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To come to a conclusion: he is manifestly below Horace because he borrows most of his greatest beauties from him; and Casaubon is so far from denying this that he has written a treatise purposely concerning it, wherein he shows a multitude of his translations from Horace, and his imitations of him, for the credit of his author, which he calls "Imitatio Horatiana."

Christianity, in a word, means the carrying out into daily practice of the ideal of the Imitatio Christi, the imitation of Jesus Christ, in the spirit if not in the letter. It means that as He was, so are we to be in the world. It means that all things, whatsoever we do, are to be done in His Spirit and to His glory: that our every thought is to be led captive under the obedience of Christ.

What a beautiful phrase that is to live one's own life! redolent of honest scorn for moral plagiarism. No Imitatio Christi in that ... I long to see more of men and cities.... I begin late, I know, to live my own life, bald as I am and grey-whiskered; but better late than never. Why should the educated girl have the monopoly of the game? And after all, the whiskers will dye....

The author of the Imitatio Christi discourages such vain and too curious inquiries as helped to rend the Church, and divided Christendom into hostile camps. The Quest of the actual Grail was a knightly form of theological research into the unsearchable; undertaken, often in a secular spirit of adventure, by sinful men. The poet's heart is rather with human things:

They are fairly familiar now with the story of the New Testament, and Jesus Christ stands before them as the supereminent object of bhakti; and I venture to say is generally regarded as such, although comparatively few as yet have adopted the bhakti attitude towards Him. The Imitatio Christi, however, is a well-known book to the spiritually minded among the educated classes.

Society he had never entered since Grey sailed for the Crimea. As in boyhood, so again now, he felt that Nature was the only true consoler, and for weeks at a time he tried to bury himself in the wilds of Scotland or Cumberland or Cornwall, spending his whole day in solitary walks, with Wordsworth or the Imitatio for a companion, and sleeping only from physical exhaustion.

'That's all very well, said Dick truculently, 'but I want to know what WE are going to do. Are we going to take it lying down? I sniffed. 'I suppose we had better, I said. 'And if we want a decent handbook of procedure I am told that the Imitatio Christi is excellent.

But fate was no kinder to him than to Otto; he outlived his boy patron only by a year. Modern life has travelled so far beyond medieval Christianity that it is only with an effort we retrace our steps to the intellectual position of a St. Bernard, a St. Francis, or the Imitatio Christi.

The tears rose from my heart in more than one place. The whole opera being one indivisible wonder, I cannot stop to point out any particular passage, combination, or effect. A pious ecclesiastic once underlined word for word the whole "Imitatio Christi;" in the same way I might underline your "Lohengrin" note for note.

This imitatio Christi to which every private Christian theoretically aspires, had been realised by a true prince upon an actual scaffold with a graceful dignity of demeanour, of which it may be said, that nothing in life became him like the leaving it. This moving situation Gauden, no mean stylist, set out in the best academical language of the period.