As a brilliant interpretative critic of Catholic writers, such as Crashaw, Patmore, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson and Belloc, he brought, I think I may venture to say, an altogether new touch into Catholic journalism in America, a striking and distinguished blend of “piety and mirth,” which had the rare and highly effective quality of being both engaging and highly illuminating even to, as Kilmer would amiably have said, the Pagan. Impetus, of course, was given to his style in this by his admiration for the brilliant school of English Catholic journalists, an impetus doubtless accelerated by the personal acquaintance with Belloc, the Chestertons and the Meynells he gained in a flying visit to England in 1914 to rescue his mother from war difficulties in London; when, during a few odd moments before his return, he established a lively connection with the Northcliffe papers and _T. P.’s Weekly_. Even so, Kilmer almost, or quite, alone transplanted this particular spark; and his note of witty common sense and spiritual sensibility was particularly Kilmerian, too. One day about four years ago the village Post Office at Mahwah did a totally unprecedented and most extraordinary business in outgoing mail, and Kilmer was again multiplied manifold. The neat circulars which he had printed and with which he stuffed the mail box announced that the author of “Trees,” a member of the staff of the _New York Times_, etc., etc., “offered the following lectures for the coming season.” The result may best be epitomised in the parable of the gentleman who cast his bread upon the waters to have it come back to him in the form of sardine sandwiches. The rapid development of Kilmer’s lecture business, which soon assumed the proportions of no mean career in itself, immensely extended his force as a quickening influence in the Catholic world. Before societies and educational institutions in many places, frequently travelling as far as Notre Dame, Indiana, and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, he flung his bright portraits of “seekers after that real but elusive thing called beauty, a thing which they found in their submission to her who is the mother of all learning, all culture, and all the arts, the Catholic Church.” V As a literary lecturer and a reader of his own poems before secular audiences his success was no less abundant. In “the only combination of its kind since Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley,” as the circular of the J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau stated it, “the young American Poet” and the author of “Pigs is Pigs” contributed considerably to the lightening of the rigours of existence by an extended repetition of “a joint evening of readings from their works.” Ellis Parker Butler, in a letter before me, writes of his partner on the programme: