olitude, though often beneficial to full minds and active
intellects, is more than the vacuity of ignorance can support.
Poverty, pushed as it was by the Ascetics to the excess of
destitution, tends, it is to be feared, to blight both body and soul.
Obedience, carried beyond reasonable limits, leads to abject meanness
and hypocrisy, as the history of convents in general will abundantly
show. Yet, after making whatever deductions we fairly can for their
mistakes, we still find, in the history of these singular
institutions, much that is worthy of our deepest study; and the more
so, the more firmly we are convinced of the utter impossibility of
their restoration."--(P. 114.)

Restoration! Restore the Heptarchy! as Canning on one occasion exclaimed.
And yet we understand that of late there has been a gentle sigh, and some
half-formed projects for the revival of monastic institutions. We hear
from the preface to Maitland's "Essays on the Dark Ages," that a circular
was issued by persons of no contemptible influence in the church, headed
"Revival of Monastic and Conventual Institutions on a plan adapted to the
exigencies of the reformed Catholic religion." As Mr Maitland says of the
plan--it would be after all but "a playing at monkery." Where, we would
ask, is the irrevocable vow? Where is the unchangeable fate, the civil
death, that awaited the inmate of the monastic house? Where is the
superstitious admiration of the crowd without? Where all those religious
ideas that made renouncement of life so sacred and meritorious? And where,
moreover, is that insecure and unprotected condition of a half-civilised
age, which made the retreat of the monastery so precious to the wearied
and wounded spirit? You are charmed with an oasis in the desert;--you must
spread the desert first, if you would realise the charm. What are monastic
walls, to you,--who can take a lodging in Cheapside, and be as solitary,
as undisturbed, as utterly forgotten as if the grave had closed upon you?

Viewed strictly as a portion of the past, and in relation to all the
circumstances that gave origin and value to them, we confess we have a
partiality for the old monasteries. Some of the popular censures which are
still dealt upon them are founded upon erroneous ideas of the nature and
purposes of such institutions. They are blamed repeatedly for their
ignorance and their neglect of learning. They were not insti