The popular disrepute into which the monastics had fallen through their increased wealth, and their departure from primitive monastical austerity, led, during the next two centuries, viz., from the beginning of the tenth to the end of the eleventh, to a series of endeavours to revive the primitive discipline. The history of all these attempts is very nearly alike. Some young monk of enthusiastic disposition, disgusted with the laxity or the vices of his brother monks, flies from the monastery, and betakes himself to an eremitical life in a neighbouring forest or wild mountain valley. Gradually a few men of like earnestness assemble round him. He is at length induced to permit himself to be placed at their head as their abbot, requires his followers to observe strictly the ancient rule, and gives them a few other directions of still stricter life. The new community gradually becomes famous for its virtues; the Pope's sanction is obtained for it; its followers assume a distinctive dress and name; and take their place as a new religious order. This is in brief the history of the successive rise of the Clugniacs, the Carthusians, the Cistercians, and the orders of Camaldoli and Vallombrosa and Grandmont; they all sprang thus out of the Benedictine order, retaining the rule of Benedict as the groundwork of their several systems. Their departures from the Benedictine rule were comparatively few and trifling, and need not be enumerated in such a sketch as this: they were in fact only reformed Benedictines, and in a general classification may be included with the parent order, to which these rivals imparted new tone and vigour. The following account of the foundation of Clairvaux by St. Bernard will illustrate these general remarks. It is true that the founding of Clairvaux was not technically the founding of a new order, for it had been founded fifteen years before in Citeaux; but St. Bernard was rightly esteemed a second founder of the Cistercians, and his going forth from the parent house to found the new establishment at Clairvaux was under circumstances which make the narrative an excellent illustration of the subject.