World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, Turkish
But the main interest centres in the character of Redmond himself. Mr.
Gwynn does not work to display his leader as a hero without faults and
incapable of mistakes. He shows the man as he knew him and worked under
him, traces his career through its triumphs to reverses, and through
gallant recovery to final defeat. A great man is made familiar to the
reader, in his wisdom, his magnanimity, and his love of country. The
tragic waste of great opportunities is portrayed in a story which has
the quality of drama in it. Beside the picture of John Redmond himself
there is sketched the gallant and sympathetic figure of his brother,
who, after thirty-five years of parliamentary service, died with the
foremost wave of his battalion at the battle of Messines.
A MEDLEY OF MEMORIES.
By the Rt. Rev. Sir DAVID HUNTER BLAIR, Bart.
_With Illustrations. 1 vol. Demy 8vo._ =16s. net.=
Sir David Hunter Blair, late Abbot of Fort Augustus, in the first part
of these fifty years' recollections, deals with his childhood and youth
in Scotland, and gives a picture full of varied interest of Scottish
country house life a generation or more ago. Very vivid, too, is the
account of early days at what was then the most famous private school in
England; and the chapter on Eton under Balston and Hornby gives
thumbnail sketches of a great many Etonians, school-contemporaries of
the writer's, and bearing names afterwards very well known for one
reason or another. Eton was followed by Magdalen; and undergraduate life
in the Oxford of 1872 is depicted with a light hand and many amusing
touches. There was foreign travel after the Oxford days; and two of the
most pleasantly descriptive chapters of the book deal with Rome in the
reign of Pius IX. and Leo XIII., both of which Pontiffs the author
served as Private Chamberlain. There is much also that is fresh and
interesting in the section treating of the lives and personalities of
some of the great English Catholic families of by-gone days.
Sir David entered the Benedictine Order at the age of twenty-five; and
the latter half of the book is concerned with his life as co-founder,
and member of the community of, the great Highland Abbey of Fort
Augustus, of which he rose later to be the second abbot. The intimate
account given in these pages of the life of a modern monk will be new to
most readers, who will find it very interesting reading. The writer's
monastic experiences embrace not only his own beautiful home in the
Central Highlands, but Benedictine life and work in England, in Belgium,
Germany and Portugal, and in South America. One of the most novel and
attractive chapters in the book is that dealing with the work of the
Order in the vast territory of Brazil.
The volume is illustrated with an excellent portrait, and with some
clever black-and-white drawings, the work of Mr. Richard Anson, one of
the author's religious brethren, and a member of the Benedictine
community at Caldey Abbey, in South Wales.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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