Easy to bully down poor old rural Deans, and blow their windmills away but who is the man that dare abide King Richard's anger; cross the Lion in his path, and take him by the whiskers! Abbot Samson too; he is that man, with justice on his side. The case was this. Adam de Cokefield, one of the chief feudatories of St. Edmund, and a principal man in the Eastern Counties, died, leaving large possessions, and for heiress a daughter of three months; who, by clear law, as all men know, became thus Abbot Samson's ward; whom accordingly he proceeded to dispose of to such person as seemed fittest. But now King Richard has another person in view, to whom the little ward and her great possessions were a suitable thing. He, by letter, requests that Abbot Samson will have the goodness to give her to this person. Abbot Samson, with deep humility, replies that she is already given. Now letters from Richard, of severer tenor; answered with new deep humilities, with gifts and entreaties, with no promise of obedience. King Richard's ire is kindled; messengers arrive at St. Edmundsbury, with emphatic message to obey or tremble! Abbot Samson, wisely silent as to the King's threats, makes answer: "The King can send if he will and seize the ward: force and power he has to do his pleasure, and abolish the whole Abbey. But I, for my part, never can be bent to wish this that he seeks, nor shall it by me be ever done. For there is danger lest such things be made a precedent of, to the prejudice of my successors. Videat Altissimus, Let the Most High look on it. Whatsoever thing shall befall I will patiently endure."

Such was Abbot Samson's deliberate decision. Why not? Coeur-de-Lion is very dreadful, but not the dreadfullest. Videat Altissimus. I reverence Coeur-de-Lion to the marrow of my bones, and will in all right things be homo suus; but it is not, properly speaking, with terror, with any fear at all. On the whole, have I not looked on the face of Satan with outspread wings steadily into Hellfire these seven-and-forty years;-and was not melted into terror even at that, such the Lord's goodness to me? Coeur-de-Lion!

Richard swore tornado oaths, worse than our armies in Flanders, to be revenged on that proud Priest. But in the end he discovered that the Priest was right; and forgave him, and even

loved him. 'King Richard wrote, soon after, to Abbot Samson, That he wanted one or two of the St. Edmundsbury dogs, 'which he heard were good.' Abbot Samson sent him dogs of the best; Richard replied by the present of a ring, which Pope Innocent the Third had given him. Thou brave Richard, thou brave Samson! Richard too, I suppose, 'loved a man,' and knew one when he saw him.

No one will accuse our Lord Abbot of wanting worldly wisdom, due interest in worldly things. A skilful man; full of cunning insight, lively interests; always discerning the road to his object, be it circuit, be it short-cut, and victoriously travelling forward thereon. Nay rather it might seem, from Jocelin's Narrative, as if he had his eye all but exclusively directed on terrestrial matters, and was much too secular for a devout man. But this too, if we examine it, was right. For it is in the world that a man, devout or other, has his life to lead, his work waiting to be done. The basis of Abbot Samson's we shall discover, was truly religion, after all. Returning from his dusty pilgrimage, with such welcome as we saw,' he sat down at the foot of St. Edmund's Shrine.' Not a talking theory that; no, a silent practice: Thou St. Edmund with what lies in thee, thou now must help me, or none will!

This also is a significant fact: the zealous interest our Abbot took in the Crusades. To all noble Christian hearts of that era, what earthly enterprise so noble? When Henry II., having 'taken the cross, came to St. Edmund's, to pay his devotions be'fore setting out, the Abbot secretly made for himself a cross of 'linen cloth and, holding this in one hand and a threaded nee'dle in the other, asked leave of the King to assume it" The King could not spare Samson out of England;-the King himself indeed never went. But the Abbot's eye was set on the Holy Sepulchre, as on the spot of this Earth where the true cause of Heaven was deciding itself. At the retaking of Jeru'salem by the Pagans, Abbot Samson put on a cilice and hair'shirt, and wore under-garments of hair-cloth ever after; he ab'stained also from flesh and flesh-meats (carne et carneis) thence'forth to the end of his life.' Like a dark cloud eclipsing the

hopes of Christendom, those tidings cast their shadow over St. Edmundsbury too: Shall Samson Abbas take pleasure while Christ's Tomb is in the hands of the Infidel? Samson, in pain of body, shall daily be reminded of it, daily be admonished to grieve for it.

The great antique heart: how like a child's in its simplicity, like a man's in its earnest solemnity and depth! Heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the Earth; making all the Earth a mystic Temple to him, the Earth's business all a kind of worship. Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight; angels yet hover doing God's messages among men that rainbow was set in the clouds by the hand of God! Wonder, miracle encompass the man; he lives in an element of miracle; Heaven's splendour over his head, Hell's darkness under his feet. A great Law of Duty, high as these two Infinitudes, dwarfing all else, annihilating all else,-making royal Richard as small as peasant Samson, smaller if need be !—The 'imaginative faculties? Rude poetic ages? The 'primeval poetic element? O for God's sake, good reader, talk no more of all that! It was not a Dilettantism this of Abbot Samson. It was a Reality, and it is one. The garment only of it is dead; the essence of it lives through all Time and all Eternity!—

And truly, as we said above, is not this comparative silence of Abbot Samson as to his religion, precisely the healthiest sign of him and of it? 'The Unconscious is the alone Complete.' Abbot Samson all along a busy working man, as all men are bound to be, his religion, his worship was like his daily bread to him; -which he did not take the trouble to talk much about; which he merely eat at stated intervals, and lived and did his work upon! This is Abbot Samson's Catholicism of the Twelfth Century;-something like the Ism of all true men in all true centuries, I fancy! Alas, compared with any of the Isms current in these poor days, what a thing! Compared with the respectablest, morbid, struggling Methodism, never so earnest; with the respectablest, ghastly, dead or galvanised Dilettantism, never so spasmodic!

Methodism with its eye forever turned on its own navel; ask

ing itself with torturing anxiety of Hope and Fear, “Am I right, am I wrong? Shall I be saved, shall I not be damned ?"-what is this, at bottom, but a new phasis of Egoism, stretched out into the Infinite; not always the heavenlier for its infinitude! Brother, so soon as possible, endeavour to rise above all that. "Thou art wrong; thou art like to be damned:" consider that as the fact, reconcile thyself even to that, if thou be a man ;—then first is the devouring Universe subdued under thee, and from the black murk of midnight and noise of greedy Acheron, dawn as of an everlasting morning, how far above all Hope and all Fear, springs for thee, enlightening thy steep path, awakening in thy heart celestial Memnon's music.

But of our Dilettantisms, and galvanised Dilettantisms; of Puseyism-O Heavens, what shall we say of Puseyism, in comparison to Twelfth-Century Catholicism? Little or nothing; for indeed it is a matter to strike one dumb.

The Builder of this Universe was wise,

He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles:

The Plan He shap'd all Worlds and Æons by

Was

Heavens!-Was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles ?

That certain human souls, living on this practical Earth, should think to save themselves and a ruined world by noisy theoretic demonstrations and laudations of the Church, instead of some unnoisy, unconscious, but practical, total, heart-and-soul demonstration of a Church: this, in the circle of revolving ages, this also was a thing we were to see. A kind of penultimate thing, precursor of very strange consummations; last thing but one? If there is no atmosphere, what will it serve a man to demonstrate the excellence of lungs? How much profitabler when you can, like Abbot Samson, breathe; and go along your way!

CHAPTER XVI.

ST. EDMUND.

ABBOT SAMSON built many useful, many pious edifices; human dwellings, churches, church-steeples, barns;-all fallen now and vanished, but useful while they stood. He built and endowed 'the Hospital of Babwell:' built 'fit houses for the St. Edmundsbury Schools. Many are the roofs once thatched with reeds' which he caused to be covered with tiles;' or if they were churches, probably with lead.' For all ruinous incomplete things, buildings or other, were an eye-sorrow to the man. saw his 'great tower of St. Edmund's;' or at least the roof-timbers of it, lying cut and stamped in Elmset Wood. To change combustible decaying reed-thatch into tile or lead; and material, still more, moral wreck into rain-tight order, what a comfort to Samson !

We

One of the things he could not in any wise but rebuild was the great Altar, aloft on which stood the Shrine itself; the great Altar, which had been damaged by fire, by the careless rubbish and careless candle of two somnolent Monks, one night, the Shrine escaping almost as if by miracle! Abbot Samson read his Monks a severe lecture: "A Dream one of us had, that he saw St. Edmund naked and in lamentable plight. Know ye the interpretation of that Dream? St. Edmund proclaims himself naked, because ye defraud the naked Poor of your old clothes, and give with reluctance what ye are bound to give them of meat and drink: the idleness moreover and negligence of the Sacristan and his people is too evident from the late misfortune by fire. Well might our Holy Martyr seem to lie cast out from his Shrine, and say with groans that he was stript of his garments, and wasted with hunger and thirst!"

This is Abbot Samson's interpretation of the Dream ;-diamet