The following letter, hitherto unpublished, was written by Father C. C. Martindale, S.J., to Edward Bullough, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and subsequently Professor of Italian in the University, on the eve of his reception into the Catholic Church in February 1923. Father Martindale was a contributor to the first number of BLACKFRIARS in 1920 and remained a faithful friend of the review until his death last year. He was closely associated with Professor Bullough in the establishment of Pax Romana, the international organization of Catholic university students. And in many other fields – liturgical, missionary, literary – he was a pioneer of prophetic understanding. A classical scholar of immense distinction, he brought all the resources of a fine intelligence to bear on an apostolate which, as the letter indicates, reached an astonshing range of people. No one seemed outside the orbit of his awareness and of his love.

In Edward Bullough he found a kindred spirit. Born of a Lancashire father and a German mother, educated in Dresden and Cambridge, he taught French, German, Russian and Italian at the University. His course of lectures on aesthetics was the first of its kind at Cambridge, and the scope of his interests was reflected by his election as an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and by his membership of the Royal Commission on the Universities. His wife was the daughter of Eleanora Duse; his son became a Dominican priest, his daughter a Dominican nun.