“A personable man of seven-and-forty, stout made, stands erect as a pillar; with bushy eyebrows, the face of him beaming into you in a really strange way: the name of him Samson: a man worth looking at.... He was wont to preach to the people in the English tongue, though according to the dialect of Norfolk, where he had been brought up. There preached he: a man worth going to hear.... Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices; human dwellings, churches, steeples, barns;--all fallen now and vanished, but useful while they stood. He built and endowed ‘the Hospital of Babwell’; built ‘fit houses for the St. Edmunsbury schools.’ ... And yet these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and dubiety; they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious purpose they were built for? Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling, first saw the sun as walls, long ago. _Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven’s-Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God’s Houses, the Golgotha of true Souls departed”!_ With the advantage of eleven hundred years of accumulated knowledge in his favor, the cultivated M. Taine can well afford to sneer at “a kind of literature” with which he credits these monks. The “kind of literature” they most affected, and in which they unceasingly labored, was the kind known as “the Scriptures.” Of a verity, strange occupation for “sons of Odin,” for the most meagre summary of Anglo-Saxon, monastic labor in this field is a magnificent memorial of their imperishable glory.