Excerpt from A Roman Diary and Other Documents: Relating to the Papal Inquiry Into English Ordinations This volume can hardly be called a book. "Encore ne saurait-on composer jamais un livre," says a recent French writer with native or acquired sense of form, "en remaniant des correspondances." Still less can you make a book by merely amassing a diary, letters, and some fugitive pieces of fourteen years ago. That is all that I have done. Then let the result stand, not as a book, but as a collection. Why is the thing done ? It needs justification, and this is the apology. Fourteen years ago, I took part in a certain course of action which was misunderstood at the time, and which is persistently misrepresented even to-day. Full explanation was impossible, because others with whom I had been acting were tied to silence, and I could not fairly use my greater freedom. How long the obligation lay upon them I do not know precisely, but some of them have now begun to speak, without doing much to dispel misconceptions, and thus set me free to speak for my own part. This volume, then, contains my part of the record of what happened when the late Pope, Leo XIII, opened up to fresh investigation the old question of the English ordinations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.