at, are gathered round, to see what
issue the business will take. The business takes this bad issue,
in our Monk's own words faithfully rendered:

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*See Lyttelton's _Henry II.,_ ii: 384.
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'And it came to pass, while Robert de Montfort thundered on him
manfully (_viriliter intonasset_) with hard and frequent strokes,
and a valiant beginning promised the fruit of victory, Henry of
Essex, rather giving way, glanced round on all sides; and lo, at
the rim of the horizon, on the confines of the River and land, he
discerned the glorious King and Martyr Edmund, in shining armour,
and as if hovering in the air; looking towards him with severe
countenance, nodding his head with a mien and motion of austere
anger. At St. Edmund's hand there stood also another Knight,
Gilbert de Cereville, whose armour was not so splendid, whose
stature was less gigantic; casting vengeful looks at him. This
he seeing with his eyes, remembered that old crime brings new
shame. And now wholly desperate, and changing reason into
violence, he took the part of one blindly attacking, not
skillfully defending. Who while he struck fiercely was more
fiercely struck; and so, in short, fell down vanquished, and it
was thought, slain. As he lay there for dead, his kinsmen,
Magnates of England, besought the King, that the Monks of Reading
might have leave to bury him. However, he proved not to be dead,
but got well again among them; and now, with recovered health,
assuming the Regular Habit, he strove to wipe out the stain of
his former life, to cleanse the long week of his dissolute
history by at least a purifying sabbath, and cultivate the
studies of Virtue into fruits of eternal Felicity:

Thus does the Conscience of man project itself athwart whatsoever
of knowledge or surmise, of imagination, understanding, faculty,
acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him; and, like
light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures 'on the rim
of the horizon' and elsewhere! Truly, this same 'sense of the
Infinite nature of Duty' is the central part of all with us; a
ray as of Eternity and Immortality, immured in dusky many-
coloured Time, and its deaths and births. Your 'coloured glass'
varies so much from century to century;--and, in certain money-
making, game-preserving centuries, it gets so terribly opaque!
Not a Heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of
vacant leaden-coloured Hell. One day it wil