[4] Dryasdust puzzles and pokes for some biography of this Beodric; and repugns to consider him a mere East-Anglian Person of Condition, not in need of a biography,--whose [Old English: weoweth], _weorth_ or _worth_, that is to say, _Growth_, Increase, or as we should now name it, _Estate_, that same Hamlet and wood Mansion, now St. Edmund's Bury, originally was. For, adds our erudite Friend, the Saxon [Old English: weowethan], equivalent to the German _werden_, means to _grow_, to _become_; traces of which old vocable are still found in the North-country dialects; as, 'What is _word_ of him?' meaning, 'What is _become_ of him?' and the like. Nay we in modern English still say, 'Woe _worth_ the hour' (Woe _befall_ the hour), and speak of the '_Weird_ Sisters;' not to mention the innumerable other names of places still ending in _weorth_ or _worth_. And indeed, our common noun _worth_, in the sense of _value_, does not this mean simply, What a thing has _grown_ to, What a man has _grown_ to, How much he amounts to,--by the Threadneedle-street standard or another! [5] Lyttelton's _History of Henry II._ (2d edition), v. 169, &c. [6] Goods, properties; what we now call _chattels_, and still more singularly _cattle_, says my erudite friend! CHAPTER IV. ABBOT HUGO. It is true, all things have two faces, a light one and a dark. It is true, in three centuries much imperfection accumulates; many an Ideal, monastic or other, shooting forth into practice as it can, grows to a strange enough Reality; and we have to ask with amazement, Is this your Ideal! For, alas, the Ideal always has to grow in the Real, and to seek out its bed and board there, often in a very sorry way. No beautifulest Poet is a Bird-of-Paradise, living on perfumes; sleeping in the aether with outspread wings. The Heroic, _independent_ of bed and board, is found in Drury-Lane Theatre only; to avoid disappointments, let us bear this in mind. By the law of Nature, too, all manner of Ideals have their fatal limits and lot; their appointed periods, of youth, of maturity or perfection, of decline, degradation, and final death and disappearance. There is nothing born but has to die. Ideal monasteries, once grown real, do seek bed and board in this world; do find it more and more successfully; do get at length too intent on finding it, exclusively intent on that. They are then like diseased corpulent bodies fallen idiotic, which merely eat and sleep; _ready_ for 'dissolution,' by a Henry the Eighth or some other. Jocelin's St. Edmundsbury is still far from this last dreadful state: but here too the reader will prepare himself to see an Ideal not sleeping in the aether like a bird-of-paradise, but roosting as the common wood-fowl do, in an imperfect, uncomfortable, more or less contemptible manner!-- * * * * *