“And with whom do you begin?”

“With Tertullian, of course.”

“And what do you think of him?”

“Tertullian, one of the most fascinating characters of ancient or modern times.  In my study of his writings I have worked out a psychological study of the man himself as revealed through them.  His realism, I might say materialism, is entirely foreign to my own nature, but I cannot help being attracted by that wild African spirit, so full of savage contradictions, so full of energy that it never knew repose:  in him you find all the imperialism of ancient times.  When you consider that he lived in a time when the church was struggling for utterance amid the horrors of persecution, his mad Christianity becomes singularly attractive; a passionate fear of beauty for reason of its temptations, a fear that turned to hatred, and forced him at last into the belief that Christ was an ugly man.”

“I know nothing of the monks of the eighth century and their poetry, but I do know something of Tertullian, and you mean to tell me that you admire his style—­those harsh chopped-up phrases and strained antitheses.”

“I should think I did.  Phrases set boldly one against the other; quaint, curious, and full of colour, the reader supplies with delight the connecting link, though the passion and the force of the description lives and reels along.  Listen: 

“’Quae tunc spectaculi latitudo! quid admirer? quid rideam? ubi gaudeam? ubi exultem, spectans tot ac tantos reges, qui in coelum recepti nuntiabantur, cum ipso Jove et ipsis suis testibus in imis tenebris congemiscentes!—­Tunc magis tragoedi audiendi, magis scilicet vocales in sua propria calamitate; tunc histriones cognoscendi, solutiores multo per ignem; tunc spectandus auriga, in flammea rota totus rubens, &c.’

“Show me a passage in Livy equal to that for sheer force and glittering colour.  The phrases are not all dove-tailed one into the other and smoothed away; they stand out.”

“Indeed they do.  And whom do you speak of next?”

“I pass on to St Cyprian and Lactantius; to the latter I attribute the beautiful poem of the Phoenix.”

“What!  Claudian’s poem?”

“No, but one infinitely superior.  After Lactantius comes St Ambrose, St Jerome, and St Augustine.  The second does not interest me, and my notice of him is brief; but I make special studies of the first and last.  It was St Ambrose who introduced singing into the Catholic service.  He took the idea from the Arians.  He saw the effect it had upon the vulgar mind, and he resolved to combat the heresy with its own weapons.  He composed a vast number of hymns.  Only four have come down to us, and they are as perfect in form as in matter.  You will scarcely find anywhere a false quantity or a hiatus.  The Ambrosian hymns remained the type of all the hymnic poetry of succeeding centuries.  Even Prudentius, great poet as he was, was manifestly influenced in the choice of metre and the composition of the strophe by the Deus Creator omnium....