The Henson Journals

[252]

Friday, August 29th, 1930.

The heat continues, 92° in the shade was registered yesterday. We are hotter than the continent. After breakfast, Archbishop Carter and his wife took their departure. They were pleasant guests, & we were sorry to see them go away.

Then I wrote to Mr Baldwin about Durham castle and to Mr Justice Roche about the possibility of getting Lord Londonderry elected as the Duke's successor in the Chancellorship of the University.

I was rather startled to discover that Miss Widmore's gift of "Collected Poems" had been unacknowledged. So I wrote perhaps more flatterously than I ought in order to atone for the neglect.

I received back the MS. of "The British Lazzoni" with a note from the Literary Editor of "The English Review" in which occurs the following:–

"In view of its possible re–publication, he notes that 'corruptio optimi pessima' [corruption of the best is the worst of all] does not actually occur in Tacitus."

How often I have assumed the contrary I am appalled to remember. The truth is that one ought never to quote anything for which one cannot give chapter and verse.

[253]

Ella's lawn tennis party was numerously attended, but it had hardly got under way before the sky became overcast, and the atmosphere stiflingly sultry. Soon a considerable thunder–storm began, and continued with pertinacity. Frequent flashes of lightning, almost unintermittent thunder, & much rain. So everybody perforce came indoors, & went over the house. I was much affected by the electrical state of the weather. I found the task of acting as guide very trying.

Brooke and Tosca arrived before dinner, bringing with them his sister Mary Westcott, who was born and baptized in Auckland Castle during her grandfather's episcopate, & who professed to have some recollections of the house which she had left when little more than two years old!

Four volumes of the new edition of "The Works of Sir Thomas Browne" edited in six volumes by Geoffrey Keynes arrived from Blackwell. The type is smaller than I like, and the appearance of the books is less attractive than I expected, but they will serve.

I wrote to the Literary Editor of 'The English Review" asking him to tell me who was the author of my Tacitan quotation.

[254]

Quousque patiere, bone Jesu?

Judaei semel, ego saepius crucifixi:

Illi in Asia, ago in Britannica, Gallia, Germanica;

Bone Jesu, miserere mei et Judaeorum.

Two MSS. add these lines to the first paragraph of Sir Thomas Browne's 'Religio Medici'. He has just said that Jews are worse than Turks and Infidels, yet that not even with respect to them will he 'forget the general charity he owes unto Humanity as rather to hate than pity' them. Then, as if his conscience smote him for this severity, he inserts the confession that, in the stark reality of the spirit, he himself is worse than the Jews.

He speaks of "the general scandal of my Profession" as making it probable that he had no religion. This 'scandal' had its root in the long history of conflict between the medical profession and the ecclesiastical authority. The physician's concern for the Body was inconsistent with the reigning asceticism of the Medieval Church, and his methods, as well the traditional as the experimental, were not easily reconcilable with orthodoxy.

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