ting his noble deeds and godlike walk and conversation while on Earth Till, at length, the very Pope and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear of it; and they, summing up as correctly as they well could, with Advocatus-Diaboli pleadings and their other forms of process, the general verdict of mankind, declared: That he had, in very fact, led a hero's life in this world; and being now gone, was gone as they conceived to God above, and reaping his reward there. Such, they said, was the best judgment they could form of the case-and truly not a bad judgment. Acquiesced in, zealously adopted, with full assent of 'private judgment, by all mortals.

The rest of St. Edmund's history, for the reader sees he has now become a Saint, is easily conceivable. Pious munificence provided him a loculus, a feretrum or shrine; built for him a wooden chapel, a stone temple, ever widening and growing by new pious gifts;-such the overflowing heart feels it a blessedness to solace itself by giving. St. Edmund's Shrine glitters now with diamond flowerages, with a plating of wrought gold. The wooden chapel, as we say, has become a stone temple. Stately masonries, long-drawn arches, cloisters, sounding aisles buttress it, begirdle it far and wide. Regimented companies of men, of whom our Jocelin is one, devote themselves, in every generation, to meditate here on man's Nobleness and Awfulness, and celebrate and shew forth the same, as they best can,-thinking they will do it better here, in presence of God the Maker, and of the so Awful and so Noble made by Him. In one word, St. Edmund's Body has raised a Monastery round it. To such length, in such manner, has the Spirit of the Time visibly taken body, and crystallised itself here. New gifts, houses, farms, katalla come ever in. King Knut, whom men call Canute, whom the Ocean-tide would not be forbidden to wet,-we heard already of this wise King, with his crown and gifts; but of many others, Kings, Queens, wise men, and noble loyal women, let Dryasdust and divine Silence be the record! Beodric's-Worth has become St. Edmund's Bury;-and lasts visible to this hour.

Goods, properties; what we now call chattels, and still more singularly cattle, says my erudite friend!

All this that thou now seest, and namest Bury Town, is properly the Funeral Monument of Saint or Landlord Edmund. The present respectable Mayor of Bury may be said, like a Fakeer (little as he thinks of it), to have his dwelling in the extensive, many-sculptured Tombstone of St. Edmund; in one of the brick niches thereof dwells the present respectable Mayor of Bury.

Certain times do crystallise themselves in a magnificent manner; and others, perhaps, are like to do it in rather a shabby one!—But Richard Arkwright too will have his Monument, a thousand years hence: all Lancashire and Yorkshire, and how many other shires and countries, with their machineries and industries, for his monument! A true pyramid or 'flame-mountain,' flaming with steam fires and useful labour over wide continents, usefully towards the Stars, to a certain height;-how much grander than your foolish Cheops Pyramids or Sakhara clay ones! Let us withal be hopeful, be content or patient.

CHAPTER IV.

ABBOT HUGO.

Ir is true, all things have two faces, a light one and a dark. It is true, in three centuries much imperfection accumulates ; many an Ideal, monastic or other, shooting forth into practice as it ean, grows to a strange enough Reality; and we have to ask with amazement, Is this your Ideal! For, alas, the Ideal always has to grow in the Real, and to seek out its bed and board there,' often in a very sorry way. No beautifullest Poet is a Bird-ofParadise, living on perfumes; sleeping in the æther with outspread wings. The Heroic, independent of bed and board, is found in Drury Lane Theatre only; to avoid disappointments, let us bear this in mind.

By the law of Nature, too, all manner of Ideals have their fatal limits and lot; their appointed periods of youth, of maturity or perfection, of decline, degradation, and final death and disappearance. There is nothing born but has to die. Ideal monasteries, once grown real, do seek bed and board in this world; do find it more and more successfully; do get at length too intent on finding it, exclusively intent on that. They are then like diseased corpulent bodies fallen idiotic, which merely eat and sleep; ready for dissolution,' by a Henry the Eighth or some other. Jocelin's St. Edmundsbury is still far from this last dreadful state but here too the reader will prepare himself to see an Ideal not sleeping in the æther like a bird-of-paradise, but roosting as the common woodfowl do, in an imperfect, uncomfortable, more or less contemptible manner!—

Abbot Hugo, as Jocelin, breaking at once into the heart of the business, apprises us, had in those days grown old, grown rather blind, and his eyes were somewhat darkened, aliquantulum cali

gaverunt oculi ejus. He dwelt apart very much, in his Thalamus or peculiar Chamber; got into the hands of flatterers, a set of mealy-mouthed persons who strove to make the passing hour easy for him,—for him easy, and for themselves profitable; accumulating in the distance mere mountains of confusion. Old Dominus Hugo sat inaccessible in this way, far in the interior, wrapt in his warm flannels and delusions; inaccessible to all voice of Fact; and bad grew ever worse with us. Not that our worthy old Dominus Abbas was inattentive to the divine offices, or to the maintenance of a devout spirit in us or in himself; but the Account-Books of the Convent fell into the frightfullest state, and Hugo's annual Budget grew yearly emptier, or filled with futile expectations, fatal deficit, wind and debts!

His one worldly care was to raise ready money; sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. And how he raised it: From usurious insatiable Jews; every fresh Jew sticking on him like a fresh horseleech, sucking his and our life out; crying continually, Give, give! Take one example instead of scores. Our Camera having fallen into ruin, William the Sacristan received charge to repair it; strict charge, but no money; Abbot Hugo would, and indeed could, give him no fraction of money. The Camera in ruins, and Hugo penniless and inaccessible, Willelmus Sacrista borrowed Forty Marcs (some Seven-and-twenty Pounds) of Benedict the Jew, and patched up our Camera again. But the means of repaying him? There were no means. Hardly could Sacrista, Cellerarius, or any public officer, get ends to meet, on the indispensablest scale, with their shrunk allowances: ready money had vanished.

Benedict's Twenty-seven pounds grew rapidly at compoundinterest; and at length, when it had amounted to a Hundred pounds, he, on a day of settlement, presents the account to Hugo himself. Hugo already owed him another hundred of his own; and so here it has become Two Hundred! Hugo, in a fine frenzy, threatens to depose the Sacristan, to do this and do that; but, in the mean while, How to quiet your insatiable Jew? Hugo, for this couple of hundreds, grants the Jew his bond for Four hundred, payable at the end of four years. At the end of four years there is, of course, still no money; and the Jew now gets a bond

for Eight hundred and eighty pounds, to be paid by instalments, Four-score pounds every year. Here was a way of doing busi

ness!

Neither yet is this insatiable Jew satisfied or settled with he had papers against us of 'small debts fourteen years old;' his modest claim amounts finally to 'Twelve hundred pounds besides interest;-and one hopes he never got satisfied in this world; one almost hopes he was one of those beleagured Jews who hanged themselves in York Castle shortly afterwards, and had his usances and quittances and horseleech papers summarily set fire to! For approximate justice will strive to accomplish itself; if not in one way, then in another. Jews, and also Christians and Heathens, who accumulate in this manner, though furnished with never so many parchments, do, at times, 'get their 'grinder-teeth successively pulled out of their head, each day a new grinder,' till they consent to disgorge again. A sad factworth reflecting on.

Jocelin, we see, is not without secularity: Our Dominus Abbas was intent enough on the divine offices; but then his AccountBooks--One of the things that strikes us most, throughout, in Jocelin's Chronicle, and indeed in Eadmer's Anselm, and other old monastic Books, written evidently by pious men, is this, That there is almost no mention whatever of personal religion' in them; that the whole gist of their thinking and speculation seems to be the privileges of our order,'' strict exaction of our dues,' 'God's honour (meaning the honour of our Saint), and so forth. Is not this singular? A body of men, set apart for perfecting and purifying their own souls, do not seem disturbed about that in any measure the Ideal' says nothing about its idea; says much about finding bed and board for itself! How is this?

Why, for one thing, bed and board are a matter very apt to come to speech it is much easier to speak of them than of ideas; and they are sometimes much more pressing with some! Nay, for another thing, may not this religious reticence, in these devout good souls, be perhaps a merit, and sign of health in them? Jocelin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of Methodism;' no Doubt, or even root of Doubt. Religion is not