The Crusades, notwithstanding, had the unquestionable advantage of sifting the clergy, and of removing from the cloisters a large number of clerks who were less fitted for study and seclusion than for the hardships of the battle-field. The monks who remained in Europe shut up in their cloisters were nearly all acting in obedience to some special aptitude, and they formed that band of artists, architects, painters, sculptors, and musicians, calligraphists, savants, translators, philosophers, rhetoricians, and preachers, which shed so much lustre upon the monasteries during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By their direct action, as well as by their example, ecclesiastical architecture made vast progress, and the wonderful wealth of decoration which accompanied it, suddenly burst forth in the erection of those holy-chapels which seem like shrines of chiselled stone, in which the relics brought back from the Crusades were deposited (Fig. 252). It was under these influences that most of the great abbeys (Fig. 253) were restored, that painting upon glass attained its full perfection, that the Roman tongue reached the solitude of the cloister, and the beautiful literature of the ancient classics, which had for centuries been relegated to the dust of the monastic libraries, once more saw the light, and lent the aid of all its charms to combat the invasion of the vulgar idiom which the inhabitants of the communes had everywhere substituted for the Latin language. [Illustration: Fig. 252.--Reliquary of the Holy Thorn, preserved in the Convent of the Augustine Sisters at Arras.--Carved brasswork of the Thirteenth Century.] [Illustration: Fig. 253.--Refectory in the Priory of St. Martin des Champs, Paris (now part of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers), the work of Pierre de Montereau, architect to St. Louis (Thirteenth Century).--Archæological Restoration by M. Alfred Lenoir.] [Illustration: Fig. 254.--St. Bernard taking possession, with the Cistercian Monks, of the Abbey of Clairvaux. At the foot of the engraving is inscribed: “St. Bernard, Chaplain of the Virgin Mary, was descended from the house of the Kings of Burgundy.” He was, as a matter of fact, related through his mother, Aleth (diminutive for Elizabeth), to the first house of the Dukes of Burgundy.--“Chroniques abrégées de Bourgogne,” a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Library of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot.] [Illustration: Fig. 255.--The Great Beguin Convent at Ghent, called the Convent of St. Elizabeth, founded in the Twelfth Century, and which now occupies the same site as in 1234, when the Countess Jane gave a code of rules to the community.--General View taken from the “Ghent Churches,” by Baron Kervyn de Volkaersbeke, reproducing the Engraving of P. J. Goetghebuer.]