to time, if it be only to sustain the
links of the old traditions; and the present paper will contain one or
two pictures of a peculiar kind, exhibiting the life and habits of those
institutions, which have been lately met with chiefly among the
unprinted Records. In anticipation of any possible charge of unfairness
in judging from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to
judge--all wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained
stories. Let it remain, to those who are perverse enough to insist upon
it, an open question whether the monasteries were more corrupt under
Henry the Eighth than they had been four hundred years earlier. The
dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no reasonable
person would desire that bodies of men should have been maintained for
the only business of singing masses, when the efficacy of masses was no
longer believed. Our present desire is merely this--to satisfy ourselves
whether the Government, in discharging a duty which could not be
dispensed with, condescended to falsehood in seeking a vindication for
themselves which they did not require; or whether they had cause really
to believe the majority of the monastic bodies to be as they
affirmed--whether, that is to say, there really were such cases either
of flagrant immorality, neglect of discipline, or careless waste and
prodigality, as to justify the general censure which was pronounced
against the system by the Parliament and the Privy Council.

Secure in the supposed completeness with which Queen Mary's agents
destroyed the Records of the visitation under her father, Roman Catholic
writers have taken refuge in a disdainful denial; and the Anglicans, who
for the most part, while contented to enjoy the fruits of the
Reformation, detest the means by which it was brought about, have taken
the same view. Bishop Latimer tells us that, when the Report of the
visitors of the abbeys was read in the Commons House, there rose from
all sides one long cry of 'Down with them.' But Bishop Latimer, in the
opinion of High Churchmen, is not to be believed. Do we produce letters
of the visitors themselves, we are told that they are the slanders
prepared to justify a preconceived purpose of spoliation. No witness, it
seems, will be admitted unless it be the witness of a friend. Unless
some enemy of the Reformation can be found to confess the crimes which
made the Reformation necessary, the crimes themselves are to be regarde