T WAS AS FOOLISH A MISTAKE to judge poetry of the fourth and following centuries by the rules of the Augustan age as it would be to try to tinker prose written in one language, to make it conform with the grammar of another. There are cases where these seventeenth-century Jesuits did not even know the rules of their own grammar books. In “Conditor alme siderum” they changed lines which are perfectly correct by quantity.
—Fr. Adrian Fortescue
According to Michael Davies:
On one occasion, Fr. Fortescue was engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with some fanatical Albanian soldiers at Hebron, and he and his companions had to fight their way with bludgeons to their horses and gallop away—in Adrian’s case with a broken collarbone. On a second occasion the caravan with which he was travelling in Asia Minor, disguised as an Arab, was attacked by brigands, and in self-defense he killed an assailant with a pistol shot.