of great value in the history
of the arts[11].--The bounty of the queen was well employed by the
saint; and the cruciform church, with chapels, and altars, and shrines,
and oratories, on either side, and with its high altar hallowed by
relics, and decked out with gold and silver and precious stones, shews
how faithfully the catholics, in their religious edifices of the present
day, have adhered to the models of the early, if not the primitive, ages
of the church.

Writers of the same period record two facts in relation to Jumieges,
which are of some interest as points of natural history.--Vines were
then commonly cultivated in this place and neighborhood;--and fishes of
so great a size, that we cannot but suppose they must have been whales,
frequently came up the Seine, and were caught under the walls of the
monastery.--The growth of the vine is abundantly proved: it is not only
related by various monkish historians, one of whom, an anonymous writer,
quoted by Mabillon, in the _Acta Sanctorum ordinis Sancti Benedicti_,
says, speaking of Jumieges, "hinc vinearum abundant botryones, qui in
turgentibus gemmis lucentes rutilant in Falernis;" but even a charter
of so late a date as the year 1472, expressly terms a large tract of
land belonging to the convent, the vineyard[12].--The existence of the
English monastic vineyards has been much controverted, but not
conclusively. Whether these instances of the northern growth of the
vine, as a wine-making plant, do or do not bear upon the question of the
supposed refrigeration of our climate by the increase of the Polar ice,
must be left to the determination of others.--The whale-fishery of
Jumieges rests upon the single authority of the _Gesta Sancti
Philiberti_: the author admits, indeed, that it is a strange thing, "et
a saeculo inauditum;" but still he speaks of it as a fact that has fallen
under his own knowledge, that the monks, by means of hooks, nets, and
boats, catch sea-fish[13], fifty feet in length, which at once supply
their table with food, and their lamps with oil.

The number of holy men who originally accompanied St. Philibert to his
new abbey, was only seventy; but they increased with surprising
rapidity; insomuch, that his successor, St. Aicadras, who received the
pastoral staff, after a lapse of little more than thirty years from the
foundation of Jumieges, found himself at the head of nine hundred monks,
besides fifteen hundred attendants and dependants of va