and leafy, like a damp black American Forest, with cleared
spots and spaces here and there. Dryasdust advances several
absurd hypotheses as to the insensible but almost total
disappearance of these woods; the thick wreck of which now lies
as peat, sometimes with huge heart-of-oak timber logs imbedded in
it, on many a height and hollow. The simplest reason doubtless
is, that by increase of husbandry, there was increase of cattle;
increase of hunger for green spring food; and so, more and more,
the new seedlings got yearly eaten out in April; and the old
trees, having only a certain length of life in them, died
gradually, no man heeding it, and disappeared into _peat._

A sorrowful waste of noble wood and umbrage! Yes,--but a
very common one; the course of most things in this world.
Monachism itself, so rich and fruitful once, is now all rotted
into peat; lies sleek and buried,--and a most feeble bog-grass
of Dilettantism all the crop we reap from it! That also was
frightful waste; perhaps among the saddest our England ever saw.
Why will men destroy noble Forests, even when in part a nuisance,
in such reckless manner; turning loose four-footed cattle and
Henry-the-Eighths into them! The fifth part of our English soil,
Dryasdust computes, lay consecrated to 'spiritual uses,' better
or worse; solemnly set apart to foster spiritual growth and
culture of the soul, by the methods then known: and now--
it too, like the four-fifths, fosters what? Gentle shepherd,
tell me what!

Chapter XII

The Abbot's Troubles

The troubles of Abbot Samson, as he went along in this
abstemious, reticent, rigorous way, were more than tongue can
tell. The Abbot's mitre once set on his head, he knew rest no
more. Double, double, toil and trouble; that is the life of all
governors that really govern: not the spoil of victory, only the
glorious toil of battle can be theirs. Abbot Samson found all
men more or less headstrong, irrational, prone to disorder;
continually threatening to prove ungovernable.

His lazy Monks gave him most trouble. 'My heart is tortured,'
said he, 'till we get out of debt, _cor meum cruciatum est.'_
Your heart, indeed;--but not altogether ours! By no devisable
method, or none of three or four that he devised, could Abbot
Samson get these Monks of his to keep their accounts straight;
but always, do as he might, the Cellerarius at the end of the
term is in a coil, in a flat deficit,--vergi