oral both had somewhat of the old Etruscan earnestness and gloom.

One may easily imagine the stupid alarm and helpless confusion of these
easy-going monks, when their new Superior came down among them hissing
with a white heat from the very hottest furnace-fires of a new religious
experience, burning and quivering with the terrors of the world to
come,--pale, thin, eager, tremulous, and yet with all the martial
vigor of the former warrior, and all the habits of command of a former
princely station. His reforms gave no quarter to right or left; sleepy
monks were dragged out to midnight-prayers, and their devotions
enlivened with vivid pictures of hell-fire and ingenuities of eternal
torment enough to stir the blood of the most torpid. There was to be
no more gormandizing, no more wine-bibbing; the choice old wines were
placed under lock and key for the use of the sick and poor in the
vicinity; and every fast of the Church, and every obsolete rule of the
order, were revived with unsparing rigor. It is true, they hated their
new Superior with all the energy which laziness and good living had left
them, but they every soul of them shook in their sandals before him; for
there is a true and established order of mastery among human beings, and
when a man of enkindled energy and intense will comes among a flock of
irresolute commonplace individuals, he subjects them to himself by a
sort of moral paralysis similar to what a great, vigorous gymnotus
distributes among a fry of inferior fishes. The bolder ones, who made
motions of rebellion, were so energetically swooped upon, and consigned
to the discipline of dungeon and bread-and-water, that less courageous
natures made a merit of siding with the more powerful party, mentally
resolving to carry by fraud the points which they despaired of
accomplishing by force.

On the morning we speak of, two monks might have been seen lounging on
a stone bench by one of the arches, looking listlessly into the sombre
garden-patch we have described. The first of these, Father Anselmo, was
a corpulent fellow, with an easy swing of gait, heavy animal features,
and an eye of shrewd and stealthy cunning: the whole air of the man
expressed the cautious, careful voluptuary. The other, Father Johannes,
was thin, wiry, and elastic, with hands like birds' claws, and an eye
that reminded one of the crafty cunning of a serpent. His smile was a
curious blending of shrewdness and malignity. He regarded his