The sequence of development is well worked out east of the Seine, and at the hands of the Franks of the “Royaume,” now under the direction of the Cistercians, as a century before the Normans had been controlled by the Cluniacs. This constant revivification of monasticism during crescent periods of human growth is a very interesting phenomenon. Apparently monasticism, which has accompanied Christianity from its earliest beginning until to-day, is an essential portion of its working structure, and if you accept Christianity in fact, you cannot escape accepting the “religious life” in principle. It seems, however, that it is always in unstable equilibrium, prone to inevitable decadence, and no order lasts out three generations without losing its beneficent energy. When life is on its periodic upward curve, a reformation always occurs at the critical moment, and there is no loss of impetus; so the original Benedictinism which had served Charlemagne so well, but had sunk into worse than inaction, gave place in the eleventh century to the great Cluniac reform, which in its turn was succeeded by the Cistercian reform, as this yielded after another hundred years to the reform of St. Dominic and St. Francis. Now the Romanesque art of Toulouse, Aquitaine, and Burgundy, the Norman of Normandy and England, the Rhenish of Germany, were largely Benedictine of the Cluniac mode, and the style rapidly became inordinately sumptuous, costly, and magnificent, as at Arles, Toulouse, Poitiers, Glastonbury, Durham. It has been said of monastic movements: “First generation pious, second generation learned, third generation decadent.” Certainly as the Benedictines in France went on to the twelfth century, their original austerity and fervour were relaxed, and their art became a thing of splendour as their wealth and learning and temporal power increased. The Cistercian movement of Robert of Molesme and Stephen Harding and Bernard of Clairvaux was a revolt against luxury and laxity, an attempt (as ever) to get back to the supposititious simplicity of earlier times, and in the success that followed architecture changed completely, though the ending of the new style, and even its consummation, were different indeed from what the Cistercian reforms had desired.