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soul through hundreds of dark and troubled yearsconfessing and leaving on record that after all it had a soul and sought a country.

But here in St. Mary's Abbey-371 feet long and 60 broad-or there at Jervaulx, where, with scarcely one stone of the church still left upon another, the very domestic buildings strike and impress us with their mass and grand proportions, it is impossible quite to shut one's eyes to all this. It is not only because they illustrate a chapter or two in the history of architecture, still less because most of them stand under picturesquely wooded hills and by quiet streams, that these ruins are worth visiting. As long as there is the merest ground-plan to be traced, their human interest appeals to men and women of every creed but that of sheer stupidity.

In York, where the very names of streets are monuments of antiquity, and the relics of Roman, Saxon, and Dane are gathered under the shadow of one of the finest cathedrals in the world, it is a little hard to turn aside into a trim garden and fix our attention upon the ruins of an abbey. Bootham, the subject of our illustration, is one among a hundred points of interest, and even when we hear of "Marygate" and "Monk-bar," we are more struck by their last syllables than their first.

There is an instant

and pleasurable surprise in finding ourselves in a place where a bar means a gate and a gate means something quite different; but it is not till abbey after abbey with endless similarity and endless variety has brought home to us the solemn beauty and deep significance of monastic ruins, that we can contentedly give them the attention they deserve.

And who, meanwhile, was St. Benedict? It is soon told; but the "historical imagination" must wing its flight over more than thirteen centuries to listen. The date of his birth was near the end of the fifth century; the place was Nursia, in the Duchy of Spoleto. At an early age Benedict was sent by his parents to study at Rome; but the story of his flight from thence, at the age of fourteen, agrees with the description afterwards given of him by St. Gregory the Great, as "scienter nesciens et sapienter indoctus."

Escaping, not without difficulty, from the faithful nurse who had accompanied him to Rome, this precocious ascetic concealed himself on the then desolate shore of Subiaco. Here he quickly became famous; and from hence, after only three years, he was summoned to preside as abbot over a neighbouring monastery. Once more he withdrew to solitude and an even greater severity of life. As time went on he was followed into his seclusion by a motley

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crowd of disciples. From the old world Roman nobles sent their sons to be rescued from the "deep weariness and sated lust" which to themselves "made human life a hell;" from the new the wild Goth came to learn the first elements of civilisation.

Taking with him a few followers, Benedict now founded a monastery on Monte Cassino, the destined. scene of his bold rebuke to Totila, the Gothic king. Already no less than twelve religious houses, each with its own superior, bore witness to his influence; and in 515 he composed the famous Regula Monachorum. In obedience to that rule the stones of a hundred ruined abbeys lie to-day in English fields the silent witnesses and unanswerable arguments of the past.

On such more personal matters as the devotion to St. Benedict of Scolastica, his sister, and of Maurus, Placidus, and Flavia, his friends, this is not the place to dwell. Art, which delights to gild in retrospect the path which the saint has trod, "not without dust and heat," lingers tenderly over their loves. Let us remember their names, at least, when we read of Chaucer's degenerate fourteenth-century Benedictine : "The rule of St. Maure and of St. Benait,

Because that it was old and somedeal strait,
This ilke monk let olde thinges pace,

And held after the newe world the trace."

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