"Doctor Brighton" (was not this affectionate sobriquet the invention of Thackeray?) did much for the restoration of my health and strength; and I was able to get to Oxford before the end of summer term, to spend a fortnight with kind Monsignor Kennard at his charming old house in St. Aldate's, where I had a room so close to Tom Tower that the "Great Bell of Tom" sounded as if it were tolling at my bedside![11] In his pretty chapel (of which the open roof was said to be a relic of Oseney Abbey), I had the happiness, on Trinity Sunday, of celebrating Mass for the first time for more than three months--a greatly-appreciated privilege. [1] "A brown Gregorian is so devotional.... Gregorians are obviously of a rich and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn is a violent magenta." [2] Dr. Selden Talcott, of the State Asylum, Middleton, New York; according to whom early rising is the most prolific cause of madness. "A peremptory command to get up, when one's sleep is as yet unfinished, is a command which grinds the soul, curdles the blood, swells the spleen, destroys all good intentions, and disturbs all day the mental activities, just as the tornado disturbs and levels with advancing ruin the forest of mighty pines.... The free and lazy savage gets up when he feels ready, and rarely or never becomes insane." Dr. Talcott quotes the percentage of lunacy among country people as compared with professional men. The latter, almost without exception, get up comparatively late, whereas our manual labourers all leave their beds long before they should. "The early morning hours, when everything is still, are peculiarly fitted for sleep; and it is a _gross violation of Nature's laws_ to tear human brains out of the sound rest they enjoy at this time." A weighty utterance, no doubt: still, it is but fair to point out that among monks, who perhaps, as a class, get up earlier than any men living, the number of those whose good intentions are destroyed and mental activities disturbed, and who finally become lunatics, is really not alarmingly large. [3] Dom Paulinus Gorwood, who had been a choirboy at Beverley Minster, and draughtsman in a great shipbuilding yard, and had studied religious art in the famous Beuron Benedictine school at Prague. He had industry as well as talent; and there were specimens of his handiwork in places as remote from one another as the Highland Catholic Church at Beauly, and the college chapel at St. Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate. [4] This printer's feat somehow reminds me of the statement in an Edinburgh paper that a certain eminent tenor, who had had a bad fall alighting from the train, was nevertheless "able to appear that evening at the concert in several pieces." But the funniest printer's slip which I remember in connection with trains was an announcement in a Hampshire newspaper that "The Express Engine was seriously indisposed, and confined to bed." The distinguished invalid was really the Empress Eugénie!