration in the large faiths and regenerating principles which called into being the French revolution; Byron and Shelley on the other hand, produced their most characteristic works in the days of the reactionary Holy Alliance. And in the space between the era of faith and the era of reaction loomed the colossal form of Napoleon astride a blood–stained Europe.

Cambridge. History of Eng: Lit: XII. 39

I motored into Durham, and presided at a meeting of the Committee of Governors of the N.E. Counties School. We had lunch in the Common Room, and then I called on the Bishop of Jarrow. Afterwards I returned to the Castle, & walked in the Park with the dogs.

The "Times" publishes under the heading "Bishops on the Malines Conversations" the opinions of the Bishops of Lichfield & Durham. The one bishop has expressed his mind in his diocesan magazine: the other has made a speech at Stockton. The first holds that it is "quite grotesquely untrue" to represent the English delegation at Malines as men "who regard the Reformation as a complete mistake"; the last says that these distinguished men held opinions which "could not possibly be reconciled with the teaching" of the great Anglican divines of the 16th & 17th centuries.

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