66

verses in this island, on becoming the prior of his own abbey, " used to plunge himself up to the shoulders," says his historian, "into a well "very near the monastery, to cut short the power of his rebel body; "there he continued unshrinking for a whole night, minding neither the 'icy rigours of winter, nor the vapours exhaling from the marshes in "summer; and he never terminated the discipline till he had chanted his "Psalter throughout." So very similar was the conduct of both! But another of the monks practised the same severity, at the same time. "In another part of the town," adds the historian, "is what is called "Daniel's Well, because Daniel, who was afterwards made bishop when "Adhelm was, used to keep these heavenly watches in it by night †.” The severity of discipline in these was greater than in Neot; he sitting in the well by day with the water up to his knees, only, but they standing in it up to their shoulders by night. Either way, however, such a situation in the act of prayer seems amazing to the mind and astonishing to the spirit of an age like our own, peculiarly distinguished by its attention to bodily ease, and its repugnance to bodily rigours. But the high tone of devoutness in these hermitical or monastic men, considered severity to the body as a stimulus to the soul, as, therefore, an accompaniment serviceable to prayer, and as presenting the body with the soul, an agreeable oblation to GOD. Equally at Litchfield, as Leland/ informs us," is St. Chadde's well, a springe of pure water, wheere is "seene a stone in the bottome of it, on the whiche some saye St. Chadde "was wont naked to stand in the water and praye. At this stone Chad had his oratory, in the tyme of Wulpher kinge of the Merches," or Mercia. So plainly were the baths in monasteries, calculated merely for a monastic exercise of discipline! Nor let us smile at the supposed

Anglia Sacra, ii. 13: "Ut vim rebelli corpori conscinderet, fonti, qui proximus mo"nasterio, se humero tenus, immergebat;, ibi nec glacialem in hyeme rigorem, nec æstate "nebulas ex locis palustribus halantes, curans, noctes durabat inoffensus; finis duntaxat 66 percantati Psalterii terminum imponebat labori."

Ihid. ibid. "In aliâ parte urbis, Fons Danielis dicitur; quia in eo Daniel cœlestes noc"tibus ducebat excubias, qui cum Aldelmo pontificales accepit infulas." Daniel's and Adhelm's wells remained with their names respectively annexed, to the days of Leland (De Script. Brit. 92).

t

: Itin., iv. 117.

VOL. II.

SS

folly

folly of this practice, either from such indulgence to our bodily feelings, as shrinks before all austerities however requisite; or from such an ignorance of the views of religion, as knows not it is calculated for the recovery of a fallen being; or from such a poor, creeping philosophy as is too ignorant and too indulgent to wish for any recovery at all, hating, therefore, the very sun of Christianity over its head, and earthing from it in the very darkness of deism*. Such strong self-denials as these, indeed, could never be practised by the generality even of real Christians. They have been always reserved for the few who wished to work up their souls into a religious abstraction from the body, in order to mix more freely in an union of fraternal devoutness with the angels, and to enjoy more fully an union of filial affectionateness with GOD himself.

But, above all, a literary mind is strongly impelled to inquire, where was the LIBRARY of this incorporated society of scholars. Yet, on such an inquiry, perhaps, the credulity of protestantism will stare with an air of foolish wonder at the simplicity prompting it. Monks, indeed, had their ignorance and their illiterateness as well as our own clergy, and even as much as our most protestant ministers of the dissension havet. Yet

I here allude to a speech, which Deism may well maké to Christianity :

To thee I call

But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,

O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,

That bring to my remembrance from what state

I felt... ati eit dr's an

+ Leland's Coll iv. 60: Apud Franciscanos, at Oxford, sunt tela aranearum in "bibliothecâ; præterea, tinea et blatta: amplius, quicquid alii jactent, nihil, si spectes eruditos libros. Nam ego, invitis fratribus omnibus, curiose bibliothecae forulos omnes "excussi." This passage is as curious as it is unknown: but the pointedness of it is increased in his work De Script. Brit. 286: "Id temporis fui Oxonii," he there says, « ut "copiam peterem videndi bibliothecam Franciscanorum; ad quod obstupuerunt asini aliquot, rudentes mulli prorsus mortalium licere tam sanctos aditus et recessus adire, et mysteria ¿ videre, nisi gardiano, sic enim præsidem suum vocant, et sacris sui collegit baccalaureis. "Sed ego urgebam, et principis diplomate munitus, tantùm non coegi ut sacrária illa apérirent. "Tum unus ex majoribus asinis, multa subrudens, tandem fores ægrè reseravit. Summe paketipiter !

Yet we find them, not perhaps as generally learned as our own clergy are at present, and not even as the ministers of the dissension are; but still exhibiting some individuals as learned as any of either as much practised too in the arts of composition, and as ready to inform their cotemporaries by their publications, a BEDE, à MALMESBURY, and a PARIS. When such men could be formed in the bosom of a monastery, the monastic libraries must have been furnished with books, in quafifity and in quality almost equal to our own! The late historian of St. Alban's abbey, therefore, argues in the very face of fact, when he says, a desire to excel" in studiousness and in learning, “ could not

}

or

be cultivated with effect in the monasteries, because the continual "duty of the choir occupied their whole time, and allowed to vacant « hours for private study§." The existence of his own historian, PARIS, decisively proves the contrary. The great length, or the frequent recurrence of the church-services, indeed, hardly occupied more of their 10W Inf hours in a day than our morning walks, our morning rides, or our morning I the calls, our dinner-visits in the afternoon, our tea-drinkings in the evening, our clubs or our plays at night, occupy with ourselves at present. Yet my late unhappy opy friend Mr. Gibbon, who first solicited my acquaintance from my publication in 1771, by a letter amicably controverting some positions it';, with whom I afterwards spent many an hour, and e y an hour, and exchanged many a letter of literary friendliness, during an intercourse of four five years; by whom (let me assume the honour due to myself) the poor scepticism of his spirit was carefully kept a secret to me all the time, though I began to suspect it at last, from whom I even received the favour of perusing, at my own leisure, his History in manuscript, alvinos avidesomo) inuudro, ils then prosecuted into a part of the second volume, but industriously gutted of every thing very offensive; and to whom I remonstrated upon his sending me the first volume printed in 1776) so boldly and so keenly ais edıskandı ala b et vbi ai svorion Pems qeani ya il· "Jupiter: quid ego illic inveni Pulverem autem inveni, telas aranearum, tineas, blattas, "situm denique et squalorem. Inveni etiam et libros, sed quos tribus obolis libenter non emerem.-Roberti episcopi yolumina et exemplaria omnia, ingenti olim pretio comparata, by bishop Grostest himself, and left in his will to this library, fifurto ab ipsis Franciscanis, "huc illuc ex præscripto commigrantibus, sublata sunt. Yot this very society, let us remember, had previously produced Roger Bacon.

را

Newcome, 231.

-

in a couple of letters, on his impious effrontery against Christianity, as broke off our friendly intercourse for ever; he who laid out his splendour of talents peculiarly in the self-deceptive glitter of eloquence, thus overpowered the solar light of his own judgment, and caught himself as larks are caught in France and in England at times, by the dazzling reflection of a mirror*; who therefore, from principle, wandered away into popery at first, then from sensuality turned off into Mahometanism (I believe) afterwards, but at last retired into a Roman kind of frigidly philosophical heathenism, and settled finally (I fear) in the central darkness of atheism itself; who, in this fluctuation of intellect and conduct, began to write his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, so burst out like a comet upon the world of religion,

" 10 dorong piovilisom 261 to 95.91%9

worst of wars, one

that worst of pestilences, infidelity, with that against God himself; under all this wildly devious eccentricity of his spirit, and amid all the common or the parliamentary avocations of his mind, did he compose no less than six volumes, or nearly four thousand pages in quarto. And with the monastic avocations did a Paris, moving like the sun in a regular orbit, never glaring, always shining, with an attachment to truth, to principle, to utility, infinitely greater than Mr. Gibbon's, draw up his Latin histories of the kingdom and the abbey, in nearly twelve hundred pages folio. "Quantum ceteris ad suas res obeundas, quantum ad festos ludorum celebrandos, quantum ad alias voluptates et ad ipsam requiem animi et corporis, conceditur tem"porum; quantum alii tribuunt tempestivis conviviis, quantum denique

jo.

་

* "We travelled part of the way," says Mr. Swinburne, on his return from Spain, ii. 415, and in an excursion from Nismes to Arles, " in a rich plain, where a great number of "fowlers were stationed, turning small mirrors in order to dazzle the larks, and draw them "down within reach of their guns." Nor is the practice confined to France: Spenser alludes to it as English, in his Fairy Queen, vii. 6, 478

Like darred larke, not daring up to looke

On her whose sight before so much he sought.

And a glass made use of in catching larks is called "a daring-glass” (note to Church's edition, in 1757).

"aleæ,

"aleæ, quantum pilæ; tantum mihi egomet," might such a monk exclaim with Cicero," ad hæc studia recolenda sumpsi †."

68

Yet it is to be observed," cries the historian of St. Alban's again, that, among all the rooms and buildings belonging to the abbey, there was none called the library; the scarcity of books rendered this unnecessary." All, however, is inferred merely from one notice thus taken from the original historian; that abbot Symond, in the twelfth century, " provided a great number of very fair and reputable books, among others the Old and New Testament much embellished;" and "caused a place to be made for these books, called the almonry, oppo"site the tomb of Roger the hermit, somewhere within the body of "the church." But the inference is unjust in itself, and the observation is void of truth. That the inference is unjust, a similar account of a former abbot shews us; who " gave to this church twenty-eight “notable volumes, and eight psalters, a collectary, an epistolary, a book " containing the Gospel lessons for the whole year, and two texts," or complete volumes of the Scriptures," ornamented with gold and silver, "and gems; besides ordinals, consuetudinaries, missals, troparies, col"leetaria, and other books, which are kept in presses," within the church, for the immediate use of it;" and besides relics, philacteries, palls, copes, albs, and various other ornaments," equally kept in the

+ Oratio pro Archiâ, 13.

Newcome, 75. The words of the original are these, p. 1036: "non desiit libros "optimos, et volumina authentica et glossata, tam Novi quàm Veteris Testamenti (qui"bus non vidimus nobiliora);" not, as Mr. Newcome has vaguely rendered the words, "very fair and reputable books," but "the finest books ;" and not," among others, the Old "and New Testament much embellished," but, still referring books and volumes equally to the Bible, volumes authentic" in their readings, and "glossed" upon their margins, ◄ being the Old Testameni” in one volume, and the “New" in another, "than which I "never saw nobler" volumes; "scribere, et ad unguem irreprehensibiliter præparare; 66 quorum numerum, longum foret explicare." That the "libri" and the " volumina" refer to the same object, is plain from p. 1038; where the expression is simply this: “ librorum "optimorum copiam impretiabilem ad unguem præparavit." But, as the author proceeds in the first passage, qui cosdem libros videre desiderat, in almario picto," or, as in p. 1038, " in speciali almario—picturato," not, as Mr. Newcome speaks, " in a place-called « the Almonry,” a version egregiously absurd, but "in a painted press," or book-case, "quod est in ecclesia."

church,