If, indeed, the Reformation was to be carried at all, it was necessary, for the prevention of civil war, that it should be thorough. Therefore the young generation must be made to believe that a return of the old things was absolutely impossible; that the old religion could never, under any circumstances, be revived. When Queen Mary ascended the throne, the work was only half done; the Protestant faith had not yet taken root; yet when she died, five years later, no lamentations were made over the second departure of the priests. It is a commonplace that the flames of Smithfield, more than the preaching of Latimer, reconciled the people to the loss of the old religion. I do not think that the commonplace is more than half true, because the flames were again kindled, and more than once, in the reign of Elizabeth without any murmur from the people. Henceforth the old religion was dead indeed, and impossible to be revived. When Shakespeare came up to London, he found many who could remember the monks--gray, white, and black; the Franciscan--innocent of the old simplicity; the rich and stately Benedictine; the austere Dominican; the pardoner and the limitour; the mass, and the holy days of the Church; but we find in Shakespeare's writings no trace of any regret for their disappearance, or of any desire for their return. The past was gone; even the poetic side of a highly poetic time was not touched, or hardly touched, by the sadness and pathos of this great fall; the dramatists and poets have made nothing out of it. [Illustration: THE VIEW OF LONDON BRIDGE FROM EAST TO WEST] The people lived among the ruins but regarded them not, any more than the vigorous growth within the court of a roofless Norman castle regards the donjon and the walls. They did not inquire into the history of the ruins; they did not want to preserve them; they took away the stones and sold them for new buildings. It was very remarkable and very fitting that on the site of the Grey Friars' House should be erected a great school. The teaching of the new thought was established in the place where those dwelt who had been the most stalwart defenders of the old. It was also very remarkable and very fitting that within the walls of Black Friars' Abbey, the home of austerity and authority, should rise a play-house for the dramas of free thought and human passion. It was further remarkable and very fitting that the house of the Carthusian monks, those who had fled from the work, and war, and temptations of the world, those who, while yet living, were already dead, should be converted into a home for those who were broken down and spent with that very work and war, a place where they could meditate in their old age over the storm and struggle of the past.