s and be forgotten and fall asleep, with the prayers of other
sufferers to console and support them in their passage through the
valley of the shadow of death. The gentlest spirits here could taste the
bliss of a holy tranquillity; the ascetic could indulge his most
fantastic self-immolation; the morbid visionary could dream at his will
and give his imagination full play, none hindering him; evil demons
might chatter and gibe and twit him at his prayers; choirs of angels
might calm his despair with celestial lullabies; awful forms might rise
from clouds of incense as the gorgeous procession moved along the vast
church aisles, or stopped before some glittering shrine. What then? Who
would question the reality of a miracle, or doubt that sublime
revelations might be made to any holy monk as he wrestled in prayer with
a rapture of the soul, and found himself lifted to the seventh heaven in
ecstasy unutterable?

What has been said applies mainly to the older houses, those which were
under what may be called the _primitive_ Benedictine rule. If men were
moved to rigid asceticism, however, and had a taste for bald simplicity;
if art, and music, and ornate architecture, had no charm for them, and
they dreamt that God could only be sought and found in the wilderness,
the Cistercian houses offered such a congenial asylum. The Cistercians
were the Puritans of the monasteries, and appealed to that mysterious
sentiment which makes some minds shrink with fear from the touch of
luxury, and regard culture as antagonistic to personal holiness. The
sentiment was strong in the reign of Henry II., when nineteen Cistercian
houses were founded; but it is not improbable that other motives, beside
mere taste for a stricter discipline, led to the foundation of eight
more in the reign of King John. Meanwhile the Benedictines had become by
far the most learned and most _educating_ body in the land, and
pre-eminent above them all was the great Abbey of St. Alban's. If it was
not at this time the centre of intellectual life in England, it was
because at this time centralization was unknown. Eadmer, Florence of
Worcester, Gervase of Canterbury, William of Malmesbury, Simeon of
Durham, were all 12th-century Benedictines. They were all students and
writers of history, and history meant _literature_ till Peter Lombard
arose at the end of the 12th century and revolutionized the world of
thought--at any rate the domain of logic. John of Salisbury fiercel