The book is "about Queen Elizabeth"; it is not a portrait; nor is it a "study." It is rather a series of vignettes, thumbnail sketches of a number of characters who figured on the English stage in the sixteenth century-and left it worse than they found it . . . The "Catholic Problem" as here presented is one which every Catholic who is proud of our Martyrs should read if he would grasp the nature of the mental trial they went through.
-from Blackfriars magazine, January 1930