Yes, that age has passed away for ever. History repeats itself, it is true, but history will not bear mimicry. In every melody that wakes the echoes there is repetition of this note and that, the same single sound is heard again and again; but the glorious intertwinings of the several parts, the subtle fugues and merry peals of laughter that "flash along the chords and go," the wail of the minor, as if crying for the theme that has vanished and yet will reappear--"like armies whispering where great echoes be"--these things are not mere repetition; they are messages from the Eternal Father to the sons of men, reminding them that the world moves on. Merely to ape the past, and to attempt to reproduce in the nineteenth century the tree that had taken a millennium to grow into its maturity in the thirteenth and was rudely cut down root and branch in the sixteenth, is about as wise as it would be to try and make us sing the Hallelujah Chorus in unison! Let the dead bury their dead. Meanwhile the successors of the thirteenth-century monasteries are rising up around us each after his kind; Pall Mall swarms with them, hardly less splendid than their progenitors, certainly not less luxurious. Our modern monks look out at the windows of the Carlton and the Athenæum with no suspicion that they are at all like the monks of old. Nor are they. They lack the old faith, the old loyalty to their order, and with the old picturesqueness something else that we can less afford to miss--the old enthusiasm. We look back upon the men of the thirteenth century with much complacency. A supercilious glance at the past seems to give the moderns an excellent opinion of themselves. But suppose the men of the thirteenth century could turn the tables upon us, and, from their point of view, pass their judgment upon the daily life of the conventuals of St. James's, who are, after all, only survivals, but just conceivably not quite survivals of the fittest; would the monks of old find all things quite up to the highest ideal, or would they hide their heads in shame and confusion of face compelled to acknowledge that the new is in all things so much better than the old? IV. THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA. "So they died! The dead were slaying the dying, And a famine of strivers silenced strife: There were none to love and none to wed, And pity and joy and hope had fled, And grief had spent her passion in sighing; And where was the Spirit of Life?"