"For the sage,

Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful Rainbow once in heaven:
We know its woof, its texture; it is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine,
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade."

The insoluble problem in estimating the historical value of the romance of Philostratus, is to ascertain how much of it is due solely to Philostratus and to his desire to achieve creditably the task appointed him by the Empress. Philostratus is far too important a person in his own eyes to be particular about the memory of Apollonius, or reverently afraid of imputing to him anything he did not say or do. On the unsophisticated, unlearned, unspeculative minds of the men who followed Jesus of Nazareth, the words of the Master fell as the sunbeam falls on the colourless plate of the photographer, and a portrait was produced whose sole and transcendent merit is its accuracy. Whatever materials might exist at the end of the second century for composing the biography of Apollonius, they were lost to all purposes of historical truth when put into the hands of the rhetorician, sophist, and fine-talking courtier, who worked them up at the bidding of Julia Domna. Apollonius is as good a Christ as could be expected of Philostratus,—that is all. While the claims of Christianity were weighed in the scales of ridicule, and seriousness was out of the question, a Voltaire or a Blount might edge their witticisms with references to the sage of Tyana as well as to any other man or thing; but no one would now, I presume, attempt to found an argument against the Christian religion on the work of Philostratus. "What would have been the fate," asks Dr. Reville, in the concluding passage of his book, which is also its best, "of our Western world if Christianity had not baptised it with a new spirit and animated it with a new life? Let us ask ourselves the question, and I think we can solve it without presumption by the following alternative. Either the condition of barbarism would have been irremediable, and the brilliant Greco-Roman civilisation would have had no successor; or after a time, thanks to municipal institutions, and when the waters of destruction had found their level, a certain form of social order, a coarse copy of the society of the ancients, would have been gradually established. In the latter case it is easy to foresee to what a height of civilisation we should have attained. China is there to give us an idea of it. Hollow forms which only serve to hide, and that faintly, a state of barbarism in social habits, a hopeless want of moral vigour and taste for the infinite, a certain barrenness and incorrigible shallowness of mind, the grossest superstitions joined to the most listless indifference to religious and scientific truth-such would have been our condition. It is quite possible that under such circumstances the recollection of a human being indistinctly known by the name of Pythagoras would have floated in our memories as the Buddha of the West. . . . I may be mistaken, but when I look at Apollonius the sage, with his everlasting maxims, the foolish Damis, and Philostratus the rhetorician, and all those emperors and empresses who, in the quietness of their domestic

circles, decide how the world is to be restored to virtue-when I look at all those councils of women, and men of letters, and others well versed in the ritualisms of the age, I seem to have before me a picture of Chinese life with all its most characteristic traits. They wish to appear as though they were in earnest; they wish to look imposing, but they are simply absurd. . . . How pleasant it is to think that at the very time when this old comedy was being played out, the gospel of freedom, of more intimate communion with God, of progress through holiness, truth, and charity, was already telling upon these grown-up children who were in the midst of their games playing at making gods, and that the feeble and aimless questionings of these outstripped apostles of Conservatism were being answered by the fresh, clear voice which, rejoicing in the full vigour of its youth, and resting upon the immovable foundation of infinite love, proclaimed both to the individual and to society at large the sacred duty of a never-ending reform !" PETER BAYNE.

CHRONICLES OF MEAUX ABBEY. (CHRONICA MONASTERII DE MELSA, A FUNDATIONE USQUE AD ANNUM 1396, AUCTORE THOMA DE BURTON, ABBATE. ACCEDIT CONTINUATIO AD ANNUM 1406, A MONACHO QUODAM IPSIUS DOMUS.) Edited, from the Autographs of the Authors, by EDWARD A. BOND, Assistant Keeper of the MSS. and Egerton Librarian in the British Museum. Published by the authority of the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury, under the direction of the Master of the Rolls. Vol. I. Longmans.

DOES it ever occur to a traveller who comes upon the ruins of some old monastery in the course of his summer rambles, to inquire to which of the monastic orders the building formerly belonged? We have now-a-days among our tourists a fair proportion of amateur geologists, who can tell igneous from sedimentary rocks, and speculate on the causes which shaped the hills or produced those markings on the hard surface of the granite. But to the great majority, we suspect, one abbey and another are very much alike, only differing in regard to the picturesque. Imagination suggests nothing in their history but a repeated chanting of Latin hymns, and the mind finds no employment in endeavouring to recall a past which appears to us a mere dull monotony. Yet it might possibly give additional interest to those ruins, even where the surrounding scenery alone is enough to engross the mind, to think of the community that once inhabited their walls as an offspring of one of the great religious movements of the Middle Ages. Such interest could not but be felt if those movements were better understood.

The oldest religious houses in England were of the Benedictine order. All monasteries erected before the Conquest followed the rule of St. Benedict. Such were the famous abbeys of Glastonbury, St. Alban's, Westminster, Malmesbury, Evesham, Selby, St. Mary's at York, and a great number of others. Almost all the mitred abbots in England were Benedictine, and a large proportion of the greater monasteries; nor was it until the era of the Crusades that any serious innovations were made on the discipline and mode of life enjoined upon the followers of St. Benedict. Abuses, however, had crept in, and discipline generally had become more lax when Robert, Abbot of Molesme, in Burgundy, endeavoured, towards the close of the eleventh century, to revive

the original strictness of their rule. Unable to effect his purpose, he withdrew along with a few faithful followers, to Citeaux, in the diocese of Chalons, where they set up a community by themselves, the better to serve God according to their own ideal. His success even here did not equal his ardent hopes, and the community languished until the time when St. Bernard arrived among them with thirty companions, determined expressly to devote themselves to a more ascetic life than that which prevailed in other monasteries. The influence of St. Bernard's example was immense; reformed monasteries, called Cistercian as being after the model of Citeaux, sprang up everywhere over Europe, and about sixty are said to have been founded by St. Bernard himself.

Everything connected with the Cistercian rule was calculated to keep the brethren in mind of the one great object, purity. All their monasteries were dedicated to the Virgin, whose worship had at that time reached its greatest ascendancy. The dress of the monks was a white cassock, in marked distinction to the black gowns of the Benedictines. The localities they inhabited, unlike the older monasteries, which were generally found just outside the walls of populous cities, were all secluded valleys or lonely spots, which their own industry made beautiful by cultivation; for their own industry must support them if they were to exist at all so far from human intercourse. Even to this day the neighbourhood of a Cistercian ruin is commonly a solitude. Of the old Benedictine abbeys, some few, like St. Alban's and Westminster, have been kept up for the purpose of Protestant worship; but Cistercian monasteries have been invariably left to moulder. And such is the general loveliness of their situations, as well as the picturesqueness of their remains, that no abbey ruins are so frequently visited by tourists, or so often become subjects of the artist's sketches. Tintern amid the exquisite scenery of the Wye, Melrose in the sweet valley of the Tweed, the fine cultivation of which at this day is not a little owing to the monks of old, Netley on the banks of Southampton Water, Jorevalle, Fountains, Kirkstall, Furness, and many other instances might be quoted of beautiful Cistercian ruins in beautiful situations. It was, indeed, the design of St. Bernard that his followers should be brought to contemplate the works of the Creator in these seclusions, and not be carried away by that love of art and magnificence which distinguished the rival order of the Cluniacs. He did not even encourage them to form valuable libraries. "Believe me," he said to one of his companions, "you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters. Have you forgotten how it is written, 'He made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock ?" You have need, not so much of reading as of prayer; and thus may God open your hearts to understand His law and His commandments." Art and luxury were, therefore, things positively prohibited in the first constitutions of the Cistercian order. "Their buildings," says Mr. Bond, were to be free from ornamentation; the belltowers not to be built of stone, and even the wooden structure to be of moderate height. No coloured glass was to be used, excepting in abbeys formerly of a different order, in which the existing stained glass might be retained. No extravagances or noticeable refinements in sculpture, painting, building, or pavement were allowed, nor any pictures excepting of our Saviour. The altar paintings were to be in one colour; and visitors of the houses were enjoined to enforce this regulation. The dress of the monks was to be of the plainest description, and they were suffered to shave themselves only once a

month. Even this was a concession made out of reverence for the Holy Communion. They were to give unqualified obedience to their superior, and all appeal to the chapter of their order was prohibited under penalty of excommunication. With a view apparently to check litigious dispositions in the convent, it was ordered that no works in canon or civil law were to be kept in the common book chests of the monasteries. Every abbey was to have its strong prison in which criminals, such as thieves, incendiaries, forgers, and homicides, should be locked up at the pleasure of the abbot.'

It is a question how far these rules were enforced, and how far they advanced the best interests of religion. Very different characters of the Cistercian order were given by the writers of a later age. Cardinal de Vitry, in the thirteenth century, speaks in the highest terms of their widespread reputation for holiness; but Walter Map, whom modern writers have miscalled Mapes, never mentions them without a bitter sneer. To such a length did he carry his animosity against them, that having heard of two Cistercians becoming apostates to the Jewish religion, "I wonder," he said, "that if they wished to quit their abominable order, they did not turn Christians!" They had doubtless many prejudices to contend with, and Map's prejudices were of a most vigorous growth. Still, what has been seen in other cases most probably was true of the Cistercians. Human nature takes its revenge on rules framed to promote austerity, and in this instance the rules themselves must have withdrawn the monks from more wholesome influences than even the strictest discipline could have supplied. Their seclusion from the world, as it gave them the less occasion to exercise the old monastic virtue of hospitality, may have rendered them the easier victims of selfish, sensual indulgence. For, as pointed out elsewhere by Map, it was not a seclusion like that of the ancient hermits, who retired into the desert. The very fact that there was a considerable community to support made it necessary that they should fix upon places which, though uninhabited, were fertile, and capable of cultivation. All the means of existence must be found upon the spot; the brethren would have no neighbours to depend upon. Some wealthy founder, whose broad acres had not yet been thoroughly utilised, gave them generally at first a little portion of ground on the margin of some large forest, where they could find fuel in abundance, and had a plentiful supply of wholesome water. Forthwith they began clearing away the trees and cultivating the land; "to find time for which occupation," Map cynically remarks, "it was necessary to give somewhat the less, perhaps, to prayers." The land improved vastly under their skill and labour, and their domains were enlarged at the same time by the piety of new benefactors. Soon all, or most of the neighbourhood became their own; and, true to their ancient principle of solitude, they allowed no other monastery, even of their own order, to come into their vicinity. There they enjoyed undivided the fruits of their own orchards and their own cornfields, yet were not forbidden to receive from pious donors a yearly pipe of Gascon wine, or at intervals a butt of Malmsey. The absolutism of their abbot's rule was tempered by the fact that they elected him, and he could hardly impose on others a severity that he himself, perhaps, did not always affect.

We have before us the first volume of a history of one of these settlements compiled within the walls of the monastery at the beginning of the fi.teenth

(1) Deut. xxxii. 13.

century. The Abbey of Meaux, a few miles east of Beverley, in Yorkshire, was founded in the year 1150, during the reign of Stephen, and while St. Bernard, the father of the Cistercian order, was still alive. The writer of this chronicle was an abbot of the house, whose tastes seem to have been a little too studious and his rule too severe to gain him the cordial goodwill of his brethren; for after little more than three years' administration of the monastery, he gave up his charge, and a later pen informs us that his resignation was the chief benefit he had conferred upon the house. However that may be, he appears to have been a man of praiseworthy industry, and from the neglected or forgotten records of the monastery he composed the present narrative of its history from the date of its foundation to his own day. Of the substance of this narrative Mr. Bond gives us in his preface a very interesting and useful summary, to which we must content ourselves merely to refer the reader, as we have hardly left ourselves space for an extract, and would be loth to condense still further any portion of what is there so well epitomised. Suffice it to say that the monastery experienced very various fortunes during the two centuries and a half to which the chronicle relates, and that even the general reader will find much to interest him in many things, such as the graphic account given at the commencement of the foundation of the abbey by William le Gros, Earl of Albemarle, the mode in which the abbot acquired certain lands mortgaged by William Fossard to the Jews, the heavy fine of a thousand marks imposed upon the monastery by King John, which led to the dispersion of the brethren for a time, the mode in which their services and burials were conducted during the interdict laid upon the kingdom by the Pope, the discipline applied to the unruly lay brethren, and other matters relating alike to the private history of the convent and the general history of the kingdom.

The work appears to be very carefully edited from two MSS., both of which are autographs of Abbot Burton and his continuator. When completed it will be an important accession to the materials for English history hitherto accessible in print. JAMES GAIRDNER.

VENETIAN LIFE. By WM. D. HOWELLS. N. Trubner and Co. 1866. THE author of this volume is a young man who is held in high esteem among literary men in America as the writer of some lyrics of peculiar merit, and of various excellent papers on the dramatic literature of Italy. He was appointed by President Lincoln to the American Consulate at Venice more on account of his acquaintance with European languages and literatures than from any political considerations. Four centuries of commercial decay have, we may assume, left but little official duty for the consul of an active nation in that city; but they equally imply abundance of occupation for an intelligent observer and a scholar, and Mr. Howells appears to have been never less idle than when idle. Holding his position-which was of three years' duration-by consent of the Austrian Government, he preserved a strict neutrality with regard to the intimate politics of Venetia, and,. though he has resigned his consulship, he is still careful in his book to limit himself in that direction to the social anomalies referable to political causes, which have gradually hardened into characteristics of the people. Those who look into this volume to discover anything new concerning the present "situation" will be disappointed;