you a seven-headed Solomon. Stay in those pleasant
circumstances and convictions if you please; but don't accuse your
roughly bred and fed fathers of telling lies about the aspect the
earth and sky bore to _them_,--till you have trodden the earth as
they, barefoot, and seen the heavens as they, face to face. If you
care to see and to know for yourselves, you may do it with little
pains; you need not do any great thing, you needn't keep one eye open
and the other shut for ten years over a microscope, nor fight your way
through icebergs and darkness to knowledge of the _celestial_ pole.
Simply, do as much as king after king of the Saxons did,--put rough
shoes on your feet and a rough cloak on your shoulders, and walk to
Rome and back. Sleep by the roadside, when it is fine,--in the first
outhouse you can find, when it is wet; and live on bread and water,
with an onion or two, all the way; and if the experiences which you
will have to relate on your return do not, as may well be, deserve the
name of spiritual; at all events you will not be disposed to let other
people regard them either as Poetry or Fiction.

[Footnote 4: Not _Londinian_.]

With this warning, presently to be at greater length insisted on,
I trace for you, in Dean Stanley's words, which cannot be bettered
except in the collection of their more earnest passages from among
his interludes of graceful but dangerous qualification,--I trace, with
only such omission, the story he has told us of the foundation of that
Abbey, which, he tells you, was the Mother of London, and has ever
been the shrine and the throne of English faith and truth.

"The gradual formation of a monastic body, indicated in the charters
of Offa and Edgar, marks the spread of the Benedictine order
throughout England, under the influence of Dunstan. The 'terror' of
the spot, which had still been its chief characteristic in the charter
of the wild Offa, had, in the days of the more peaceful Edgar, given
way to a dubious 'renown.' Twelve monks is the number traditionally
said to have been established by Dunstan. A few acres further up the
river formed their chief property, and their monastic character was
sufficiently recognized to have given to the old locality of the
'terrible place' the name of the 'Western Monastery,' or 'Minster of
the West.'"

The Benedictines then--twelve Benedictine monks--thus begin the
building of existent Christian London. You know I told you the
Benedictines ar