I believe that our Oxford pageant (in spite of the wet summer) proved financially successful, if not altogether so artistically. A few of the scenes were very pretty, especially the earliest (St. Frideswide), and also the one representing Charles I. and his family at Oxford. And the ecclesiastical and monastic episodes were instructive, if only as showing the incompetence of twentieth-century Anglicanism to reproduce even the externals--much more the spirit--of the Catholicism of old England. Even more deplorable was the "comic" scene (written by the Chichele professor of modern history!) in which the _clarum et venerabile nomen_ of one of Oxford's saintliest sons was dragged in the mud: Roger Racon being depicted as a mountebank cheap-jack, hawking quack medicines from a {91} motor-bicycle![15] My brother, who had entertained me at Warwick, came as my guest to witness the Oxford effort; and we had the rather interesting experience of viewing it in the company of Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain. They were both pleased and interested; but it was impossible to deny that the poetic glamour of the Warwick pageant (largely due to the romantic beauty of its setting) was almost wholly wanting at Oxford. Of the other pageants which were sprouting up all over the country during this summer (unhappily one of the wettest on record), I attended only one--that held at Bury St. Edmunds, which attracted me as being mainly concerned with Benedictines. The setting was almost as fine as at Warwick--verdant lawns, big trees and the majestic ruins of our famous abbey all "in the picture"; and the "monks," mostly represented by blameless curates, were at least presentable, not unkempt ragamuffins as at Oxford.[16] The appearance of "Abbot Sampson" (played, I was told, by a local archdeacon) was grotesque enough: he wore throughout a purple chasuble over a black cassock, with a white mitre, and strode about brandishing a great wooden crosier! but he spoke his lines very well. Everything, however, was spoilt by the pitiless rain, which {92} fell unceasingly. A clever black-haired lady who played Boadicea (I believe the wife of an Ipswich dentist) had to abandon her chariot and horses and appear on foot, splashing through several inches of mud; and some of the "early British" matrons and maidens sported umbrellas and mackintoshes! I had to leave half-way through the performance, chilled to the bone, and firmly convinced that open-air drama in England was a snare and a delusion.