the Middle Ages, speaks volumes for the sense and taste of this excellent anonym. This part is the last or eighth "dole," as the sections are termed; the remaining seven deal with religious service, private devotion, the _Wesen_ or nature of anchorites, temptation, confession, penance, penitence, and the love of God. Although some may think it out of fashion, it is astonishing how much sense, kindliness, true religion, and useful learning there is in this monitor of the anchoresses of Tarrant Keynes, which place a man might well visit in pilgrimage to do him honour. Every now and then, rough as is his vehicle of speech--a transition medium, endowed neither with the oak-and-rock strength of Anglo-Saxon nor with the varied gifts of modern English--he can rise to real and true eloquence, as where he speaks of the soul and "the heavy flesh that draweth her downwards, yet through the highship [nobleness] of her, it [the flesh] shall become full light--yea, lighter than the wind is, and brighter than the sun is, if only it follow her and draw her not too hard to its own low kind." But though such passages, good in phrase and rhythm, as well as noble in sense, are not rare, the pleasant humanity of the whole book is the best thing in it. M. Renan oddly enough pronounced _Ecclesiastes_, that voice of the doom of life, to be "le seul livre aimable" which Judaism had produced. The ages of St Francis and of the _Imitation_ do not compel us to look about for a _seul livre aimable_, but it may safely be said that there is none more amiable in a cheerful human way than the _Ancren Riwle_.