it; justice, nay justice in mere money, denied a
man, for all his pleading, till twenty, till forty years of his Life
are gone seeking it: and a Cockney Funeral, Death reverenced by
hatchments, horsehair, brass-lacquer, and unconcerned bipeds carrying
long poles and bags of black silk:--are not these two reverences, this
reverence for Death and that reverence for Life, a notable pair of
reverences among you English?"

Abbot Samson, at this culminating point of his existence may, and
indeed must, be left to vanish with his Life-scenery from the eyes of
modern men. He had to run into France, to settle with King Richard for
the military service there of his St. Edmundsbury Knights; and with
great labour got it done. He had to decide on the dilapidated Coventry
Monks; and with great labour, and much pleading and journeying, got
them reinstated; dined with them all, and with the 'Masters of the
Schools of Oxneford,'--the veritable Oxford _Caput_ sitting there at
dinner, in a dim but undeniable manner, in the City of Peeping Tom! He
had, not without labour, to controvert the intrusive Bishop of Ely,
the intrusive Abbot of Cluny. Magnanimous Samson, his life is but a
labour and a journey; a bustling and a justling, till the still Night
come. He is sent for again, over sea, to advise King Richard touching
certain Peers of England, who had taken the Cross, but never followed
it to Palestine; whom the Pope is inquiring after. The magnanimous
Abbot makes preparation for departure; departs, and----And Jocelin's
Boswellean Narrative, suddenly shorn-through by the scissors of
Destiny, _ends_. There are no words more; but a black line, and leaves
of blank paper. Irremediable: the miraculous hand, that held all this
theatric-machinery, suddenly quits hold; impenetrable Time-Curtains
rush down; in the mind's eye all is again dark, void; with loud
dinning in the mind's ear, our real-phantasmagory of St. Edmundsbury
plunges into the bosom of the Twelfth Century again, and all is over.
Monks, Abbot, Hero-worship, Government, Obedience, Coeur-de-Lion and
St. Edmund's Shrine, vanish like Mirza's Vision; and there is nothing
left but a mutilated black Ruin amid green botanic expanses, and oxen,
sheep and dilettanti pasturing in their places.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] _Annual Register_ (year 1828, Chronicle, p. 93), _Gentleman's
Magazine_, &c. &c.

[25] 'This is the Martyr's Garment, which Michael's Image guards.'

CHAPTER XVII.

THE BEG