which, by some mysterious fate, was destined to absorb and supersede that of the widespread Columbanians; there were the missionary principles first established which led to the conversion of the Anglo‐Saxon race; there the school of _quies_ and reverence first planted which made this wonderful monastery “the most powerful and celebrated in the Catholic universe.”(59) It was likened to Sinai by Pope Victor III., the successor of Hildebrand, in bold and simple verses, full of divine exultation and Christian pride: it has been defended and protected by an English and Protestant scholar,(60) the minister of a nation whose civilization once flowed from its bosom, and whose learning was fostered in its early “scriptoria.” It has outlasted many of its own offspring, and still stands undecayed in its moral sublimity, fruitful yet in saints and scholars, the mother‐house of an order whose origin stretches beyond Benedict far into the desert of Paul and Anthony, Jerome and Hilarion. And now that we are forced, reluctantly enough, to let fall the veil over that teeming life of the mediæval cloister, the fruitful nursery of every later intellectual development, shall we tell the reader what has most struck us throughout the short sketch we have been able to give of these centres of thought? Does not their history sound like some “monkish chronicle”? How is it that all the most “celebrated men of their time” (the phrase so often repeated in these annals) are monks, and so many not only monks, but saints? How is it that we come upon so many instances of these great scholars taking their turn at the mill, the forge, and the bake‐house, and that these details sound neither sordid nor vulgar, as they might of modern and secular _littérateurs_? It was the monastic principle, the Christ‐principle, as Prior Vaughan calls it in his _Life of S. Thomas of Aquin_—the principle of faith, obedience, purity, adoration, and reverence. “The monks had a world of their own.... Whilst the barbarians were laying all things in ruins, they, heedless alike of fame or profit, were patiently laying the foundations of European civilization. They were forming the languages of Schiller, of Bacon, and of Bossuet; they were creating arts which modern skill in vain endeavors to imitate; they were preserving the codices of ancient learning, and embalming the world ‘lying in wickedness’ with the sweet odor of their manifold virtues.”(61) Not only were they men who “wrote and spoke much, and, by their _masculine genius_ and _young and fresh inspiration_, prevented the new Christian world from falling back from its first advances, either by literature or politics, under the yoke of exhausted paganism”;(62) not only were they men of progress even while essentially conservative, men of the future even while their studies were all of the past, but, “in opposing poverty, chastity, and obedience, the three great bases of monastic life, to the orgies of wealth, debauchery, and pride, they