All safeguards against a petrifying routine were now broken down. We are wont to-day to look with disquiet upon the life of a clerk in an office, endlessly adding up rows of figures, with an interval for luncheon; but the clerk has his evenings, his Sundays, his annual holiday, his life as son, or husband, or father. For the medieval monk there was no such relaxation. When the salutary labour of hand and brain ordained by St Benedict no longer found a place in his life, he was delivered over bound to an endless routine of dorter, church, frater and cloister, which stretched from day to night and from night to day again. For nuns the monotony was even greater, for they had lost more completely than monks their early tradition of learning and they could not pass happy years in study at a university (as a few monks from great abbeys were able to do), nor find some solace in exercising the functions of a priest; moreover women were more apt even than men to enter the religious life without any real vocation for it, since there was hardly any other career for unmarried ladies of gentle birth. It would be an exaggeration to say that this uneventful life was necessarily distasteful. To the majority it was doubtless a happy existence; monotony appears peace to those who love it. No cruel guard of diligent cares, that keep Crown'd woes awake, as things too wise for sleep: But reverent discipline and religious fear, And soft obedience, find sweet biding here; Silence and sacred rest; peace and pure joys; Kind loves keep house, lie close and make no noise. Here behind the walls of the convent "a common grayness silvered everything" and all care was remote, save that, never to be escaped by womankind, of making two ends meet. Nevertheless the danger was there. Only a minority, one may be sure, revolted actively against the duties which are sometimes, most significantly, called "the burthen of religion"[913]. That minority is known to us, for the sinner and the apostate, whether inspired by lust or by levity, mere victims to their own weakness, or active rebels against an intolerable dulness, have left their mark in official documents. But the number can only be guessed at of those others, who carried in their hearts for all their staid lives the complaint of the Latin song: Sono tintinnabulum Repeto psalterium, Gratum linquo somnium Cum dormire cuperem, Heu misella! Nichil est deterius tali vita Cum enim sim petulans et lasciva[914]. The bell I am ringing, The psalter am singing, And from my bed creeping Who fain would be sleeping, Misery me! O what can be worse than this life that I dree, When naughty and lovelorn and wanton I be? "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room" is a charming justification of the sonnet, but it is neither good psychology nor good history.