EDMUND CAMPION

A biography of Edmund Campion, the gentle scholar- who was forced by the bigotry and persecution of the Elizabethan age into a world of violence, which offers a reverential portrayal, assured scholarship. Teaching at Oxford, Campion there pursued the life of serene study he preferred, until, suspect of Papist leanings at a time when Catholicism was illegal, he was forced to declare his convictions and became a convert to Catholicism. Fugitive to Ireland, then to France, Campion again chose the harder course, renounced the world to enter the Society of Jesuits, their life of profound piety. Later sent to England to found the English Mission of the Roman Church, to give hope to the now desperate Catholics, Campion was soon arrested, imprisoned in the Tower, tortured on the rack, tried and executed, and in his inflexible constancy served as an inspiration...Biography in the classical tradition and in the pure prose associated with Waugh, this will have a devotional appeal as well as an intellectual interest, but is not for the wider market of his last.