iSo Francis Thompson at Ncwbuildings [ l 9°7 



all that was beautiful in the world, the destruction of happiness, of the 

 happier races by the less happy, and so gradually to the despair of the 

 intellectual part of mankind with what life gave and the craving for a 

 life after death. I gave him something of my view and asked him 

 abruptly what his own view was. He said, ' Oh, about that I am 

 entirely orthodox ; indeed, it is my only consolation.' This led to a 

 question about his Catholic bringing up, and he told me that he was a 

 Catholic born, both his parents having been, however, converts, neither 

 of them Irish, he was without any Irish blood that he knew of. His 

 mother was from Lancashire, his father, I think he said, originally from 

 Rutland, but settled in Manchester. I asked him whether either par- 

 ent was alive and he said no, his mother had died before he left home. 

 It was a mistake to suppose that his father had treated him harshly. 

 The fault had been his own and a misunderstanding. He had thought 

 that his father insisted on his studying medicine ; this was a mistake, 

 it was his mother (meaning his stepmother) and her friends that de- 

 sired it. If he had spoken openly to his father telling him how repug- 

 nant the details of doctoring were to him he would not have insisted, 

 but as he did not speak, his father did not know and he acquiesced in 

 what was arranged for him. His repugnance was a physical one which 

 he could not overcome. The dissection of dead bodies he had partly 

 got over, but the sight of blood flowing he could never endure. I told 

 him how it was with me, and how I still could not look without 

 physical repulsion on a wound. I gathered from what he told me, 

 though he did not say it, that it was his stepmother rather than his 

 father who had been hard to him ; however, he blamed no one but him- 

 self. ' As a boy of seventeen,' he said, ' I was incredibly vain, it makes 

 me blush now to remember what I thought of myself. Neither my 

 father nor my mother had the least appreciation of literary things or 

 the least suspicion that I had any talent of that kind, but I was devoured 

 with literary ambition, all my medical studies were wasted because I 

 would not work, but ran off from my classes to the libraries to read. 

 If my father had known it he would not have forced me to go on. 

 Then I failed to pass the examinations and I behaved ill in every way 

 and took to drink and the rest. I was in every way an unsatisfactory 

 son.' I asked him whether he had not seen his father before he died 

 and he said, ' Oh yes, three months before, at Pantasaph, and he was 

 entirely kind.' 



" We talked next about the Franciscans and his stay of two years 

 with them. He was allowed at that time to go in and out among them, 

 but he said all had been changed now and they were kept to their strict 

 rule. Of his two special friends, Cuthbert and Angelo (the same who 

 had come to me for help to go to Rome), Angelo had broken away, not 

 only from the order, but from the church, and was now a clergyman of 



