discipline and arrangements of that institution were so considerable that the example was followed in other houses, and ultimately received the papal sanction. Pope Gregory XV. approved of the change, and Urban VIII. allowed the new congregation to assume the name of the Congregation of St. Maur. This saint had been one of the earliest companions of the founder of the order; but it has been disputed, even by the Benedictines themselves, whether he was merely a monk of Monte Cassino, the birth-place of the order, or whether he was not abbat of the French monastery of Glanfeuil on the Loire be this as it may, his name became associated with this peculiar branch of the Benedictines, and they require to be distinguished by this appellation in order to separate them from other congregations under the same general rule. This new congregation of St. Maur was divided into six provinces, each containing about twenty monasteries, the whole being under the control of a superior called the General. The most distinguished of these monasteries were those of St. Remi, at Rheims; Fleuri, or St. Benoit, on the Loire; Fescamp; the Trinity, at Vendôme; Marmoustier, near Tours; St. Denys, near Paris; and the famous Abbey of St. Germain des Prés, in Paris itself. Altogether in 1709 there were 188 monasteries belonging to this congregation. The general chapter of the order was held every three years at Marmoustier. Besides the usual observance of religious exercises by those who belonged to these houses, the members took upon themselves in a special manner the honourable profession of literary and scientific pursuits; and certainly few bodies of men ever acted, collectively, more fully up to the spirit of their vows than these learned brethren. The various convents throughout France, wherever the Benedictines were established, were distinguished for their size and their territorial revenues: and those of the Congregation of St. Maur added, in nearly every instance, the qualification of good learning as well as piety subsisting among their members. Though not the most central by position, nor the most important of these houses by its wealth, yet the abbey of St. Germain des Prés, by the circumstance of

its being within the metropolis, in the centre of the literary world of France, became the most important house of the order, so far as the modern fame of the members is concerned. It was within the walls of this abbey that the recluse students whose names have shed so much honour on French literature lived, studied, and died, and hence the very title of a Benedictine father carries a reader at once back to the walls of this venerable convent and the shelves of its famous library.

The abbey of St. Germain des Prés was situated on the southern side of the Seine, and had been founded by Childebert in A.D. 550, on the recommendation of St. Germanus, then bishop of Paris. This king gave it the fief of Issy, one of the richest domains in the vicinity of Paris; and succeeding monarchs enriched the institution with lands and privileges until it acquired a position of great importance. The superior of the abbey had absolute jurisdiction within a large surrounding district, and even had a prison within the precincts of the abbey, where persons amenable to his justice were confined. It was this prison (which still exists, and which is one of the most curious of the historical monuments of Paris) that witnessed the horrible massacres of the Revolution; and its name will ever be associated with one of the most frightful episodes of that abominable period. Westward of the abbey lay the extensive meadows along the river-side, from which the abbey derived its name: these meadows, from being in after-times the resort of the students of the university, were called Le Pré aux Clercs, just as the abbey was itself styled St. Germain des Prés. In after-times the whole became covered with sumptuous buildings, and is now known as the Faubourg St. Germain. The only other portions of this once large establishment which are still standing, are the abbatial house and the abbey church. The former is a large building of the time of Louis XIV-of imposing size and aspect; and is one of the most characteristic features of that quarter of Paris. The church is a fine specimen of the architectural styles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and, though two of its three towers have been partially destroyed, yet the other portions of

the building are well preserved, and, indeed, a special reparation of the whole has been undertaken by the enlightened zeal of the French government. The literary visitor of Paris, the antiquary, the historian, are almost sure to ask for St. Germain des Prés, amongst the earliest objects of their curiosity; but they will seek there in vain for what would have formed a centre of powerful attraction, the famous library, for which this monastery was known all over Europe. During the Revolution the abbatial buildings were, with the exception mentioned above, totally destroyed. Among them was the library, but its contents were, we believe, all transferred to the great national collection, now known as the Bibliothèque Impériale,-one of the finest libraries in the world. There are, therefore, no literary attractions to draw the visitor across the Seine, towards this old Benedictine abbey: if he would see the riches of the collection, he must stop in the Rue de Richelieu, and he may there have a rich bibliographical and literary treat. But he must know how to ask for the treasures he seeks, and he must know what those treasures are, otherwise his visit will be of little use.

The bibliographical riches of the Benedictines do not, however, come within the limits of the present paper; they may be found detailed in the various French works written upon similar subjects: it is merely worth while to observe, with regard to them, that they constituted one of those mines of information from which these monks extracted their literary gems. They were both the cause and the consequence of their literary labours. It was here that they found some of the most valuable MSS. and printed books upon which they laboured; and, as soon as the reputation of their house had risen in the world of letters, donations and legacies of books and MSS. came upon them from all quarters.

Three curious MSS. may, however, be briefly mentioned: one was the Psalter of St. Germanus, written on a purple skin, in letters of silver and gold: its date was as old as the sixth century. Another was a Bible of about the middle of the ninth century, in which the famous seventh verse of the fifth chapter of the First Epistle of St. John is found. And the third MS.

was another Bible of the same date, in which this same verse is wanting. The first of these MSS., and, we believe, the two others, may be seen in the collection of the Bibliothèque Impériale.

The dress of the Benedictine order was entirely black, and consisted externally of a long gown reaching to the neck, with wide sleeves, (from which it is said that the gowns of several of the colleges in our English universities have been copied,) and also of a hood, worn sometimes over the head,-as during the long services of cold winter nights in the abbey church,-sometimes thrown back upon the neck. The manners and habits of the monks were exceedingly simple, without being ridiculously austere everything encouraged in them labour and perseverance, whether in religious duties only, or in these conjoined with literary pursuits. The eyes of all the men of letters in the capital became turned towards the labours of these recluses within their gloomy walls. The king and his ministers favoured their exertions, while the Gallican clergy and the Pontifical authorities of Rome promoted them by all means in their power. We have little doubt but that very large sums of money must have been devoted from the revenues of this house, and from those of others of the same congregation, towards the compiling and the publishing of such large and expensive books as we shall presently see they produced; otherwise a few poor monks could never have found the means of getting their labours laid before the world. It was, however, an honourable circumstance in the French literary character of that day,-as, indeed, it has been ever since, and at no time more peculiarly so than the present,--that works of solid literature, of great size and cost, such as were all those of Benedictine mould, met with ready and even anxious purchasers. Their ponderous tomes were speedily caught up by the public. They were translated into foreign languages, reprinted in foreign countries; new editions became wanted, and new editions appeared. Even in our own times their labours are as fresh and as useful as ever: new light has indeed been thrown upon many of the subjects they treated of, but still what they effected stands good, and accordingly at the present day new

editions of some of their works are now passing through the press, and a fresh issue of others is greatly wanted by the studious portion of mankind.

The laborious activity of the Benedictines was not confined of course to the members of this one monastery of St. Germain des Prés; it shone forth with considerable lustre in others of the same order; only here it seemed to be concentrated into a flame of unusual brilliancy, which, though made up of the single lights that streamed from solitary cells,-fed, it is true, with much midnight oil,-yet gave forth a steady and enduring radiance that was felt throughout France, and, we may say, throughout Europe. The peculiar provinces of literary research assumed to themselves by the Benedictines were those of ecclesiastical and civil history, in the most general sense of the term; antiquities of all kinds; chronology and geography; divinity, as a matter of course, throw ing upon this subject a vast amount of truly Christian philosophy; and the belles lettres, in the stricter meaning of the phrase. Just as in the case of the Dutch critics, editors, and commentators, there are hardly any profound students of the great works of Greek and Roman literature but must have found themselves anticipated in almost every portion of the field by those industrious pioneers; so in all matters of modern history, in all that relates to the study of antiquities, whether civil or ecclesiastical, every inquirer is forced to confess his deep obligations to these learned fathers for laying the foundations upon which the means of modern study are based. There are very few students that can find out anything unknown to a Benedictine.

In inquiring, however, into the lives and labours of the Dutch Critics, ample materials may be found for contemporaneous history and anecdote. We find them mixed up with the civil history of their state, holding offices of public trust, sometimes ambassadors to foreign powers, often driven about and troubled by the crossing of their path by political storms. Their peculiar credit may be said to lie in their having been able to effect so much in the midst of a bustling and not very literary community. We find, too, that their literary genius seemed to run in a family,

and that the Gronofs and the Vosses seemed to inherit the abilities that made their sires illustrious. It was necessarily a far different case with the Benedictines, who, shut out from the world by the rules of their order-cut off from all the troubles and the compensating endearments of family life

seemed doomed to pass their lives over their books, and were certainly placed in most favourable situations for profiting by the contents of their extensive libraries. It should be remembered, however, that this very state of absolute (it might almost be called of forced) repose is one of the most dangerous temptations of monastic life. For one man that has the courage and the perseverance to exert himself within the pale of a cloister, it may be feared that there is a crowd who would let life glide by in absolute indolence. The excess of quiet acts as a fatal soporific to the mind, deadens the senses, and weakens the faculties of the soul. Man requires rousing to exertion; he wants to have the electric current of thought sent through his brain by the great battery of society; like steel, he may have the hidden spark within, but he has need of the blow from the flint to strike it out, and thus to originate the flame. Let not the student sigh too much for the fancied sweets of total seclusion. Monasteries have too often proved to be "Castles of Indolence;" and the warning of our own immortal Bard may well be quoted as an argument against some of their concomitant faults:

O mortal man, who livest here by toil,
Do not complain of this thy hard estate;
That like an emmet thou must ever moil,
Is a sad sentence of an ancient date;
And, certes, there is for it reason great;
For tho' sometimes it makes thee weep and wail,
And curse thy star, and early drudge and late,
Withouten that would come an heavier bale,
Loose life, unruly passions, and diseases pale.

Though, however, the rules of the Congregation of St. Maur provided most successfully, as has been proved, against the evils of indolence, they could not hinder the task of the biographer from becoming rather monotonous and uninteresting, when applied to members of that order. For since the monks had no family connections, no domestic events, to mix up with the details of their literary lives, since they generally entered their order at