Muratori Annals to Radcliffe Romances, these singular
two-legged animals, with their rosaries and breviaries, with their
shaven crowns, hair-cilities, and vows of poverty, masquerade so
strangely through our fancy; and they are in fact so very strange an
extinct species of the human family,--a veritable Monk of Bury St.
Edmunds is worth attending to, if by chance made visible and audible.
Here he is; and in his hand a magical speculum, much gone to rust
indeed, yet in fragments still clear; wherein the marvellous image of
his existence does still shadow itself, though fitfully, and as with
an intermittent light! Will not the reader peep with us into this
singular _camera lucida_, where an extinct species, though fitfully,
can still be seen alive? Extinct species, we say; for the live
specimens which still go about under that character are too evidently
to be classed as spurious in Natural History: the Gospel of Richard
Arkwright once promulgated, no Monk of the old sort is any longer
possible in this world. But fancy a deep-buried Mastodon, some fossil
Megatherion, Ichthyosaurus, were to begin to _speak_ from amid its
rock-swathings, never so indistinctly! The most extinct fossil species
of Men or Monks can do, and does, this miracle,--thanks to the Letters
of the Alphabet, good for so many things.

Jocelin, we said, was somewhat of a Boswell; but unfortunately, by
Nature, he is none of the largest, and distance has now dwarfed him to
an extreme degree. His light is most feeble, intermittent, and
requires the intensest kindest inspection; otherwise it will disclose
mere vacant haze. It must be owned, the good Jocelin, spite of his
beautiful childlike character, is but an altogether imperfect 'mirror'
of these old-world things! The good man, he looks on us so clear and
cheery, and in his neighbourly soft-smiling eyes we see so well our
_own_ shadow,--we have a longing always to cross-question him, to
force from him an explanation of much. But no; Jocelin, though he
talks with such clear familiarity, like a next-door neighbour, will
not answer any question: that is the peculiarity of him, dead these
six hundred and fifty years, and quite deaf to us, though still so
audible! The good man, he cannot help it, nor can we.

But truly it is a strange consideration this simple one, as we go on
with him, or indeed with any lucid simple-hearted soul like him:
Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical
vac