at a meaning does lie in the passage, and may by
industry be got at; that a faithful editor's industry had
already got at it before passing on. A compendious useful
Glossary is given; nearly adequate to help the uninitiated
through: sometimes one wishes it had been a trifle larger;
but, with a Spelman and Ducange at your elbow, how easy to have
made it far too large! Notes are added, generally brief;
sufficiently explanatory of most points. Lastly, a copious
correct Index; which no such Book should want, and which
unluckily very few possess. And so, in a word, the _Chronicle of
Jocelin_ is, as it professes to be, unwrapped from its thick
cerements, and fairly brought forth into the common daylight, so
that he who runs, and has a smattering of grammar, may read.

We have heard so much of Monks; everywhere, in real and
fictitious History, from Muratori Annals to Radcliffe Romances,
these singular two-legged animals, with their rosaries and
breviaries, with their shaven crowns, hair-cilices, 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 marvelous 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 di