justly conclude that learning and the polite arts found a home at Mellifont. For this latter branch, the beautiful buildings would, of themselves, suffice as an argument in favour of an advanced state of culture and refinement. It is worthy of note, that neither the Irish people, nor the representatives of the Government in this country, brought, much less substantiated, any direct charges against the Irish monks, prior to the suppression. Hence it is, that their maligners had to import, for use against them, the staple arguments commonly used in England, and there only by venal scribblers, and those who profited by the downfall of the monks. To such the learned and impartial Protestant historian, the Rev. Doctor Maitland, adverts, when after giving credit to the monks for their having been benefactors to mankind, he writes in his preface to the _Dark Ages_:--"In the meantime, let me thankfully believe that thousands of the persons at whom Robertson, and Jortin, and other such very miserable second-hand writers, have sneered, were men of enlarged minds, purified affections, and holy lives, that they were justly reverenced by men, and, above all, favourably accepted by God, and distinguished by the highest honours which He vouchsafes to those whom He has called into existence, that of being the channels of His love and mercy to their fellow-creatures." And in our own time, the _Guardian_, an English Protestant newspaper, when reviewing the Rev. Doctor Gasquet's, O.S.B., learned work, _Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries_, approvingly cites, amongst others, the following paragraph:--"The voices raised against the monks were those of Cromwell's agents, of the cliques of the new men and of his hireling scribes, who formed a crew of as truculent and as filthy libellers as ever disgraced a revolutionary cause. The later centuries have taken their tale in good faith, but time is showing that the monasteries, up to the day of their fall, had not forfeited the goodwill, the veneration, the affection of the English people." Mr. Lecky, too, with his usual candour and liberality, writes:--"Monastic institutions were the only refuges of a pacific civilisation; the only libraries, the only schools, the only centres of art, the only refuges for gentle and intellectual natures; the chief barriers against violence and rapine; the chief promoters of agriculture and of industry." (_The Political Value of History_, p. 14. London, 1892.)