In March of 1964, two years before he was himself to die on Easter Sunday of 1966 (10 April), Evelyn Waugh wrote a moving review of two books touching upon the poet Rudyard Kipling, who had died in January of 1936, only six months before G.K. Chesterton himself, on 14 June 1936.
When treating of “the heart of Kipling’s character,” Waugh was also to speak about the difficulty of founding and protecting and sustaining a civilization. (Those familiar with Virgil’s great Latin Epic, The Aeneid, will also recall that theme and its special accent as it applied to the foundation of Rome.) Waugh also touched upon this recurrent matter of a precarious and threatened civilization in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, in his book Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson
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