a mere advocate, taking a side and seeing only half the truth of
anything; but a man gifted with the judicial faculty, that precious gift
without which a man may be anything you please--a rhetorician, a special
pleader, a picturesque writer, a laborious collector of facts; but an
historian never. And yet Matthew Paris was a magnificent hater, with a
fund of indignant scorn and righteous anger which never fails him upon
occasion. Friend of King and nobles as he was, he will not spare his
words of wrathful censure upon the tyrant, or upon any that he held
deserving of rebuke for cruelty, oppression and avarice. When he has to
lay the lash on such as had proved themselves enemies to his much-loved
Abbey, or who had wronged and defrauded it, he is well-nigh as fierce as
Dante. He singles them out--the doomed wretches--and holds them, as it
were, over the fire of hell before he drops them down into the burning
flame.

Did Ralph Cheinduit, that blustering, burly knight, cry aloud 'A fig for
St. Alban and his monks! Since they excommunicated me--look you! I have
only increased in girth, behold me fat and jolly, in faith almost too
big for my saddle. A fig for them all!' Did he say so, the impious
wretch? Be it known that from that very day Sir Knight began to shrink
and waste and pine, and if he had not repented and been absolved in
time, he had gone down to the bottomless pit with never a hope of
deliverance.

Did not Sir Adam Fitz William show the evil spirit that was in him when
he sided against us time and again? And now, look to his awful end!
Gorged with meat and drink one night, he sprawled upon his bed,
_indigestus_, as you may say, and he never woke more. Aye! and he died
intestate too. And as though that was not bad enough, his wife too died,
straightway, like another Sapphira slain by the shock of the tidings.
And then there was Alan de Beccles, too, always notorious for setting
himself against us and our house, he too perished as the other did, for
he loved choice dainties overmuch, and he dined late and he ate as none
should eat, and when he could eat no more, suddenly his speech failed
him and his veins burst, smitten with an apoplexy. And many another,
whom it would take too long to name, following his evil course, and
being prosecutors of Holy Alban's Church, perished for ever by God's
vengeance.

It is no longer the fashion now to denounce the Pope and his myrmidons,
but if the rage of Exeter Hall should ev