I celebrated the Whitsuntide solemnities in our own church of St. Anselm, much impressed by the virile and sonorous chant of the monastic choir. {249} I left Rome a few days later, travelling by night to Milan, where I said mass early in the duomo--more impressive than I had ever yet seen it in the dull morning light, with the vast spaces in deep shadow, and the great jewelled windows gleaming faintly through the murk. From Milan a long and fatiguing journey brought me to Maredsous, the famous Belgian abbey which I had seen only once since I had spent four months there as a young monk thirty years before. The vast pile of building, of dark slate-coloured stone in the severest Gothic, seemed to have altered little since 1883 (there is something singularly, almost appallingly, unchangeable about these great monasteries); but of course the trees about it had grown, and there were additions near by--one the interesting school of arts and crafts directed by the monks, where I saw excellent goldsmiths' and enamel work done by the pupils, as well as fine embroideries. Another new and striking feature was the nuns' abbey, a quarter of a mile away, with a large and beautiful church open to the public. I found here an English portress, with the English name of Sister Winifred; and the abbess, a sister of our good abbot-primate in Rome, spoke English well; but she persuaded me (after cake and wine) into giving a _conférence_ in French to her community, about our doings at Monte Cassino and Rome. It was interesting to pass straight, as I did, from a great modern abbey in being to the impressive remains of our cathedral priory at Canterbury, and to sleep in an Elizabethan bedroom constructed within the ancient guest-hall of the monks. My kind host, Canon Moore, devoted a day to showing {250} me the wonders of his cathedral; and a party of cathedral dignitaries (and their wives) were asked to meet me at dinner. I had some talk with a pleasant, though minor, canon,[3] who had been for a time in charge of our choir at Magdalen. From Canterbury I went on to Douai Abbey, to preside at their school prize-giving, and then to keep St. Philip's _festa_ with the London Oratorians, who had invited a Fort Augustus monk (Dom Maurus Caruana[4]) to preach this year the panegyric of their patron saint. I look back on these Oratory festivals as among the pleasantest of London summer days--the marble altars in the great church aglow with roses and lilies and orchids; music of the best from the unrivalled choir:[5] sometimes a really eloquent sermon, and luncheon afterwards, in company with all that was best in the Catholic society of the day, in the cool spacious refectory, hung round with portraits of Faber and Dalgairns and Knox and other eminent Oratorians. I sat on this occasion next a kindly _littérateur_ and critic--so kindly a one that even when he does attack you (as Russell Lowell put it)