of the land; judging, soldiering,
adjusting; everywhere governing the people,--so that even a
Gurth born thrall of Cedric lacks not his due parings of the pigs
he tends. Governing;--and, alas, also game-preserving, so that a
Robert Hood, a William Scarlet and others have, in these days,
put on Lincoln coats, and taken to living, in some universal-
suffrage manner, under the greenwood tree!

How silent, on the other hand, lie all Cotton-trades and such
like; not a steeple-chimney yet got on end from sea to sea!
North of the Humber, a stern Willelmus Conquestor burnt the
Country, finding it unruly, into very stern repose. Wild fowl
scream in those ancient silences, wild cattle roam in those
ancient solitudes; the scanty sulky Norse-bred population all
coerced into silence,--feeling that, under these new Norman
Governors, their history has probably as good as _ended._ Men
and Northumbrian Norse populations know little what has ended,
what is but beginning! The Ribble and the Aire roll down, as yet
unpolluted by dyers' chemistry; tenanted by merry trouts and
piscatory otters; the sunbeam and the vacant wind's-blast alone
traversing those moors. Side by side sleep the coal-strata and
the iron-strata for so many ages; no Steam-Demon has yet risen
smoking into being. Saint Mungo rules in Glasgow; James Watt
still slumbering in the deep of Time. _Mancunium,_ Manceaster,
what we now call Manchester, spins no cotton,--if it be not
_wool_ 'cottons,' clipped from the backs of mountain sheep. The
Creek of the Mersey gurgles, twice in the four-and-twenty hours,
with eddying brine, clangorous with sea-fowl; and is a _Lither_-
Pool, a _lazy_ or sullen Pool, no monstrous pitchy City, and
Seahaven of the world! The Centuries are big; and the birth-
hour is coming, not yet come. _Tempus ferax, tempus edax rerum._

Chapter VI

Monk Samson

Within doors, down at the hill-foot, in our Convent here, we are
a peculiar people,--hardly conceivable in the Arkwright Corn-Law
ages, of mere Spinning-Mills and Joe-Mantons! There is yet no
Methodism among us, and we speak much of Secularities: no
Methodism; our Religion is not yet a horrible restless Doubt,
still less a far horribler composed Cant; but a great heaven-
high Unquestionability, encompassing, interpenetrating the whole
of Life. Imperfect as we may be, we are here, with our litanies,
shaven crowns, vows of poverty, to testify incessantly and
indisput