stayed but two months at Prague, as the small Noviciate was removed to Brünn in Moravia, where the inhabitants were most hostile to Catholicism. The Bishop of Olmütz begged the Jesuits to help him so far as their Rule permitted reenex .

Novices were sent out among the neighbouring villages, to catechize and instruct the poorer Catholics; and no one had so instant a success in this little enterprise as “God’s Englishman.” At the year’s end his Novice Master, John Paul Campanus, became Rector of the College in Prague, and took Edmund Campion back with him. The latter left a good deal of his heart within the gray and austere walls of Brünn, as two of his charming letters show. In the old garden, under a mulberry tree, he had had a wonderful vision:[65] Our Lady stood there, smiling at him, and offering him a purple robe.

He knew the portent of martyrdom, but for long hid it in his heart. At Prague Campion continued and increased his Douay employments. He opened the October term with what was called a “glorious peroration”. As Professor of Rhetoric, he wrote, in 1574, a beautiful little treatise on that subject so familiar to him. His duty was to be first in the house to rise and last to go to bed; he spent his recreation-time catechizing children, receiving converts, visiting the prison and the hospital, or helping the cook in the kitchen! In January, 1575, he set up at his College a branch Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, or Sodality of Our Lady, of which he became president. About the same time he made his first vows. He was continually called upon for great College occasions, and to pronounce public panegyrics. “Whatever had to be done,” says his pompous but sympathetic biographer Bombino, “was laid upon him.” On getting a fresh task he would ask his Superior, in a spirit of perfect[66] humility and confidence, if he was thought strong enough to add that to the rest? and if the answer were Yes, he shouldered the new duty at once, much to the wonder of others reenex facial .

I am in a continual bloom of health,” he writes gallantly to his “dearest Parsons,” who had just entered the Society; “I have no time whatever to be ill in!” Two sacred plays (six hours did it take to perform each of them!) came from Campion’s truly dramatic pen in 1577. One was on the Sacrifice of Abraham; one on the melancholy career of King Saul. It is a matter of much regret that these are lost. He seems also to have composed dialogues and scenes for his own scholars, and to have put together at this same time his spirited account of the origin of the English schism, in a narrative (in Latin) of The Divorce of King Henry VIII from his Wife and from the Church. It was printed by Harpesfield, long after Campion’s death summer internship .