onks of old were; they lived the guileless life--austere,
hard, self-denying, saintly! What are we in comparison with
them?

'Did not we find the bones of our brethren there, hard by
the High Altar, when we were beautifying the same? O ye
degenerate sons of this degenerate age! Two centuries ago
and our monks were men of faith and prayer. In the year of
grace one thousand two hundred and fifty-one, we found more
than thirty of them buried together, and their bones were
lying there, white and sweet, redolent with the odor of
sanctity every one; each man had been buried as he died, in
his monastic habit, and his shoes upon his feet too. Aye,
and _such_ shoes--shoes made for wear and not for
wantonness. The soles of these shoes were sound and strong,
they might have served the purpose for poor men's naked feet
even now, after centuries of lying in the grave. Blush ye!
ye with your buckles, and your pointed toes and your fiddle
faddle. These shoes upon the holy feet that we dug up were
as round at the toe as at the heel, and the latchets were
all of one piece with the uppers. No rosettes in those days,
if you please! They fastened their shoes with a thong, and
they wound that thong around their blessed ankles, and they
cared not in those holy days whether their shoes were _a
pair_. Left foot and right foot each was as the other: and
we, when we gazed at the holy relics--we bowed our heads at
the edifying sight, and we were dumbfounded, even to awe, as
we swung our censers over the sacred graves of the ages
past!'

The anecdotes and out-of-the-way pieces of information in the 'Chronica
Majora,' which may be said to represent the _paragraphs_ of modern
journalism, are countless. Brother Matthew enlivens his history with
these cross-lights at every page, and what gives to these scraps an
added charm is that Matthew himself seems to be always with us when he
prattles on. Not even Herodotus has succeeded more entirely in
impressing his quaint personality upon his narrative. It is always
something which he has seen, or heard from some living man who saw it
with his own eyes.

'There was my friend John of Basingstoke, had studied at
Paris, and a wonder of learning he was, but he told me
himself that his best teacher by far was the young lady
Constantina, daughter of an arc