I've been reading K. H. Digby's The Broad Stone of Honour over Christmas.  He was a convert to Catholicism in the early 19th Century.  He was highly educated and wrote three major works using a very deep level of knowledge in theology, history and literature.  I have found it both edifying and fascinating.  Here is a portion of an article on his life and works:

[/quote]The Broadstone of Honour, the first of Digby's longer works, derives its title from the ruined castle of Ehrenhreitstein, across the Rhine from Coblenz. As Mr. Holland indicates, this book was for Digby what The Essay on Development was for Newman and By What Authority for Robert Hugh Benson and, one might appropriately add, The Principles of Church Authority (that forgotten masterpiece of Anglo-Catholic controversy) for Archdeacon Robert Wilberforce; in each case the book immediately preceeded or followed the author's submission to the Holy See. The intention of Digby in The Broadstone was to demonstrate the greatness and display the beauty of the Catholic Church through the centuries. There was then, there is always, room for such a work. Since the so-called Reformation nothing had been left undone to vilify the Spouse of Christ, no slander had been thought too base or too absurd to heap upon her, no lie too foul with which to besmirch her. To The Dublin Review and to Studies Hilaire Belloc has recently contributed certain vital and scholarly articles, in which he shows how the original authorities and docuмents have been handled by a modern historian like Gibbon. It would be no difficult task for a trained Catholic historian to discover many similar suppressiones veri and suggestiones falsi in the work of most of the standard historians who have written from a non-Catholic or "impartial" standpoint during the last hundred years or so. Unfortunately for the cause of truth and justice the James Gairdners have been few and far between, and the wells have been pretty thoroughly poisoned.

The Broadstone is divided into four parts entitled respectively Godefridus, Tancredus, Morus and Onlandus. "The first two are so named after the heroes of the Crusades, the third after the Catholic martyr, Sir Thomas More. The main object of the book is to describe the heroic and chivalrous spirit, intimately bound up with the religious faith as it appeared in the Middle Ages. But in Morus and in part of Onlandus are stated those undeniable facts about the Protestant Revolution in England, and on the Continent, the public exhibition of which gave so much offence to the excellent rector of Hurstmonceaux. [Julius Hare, of Guesses at Truth fame, who later wrote to Digby: "Luther is the man to whom I feel that I myself, and that the whole world, owe more than to any man since St. Paul."] In one of his latest works, written when he was over seventy, Digby admits that in his youth he wrote things in religious controversy possibly too wounding to others, and expressed more strongly than he would have expressed them in old age. This is a very common reflection in old age concerning ardent and intolerant youth, which has the defects of its qualities. All the same, in England, in these days it is well to be definite and lucid in order to avoid misinterpretation. From his early youth till the end of his very long life Kenelm Digby never wavered for one moment in his definition of the Catholic Church. It is for him, that religious society existing throughout the world, of unbroken historic continuity, and consisting of people of all nations and languages, which is visibly, avowedly, and organically connected with the central Apostolic See at Rome, and it is nothing either more or less than this .... He never admitted the assertion made by some moderns that the Catholic Church consists of "all who profess and call themselves Christians," or the more exclusive assertion made by other moderns that it consists of an imagined combination of certain churches having properly descended episcopal institutions.

The Broadstone of Honour has not been without its influence upon subsequent English literature. Mr. Holland, as we have recorded, notes the indebtedness of Tennyson to it in his early poems. Ruskin also, whom Digby greatly admired, has paid tribute to this great book, assuring the reader of Modern Painters that he "will find every phase of nobleness illustrated in Kenelm Digby's Broadstone of Honour." It may be, too, that Ruskin modeled the titles of some of his own later opuscula upon those of Digby's lesser prose-writings, e.g., The Childrens Bower, The Lovers' Seat. And the author of Sesame and Lilies did not hesitate to acknowledge a further debt: "The best help I have ever had," he writes in Modern Painters "so far as help depended on the sympathy or praise of others in work which, year after year, it was necessary to pursue through the abuse of the brutal and the base-was given me when this author, from whom I had first learned to love nobleness, introduced frequent reference to my own writings in his Children's Bower." It is a pity that Ruskin did not learn yet more from these powerful and persuasive pages; that he did not go on to admire and embrace the marvelous coherence and unity of that dogmatic truth out of which Digby's highest inspirations proceeded; but many things are hidden from the prudent that are revealed unto babes, and Ruskin was never made wise unto salvation. Brought up in a rigidly Puritan atmosphere he never knew at first hand the daily lives of Catholic men and women. Perhaps it was because of this that he was capable of writing: "Modern Romanism is as different from thirteenth century Romanism as a prison from a prince's chamber."

It is to be feared that many of the absurd assumptions and statements made by those who sit in judgment on Catholicism, are attributable entirely to their crass ignorance of the real motives and beliefs of the Catholic. W. E. H. Lecky, for instance, has talked amazing nonsense about "the enormous difference" between the official Catholicism of the Council of Trent and of the writings of Bossuet and Newman and the "pure and manifest polytheism and idolatry [italics are ours] of the actual religion as it is practised in a great part of Europe with the direct sanction and under the special benediction of the highest authorities of the Church." Even so keen and so honorable a writer as Bishop Gore asseverates that a modern Roman Catholic will hardly find himself at home in St. Paul's epistles! It is inexplicable that Christian men of intelligence should write like this, and should fail to realize that the evidences of Christianity are all, when examined, equally evidences of Catholicism.

http://www.catholicauthors.com/digby.html

For a fine online or kindle version:  http://www.forgottenbooks.org/books/The_Broad_Stone_of_Honour_v1_1000201067