Monastical liqueurs are worthy of a paragraph to themselves. So long as monks have existed, they seem to have manifested a taste for the concoction of these drinks. We can scarcely pass the shop window of a liqueur-seller without having our attention attracted by what the French call a _Kyrielle_ or litany of flasks of diverse forms, decorated with tickets bearing such titles as the following:—_Liqueur des Chartreux_, _Liqueur des Benedictins_, _Liqueur des Carmes_, _Liqueur des Trappistes_, _Liqueur des Pères de Garaison_, _Liqueur du P. Kermann_, and so on. A large volume might well be composed on these liqueurs alone. About their supposed virtues,—aperient, digestive, antiapoplectic, antispasmodic, anticholeric, tonic, etc., that book might be well supposed likely to stretch out as far as the list of Banquo’s issue to the diseased imagination of Macbeth. The search for the philosopher’s stone and the powder of projection was by no means wholly fruitless. It strengthened the hands of chemistry. It was also the cradle of liqueurs. In the early part of the middle ages the learned inhabitants of the convents devoted their leisure time, of which they appear to have had no lack, to the so-called _magnum opus_. The _magnum opus_, the quintessence, the elixir of long life, were three different denominations of one and the same thing. Monkish intellectual toil was chiefly connected at that time with the study of essences, spirits, alcohols, and distillations. The plants which they sought with the greatest eagerness were rosemary, arnica, elder, camomile, sweet trefoil, rose, borage, balm mint, snake weed, iris, etc.