ch popular compositions,
adapted to what the laity already believed, than the writings of
comparatively learned and reflecting men. However, stories of the same
cast are frequent in the monkish historians. Matthew Paris, one of the
most respectable of that class, and no friend to the covetousness or
relaxed lives of the priesthood, tells us of a knight who was on the
point of being damned for frequenting tournaments, but saved by a
donation he had formerly made to the Virgin. p. 290.

[535] This hesitation about so important a question is what I would by
no means repeat. Beyond every doubt, the evils of superstition in the
middle ages, though separately considered very serious, are not to be
weighed against the benefits of the religion with which they were so
mingled. The fashion of the eighteenth century, among protestants
especially, was to exaggerate the crimes and follies of mediaeval
ages--perhaps I have fallen into it a little too much; in the present we
seem more in danger of extenuating them. We still want an inflexible
impartiality in all that borders on ecclesiastical history, which, I
believe, has never been displayed on an extensive scale. A more
captivating book can hardly be named than the Mores Catholici of Mr.
Digby; and it contains certainly a great deal of truth; but the general
effect is that of a _mirage_, which confuses and deludes the sight. If
those "ages of faith" were as noble, as pure, as full of human kindness,
as he has delineated them, we have had a bad exchange in the centuries
since the Reformation. And those who gaze at Mr. Digby's enchantments
will do well to consider how they can better escape this consequence
than he has done. Dr. Maitland's Letters on the Dark Ages, and a great
deal more that comes from the pseudo-Anglican or Anglo-catholic press,
converge to the same end; a strong sympathy with the mediaeval church, a
great indulgence to its errors, and indeed a reluctance to admit them,
with a corresponding estrangement from all that has passed in the last
three centuries. [1848.]

[536] I am inclined to acquiesce in this general opinion; yet an account
of expenses at Bolton Abbey, about the reign of Edward II., published in
Whitaker's History of Craven, p. 51, makes a very scanty show of
almsgiving in this opulent monastery. Much, however, was no doubt given
in victuals. But it is a strange error to conceive that English
monasteries before the dissolution fed the indigent part of