ue fervour. The very system of mechanical
supplication he had for months carried out so severely by rule had
rather checked than fostered his power of originating true prayer.

He prayed louder than ever, but the heart hung back cold and gloomy, and
let the words go up alone.

"Poor wingless prayers," he cried, "you will not get half-way to
heaven."

A fiend of this complexion had been driven out of King Saul by music.

Clement took up the hermit's psaltery, and with much trouble mended the
strings and tuned it.

No, he could not play it. His soul was so out of tune. The sounds jarred
on it, and made him almost mad.

"Ah, wretched me!" he cried; "Saul had a saint to play to him. He was
not alone with the spirits of darkness; but here is no sweet bard of
Israel to play to me; I, lonely, with crushed heart, on which a black
fiend sitteth mountain high, must make the music to uplift that heart
to heaven; it may not be." And he grovelled on the earth weeping and
tearing his hair.

VERTEBATUR AD MELANCHOLIAM.

(1) It requires nowadays a strong effort of the imagination
to realize the effect on poor people who had never seen them
before of such sentences as this

"Blessed are the poor" etc.

(2) The primitive writer was so interpreted by others
besides Clement; and in particular by Peter of Blois, a
divine of the twelfth century, whose comment is noteworthy,
as he himself was a forty-year hermit.

CHAPTER XCIII

One day as he lay there sighing and groaning, prayerless, tuneless,
hopeless, a thought flashed into his mind. What he had done for the
poor and the wayfarer, he would do for himself. He would fill his den of
despair with the name of God and the magic words of holy writ, and the
pious, prayerful consolations of the Church.

Then, like Christian at Apollyon's feet, he reached his hand suddenly
out and caught, not his sword, for he had none, but peaceful labour's
humbler weapon, his chisel, and worked with it as if his soul depended
on his arm.

They say that Michael Angelo in the next generation used to carve
statues, not like our timid sculptors, by modelling the work in clay,
and then setting a mechanic to chisel it, but would seize the block,
conceive the image, and at once, with mallet and steel, make the marble
chips fly like mad about him, and the mass sprout into form. Even so
Clement drew no lines to guide his hand. He went to his memory for the
gr