The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (3.1894)

102

Apple Blossom in Brittany

III
When he was in London—and it was in London that lor nine
months out of the tweive Benedict Campion was to be found—he
lived in the Tempie, at the top of Hare Court, in the very same
rooms in which he had installed himself, years ago, when he gave
up his Oxford fellowship, electing to follow the profession of
letters. Returning there from Ploumariel, he resumed at once,
easily, his old avocations. He had always been a secluded man,
living chiefly in books and in the past ; but this year he seemed
less than ever inclined to knock at the hospitable doors which were
open to him. For in spite of his reserve, his difhdence, Campion's
success might have been social, had he cared for it, and not purely
academic. His had come to be a name in letters, in the higher
paths of criticism ; and he had made no enemies. To his success
indeed, gradual and quiet as this was, he had never grown quite
accustomed, contrasting the little he had actually achieved with all
that he had desired to do. His original work was of the slightest,
and a book that was in his head he had never found time to write.
His name was known in other ways, as a man of ripe knowledge,
of impeccable taste ; as a born editor of choice reprints, of
inaccessible classics : above all, as an authority—the greatest, upon
the literature and the life (its flavour at once courtly, and
mystical, had to him an unique charm) of the seventeenth century.
His heart was in that age, and from much lingering over it, he
had come to view modern life with a curious detachment, a sense
of remote hostility : Democracy, the Salvation Army, the novels of
M. Zola—he disliked them all impartially. A Catholic by long
inheritance, he held his religion for something more than an
heirloom ;