pleasurable; and who had found that there was but small satisfaction in the enjoyment “of that fugitive and cloistered virtue, that shrunk from the race when the prize was to be won not without dust and heat.”[250] Amidst the strife of tongues, which those tempestuous times called forth, it is almost hopeless to come at the exact truth. On the one hand, the visiters are charged with inordinate rapacity, with private embezzlement of the vast property lying at their mercy, and even with abusing the opportunities which their commission gave them, and corrupting the nuns. They, on the other hand, retaliated by presenting to the eyes of the people a most revolting picture of the interior of these whited sepulchres (for such they were described to be) fair on the outside, but within full of dead men’s bones, and all uncleanness, of spurious relics and sensual sins, and the foulness of the picture helped to relieve the King from the odium of destroying it. Yet, bad as the monasteries were reported to be, and bad in many instances they probably were, (for the system was in some respects radically pernicious,) the event proved that they had their redeeming qualities too; and as we know not, says the proverb, what the well is worth till it is dry, so was it found after the dissolution, that, with all their faults, the monasteries had been the refuge for the destitute who were now driven to frightful extremities throughout the country, the effect of the suppression being with respect to them the same as would now follow from the sudden abolition of the poor laws; they had been the alms-houses, where the aged dependants of more opulent families, the decrepid servant, the decayed artificer, retired as to a home neither uncomfortable nor humiliating; that they had been the county infirmaries and dispensaries, a knowledge of medicine and of the virtues of herbs being a department of monkish learning (as passages in the old dramatic writers sometimes indicate,) and a hospital, and, perhaps, a laboratory, being component parts of a monkish establishment; that they had been foundling asylums, relieving the state of many orphan and outcast children, and ministering to their necessities, God’s ravens in the wilderness, (neither so black as they had been represented,) bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening;[251] that they had been inns for the way-faring man, who heard from afar the sound of the vesper bell, at once inviting him to repose and devotion, and who might sing his matins with the morning star, and go on his way rejoicing; that they filled up the gap in which the public libraries have since stood, and if their inmates were not very desirous to eat of the tree of knowledge themselves, they had at least the merit of cherishing and preserving it alive for others. Thus do we find in the monastic system a provision made for many of those wants of society which public institutions are now