It still remains to say a few words about the Premonstratensians-the particular variety of Regular Canons with which we are now more immediately concerned.

The Order of Premonstratensians, or White Canons, was the result of the reforming zeal of St. Norbert, and it seems to have represented the utmost height of self-mortification to which a non-monastic college or cathedral could aspire. Thus there is evidence that the Priory of Twinham, or Christchurch, in Hampshire, was before and after the Norman Conquest occupied by a dean and twenty-four secular canons. Then, about 1 150, the rule of St. Augustine appears to have been adopted by them, and finally, in the charter of 22 Edward I. this house is included in those of the Premonstratensian Order.

Norbert, born of noble family on the lower Rhine towards the close of the eleventh century, was a man not inclined to take too serious a view of life and its responsibilities, till sudden conviction and conversion fell upon him in the course of a violent thunder

storm.

Unable, like many another, to overcome the jealousy and blindness of which it comes that in his own country none may be a prophet, St. Norbert sold all he possessed, abandoned his benefices, and,

with two companions, set forth to preach the Gospel. Resisting the offers of Pope Gelasius, refusing the bishopric of Cambray, and all other preferment, praying successfully for the gift of tongues, he struggled on towards his appointed but as yet unknown goal. At last Bartholomew, Bishop of Laon, found for him a damp and lonesome hollow in the forest of Coucy. He was to have his choice, it seems, of temple or chapel, desert or garden, but had rejected one after another as suitable enough for a religious foundation but not intended by God for him. Here, however, in a little chapel of St. John the Baptist, Norbert betook him to prayer, and so continuing with Hugo, his comrade, far into the night, was at last rewarded by a vision of the Blessed Virgin herself, encircled by angels and radiant with light.

She told the future saint to fix his abode on another part of that very hill, and at the same time prescribed the distinguishing vesture for the new order the cloak and biretta were to be white, the cassock alone black. And Norbert saw in the very hands of the Virgin Mother the white woollen garb -the candida vestis-from which the name of "White Canons" was to be derived.

There, at Prémontré, or Præmonstratum, he

gathered first thirteen, and then a larger company of brethren, and founded a house which was to the Premonstratensian Order what Citeaux was to the Cistercians. Even the aristocratic element in the constitution of the latter was reproduced by Norbert; and the three houses next in dignity to Prémontré emulated the dignity of the chief daughters of Citeaux. At length the Archbishopric of Magdeburg was forced upon the acceptance of the saint, and in 1129 he resigned the headship of the now prosperous order in favour of his old companion Hugh. St. Norbert died in 1134, and was canonised

(1582) by Gregory XIII.

And so, in the womb of

time, began the potential existence of St. Agatha's, Eggleston, and Coverham.

The remains of the last-named are too scanty to compete in the limits of these pages with the fame and beauty of the others; but, from the view given in Ellis's Dugdale, it would seem that in the earlier part of the century considerable parts of the choir, transepts, and perhaps even of the nave of the church, were standing. And, still, as we descend from the high ground behind Middleham upon the garden and outbuildings which now surround and mask its remnants, or as we gaze from the breezy height of Witton Fell upon the windings of the

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Cover, we may give a passing thought to Ranulph de Glanville, Justiciary of Henry II, as well as to Miles Coverdale, and note that this quiet nook produced at different times the authors of the first digest of our laws and the first revision of our Scriptures.

On the 5th of February we are, or might be, reminded of the martyrdom of St. Agatha, who suffered 251 A.D., in the Decian persecution.

To the wretch who was sent by Quinctianus to assail her virtue and her faith, she answered, "My mind is firmly settled and grounded in Christ; your words are winds, your promises are rains, your terrors are floods, which however hardly they may beat upon the foundation of my house, it cannot ever fall, for it is founded upon a firm rock.”

It is much to be regretted that Roald of Richmond and Lord Scrope did not lay these noble words to heart when the former founded and the latter enlarged St. Agatha's Abbey of White Canons on the banks of the Swale. The roofless walls which now threaten to slide into the river might then, perhaps, have been more worthy monuments of the steadfastness of her in whose name and memory they were raised. The scanty remains of massive transition Norman, and the contrasted grace of the later

work, present, in this wooded vale, a picture which we would gladly guard against the hand of Time.

The relation of masonry to landscape, lost, alas! as an instinct, and not yet regained as an art, is the key to the special charm of nearly every ruin. The gulf between the finished and laborious product of human skill and the lavished beauties of spontaneous nature, is just perceptibly narrowed by the blurring of angles and the clinging growth of ivy, and the memory of the aching hands and bleeding feet, and the burden and the heat of the long day, is blended with the fancied presence of that spirit whose song is said to be

"There is no effort on my brow;

I do not strive, I do not weep.

I rush with the swift spheres, and glow
In joy; and when I will I sleep.

Yet that severe, that earnest air
I saw, I felt it once, but where?"

Some parts of St. Agatha's, noticeably the range containing the frater and some interlaced arcading in a very puzzling position farther west, are of great intrinsic beauty, and the early work done in the middle of the twelfth century by Constable Roaldus is well represented by the doorway in the western cloister, with its now half-obliterated cats'-head