shelter from the sorrows of life; the ambitious, with blithed hopes and a broken spirit, the gay with the experience of the wise man that all under the sun was vanity; the forlorn, whom the world had abandoned, and left to drift upon the rocks; the disappointed, whose course of true love might not have run smooth; these, and a thousand other malignant influences, contributed their victims to those “populous solitudes;” persons having now no other desire than to pass the time of their sojourning here in piety, in privacy, and in peace. This is a class to which it is impossible to refuse our sympathy, and whom it would be ungenerous and unjust to confound with the swarm of lazy, sensual, unlettered drones among whom it was their unhappy lot to live, and whom the shock of the Reformation dispersed. Exemption from episcopal visitation, and consequently from any inspection whatever, was the beginning of the evil. This privilege of the monasteries proved their poison: it was a short-sighted policy of the pope to hide them from the eye of the secular clergy, whose jealousy would have acted as a wholesome stimulant to the detection and correction of abuses. But the seculars he systematically slighted, and his iniquity eventually found him out. Then, again, came upon them an evil spirit which led them to grasp at the possession of all the benefices in the country. This was another effort to depress the working clergy, which the pope encouraged, but which, like the former, was, in the end, most injurious to his own authority, by bringing the clergy into contempt, and opening the eyes of the people, to the covetousness of the monks. The system of _impropriations_, which began with William the Conqueror, grew so rapidly that, in the course of three centuries, more than a third part of the benefices in England became such,[109] and those the richest, for the whiter the cow the surer was it to go to the altar, and by the time of the Reformation, there was added another third.[110] An attempt was made by the legislature to stay the evil, and the statute of mortmain was passed in the reign of Edward I., whereby it was enacted, that “no person, religious or other, should presume to buy or sell, or under any colour of donation, lease, or other title, to receive any lands or tenements, or by any act of invention to appropriate them, under pain of forfeiture of them.”[111] But the statute was evaded by royal dispensations, and the mischief grew. Even the pope himself took alarm (_pavet ipse sacerdos_); and Alexander, at the end of the twelfth century, writes to the Bishop of Worcester to admit no man to a vicarage on presentation of the monks, till they had assigned him, on the instant, such a portion of income as would suffice for the episcopal dues, and for the competent maintenance of the minister;[112] but this decree they set at naught by not presenting at all, either serving the churches by stipendiary curates, or (which was the readier