e lens which clears our vision, makes it an easy task to
criticise and condemn a phase of religious life which, having essayed
to tranquillise and sweeten existence, was, under altered conditions
of civilisation, bound to pass away. We of to-day pride ourselves on
a wider view of life, on a higher conception of duty, expressed in
lives dedicated to public work as a necessary complement to private
virtue. Still, if we would judge fairly this age of contemplation and
faith within the convent walls, and all that, even if done mistakenly
and imperfectly, it aspired to do, we must realise, as best we can,
the world without those walls. One of our poets has vividly reflected
it for us when he speaks of man's life as made up of "whole centuries
of folly, noise, and sin." So bitter was life then and even later,
that by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when mysticism had
claimed many votaries, eternal rest, even at the cost of personal
annihilation, was the whispered desire of many devout souls.

"A Simple Stillness." "An Eternal Silence." These are the words that
float across the centuries to us, like echoes from troubled, longing
hearts. These are the words that give us the key to the understanding
of the choice of vocation of the mediaeval woman. The spiritual need
for harmony and peace may have been great; the practical need was
perhaps even greater; for in its accomplishment the spiritual found
its consummation.

A TWELFTH-CENTURY ROMANCE-WRITER, MARIE DE FRANCE

"Marie ai nom, si sui de France." Thus, more than seven centuries ago,
wrote Marie de France. What an unpretentious autobiography! Yet these
few simple words, which seem to tell so little, but in reality suggest
so much, are the counterpart of her work, and form its fitting crown.

But who was this modest writer, and why does her work interest us
to-day? Around Marie de France there must always remain an atmosphere
of doubt and mystery, since she is only mentioned by an anonymous
thirteenth-century poet, and by one of her contemporaries--an
Anglo-Norman poet, Denys Pyramus by name--who speaks of her in the
most flattering terms, and from whom we learn that her lays were much
appreciated by the noblesse, especially the ladies. That these should
take rare delight in them may well be, seeing how monotonous life must
have been to many a woman shut up with her maidens and her needlework
in a dismal castle, or perhaps in but one tower of it, whilst her