a city, the savage
king of a tribe, alike copy the Roman magistrates. Original as one
might deem them, our monks in their monasteries simply restored their
ancient _Villa_, as Chateaubriand well said. They had no notion either
of forming a new society or of fertilizing the old. Copying from the
monks of the East, they wanted their servants at first to be
themselves a barren race of monkling workmen. It was in spite of them
that the family in renewing itself renewed the world.

Seeing how fast these oldsters keep on oldening; how in one age we
fall from the wise monk St. Benedict down to the pedantic Benedict of
Aniane;[8] we feel that such gentry were wholly guiltless of that
great popular creation which bloomed amidst ruins; namely, the Lives
of the Saints. If the monks wrote, it was the people made them. This
young growth might throw out some leaves and flowers from the crannies
of an old Roman ruin turned into a convent: but most assuredly not
thence did it first arise. Its roots go deep into the ground: sown by
the people and cultivated by the family, it takes help from every
hand, from men, from women, from children. The precarious, troubled
life of those days of violence, made these poor folk imaginative,
prone to believe in their own dreams, as being to them full of
comfort: strange dreams withal, rich in marvels, in fooleries; absurd,
but charming.

[8] Benedict founded a convent at Aniane in Languedoc, in the
reign of Charlemagne.

These families, isolated in forests and mountains, as we still see
them in the Tyrol or the Higher Alps, and coming down thence but once
a week, never wanted for illusions in the desert. One child had seen
this, some woman had dreamed that. A new saint began to rise. The
story went abroad in the shape of a ballad with doggrel rhymes. They
sang and danced to it of an evening at the oak by the fountain. The
priest, when he came on Sunday to perform service in the woodland
chapel, found the legendary chant already in every mouth. He said to
himself, "After all, history is good, is edifying.... It does honour
to the Church. _Vox populi, vox Dei!_--But how did they light upon
it?" He could be shown the true, the irrefragable proofs of it in some
tree or stone which had witnessed the apparition, had marked the
miracle. What can he say to that?

Brought back to the abbey, the tale will find a monk good for nothing,
who can only write; who is curious, believes everything, no mat