'Tis he whose law is reason; who depends
Upon that law as on the best of friends;
Whence, in a state where men are tempted still
To evil for a guard against worse ill,—
And what in quality or act is best
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,—
He labours good on good to fix, and owes
To virtue every triumph that he knows;
-Who, if he rise to station of command,
Rises by open means; and there will stand
On honourable terms or else retire;
Who comprehends his trust, and to the same
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
For wealth or honour, or for worldly state;

Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall,
Like showers of manna, if they come at all."

WORDSWORTH's Happy Warrior.

THERE can be no doubt that towards the end of the Conqueror's reign the fame of the school of Bec was pre-eminent in his dominions, above all other places of religion and learning; and that next to the illustrious name of its creator Lanfranc, was that of Anselm, his pupil and successor at Bec. There can be little doubt, either, that when Lanfranc died, the

thoughts of all who looked upon him as the great ecclesiastical leader of his day turned to Anselm, as the man to carry on his work. Anselm was known

in England as well as in Normandy; known as Lanfranc's friend; known in the cloister of Canterbury as the sharer of his counsels; known at the Conqueror's court; known as even more full of sympathy for the native English than even Lanfranc himself. Everything pointed him out as the fittest man that Normandy could furnish to take the great place which Lanfranc had left vacant. He would probably have been the Conqueror's choice; and by all who desired, for whatever reason, that the see of Canterbury should be filled in a way suitable to its eminence and importance, he was marked at once as the person whom it would most become the Conqueror's son to choose.

But for such appointments, which had been a matter of great consequence with his father, William the Red had little care. Lanfranc was gone, and Ralph Flambard was the king's new counsellor; and even that age of violence was shocked when, instead of naming an Archbishop of Canterbury, the King of England seized the possessions of the see, and that he might rack its revenues, refused to fill it up. For nearly four years this lasted; and the patience with which the scandal was endured,—keenly felt as it was even by the rough barons of William's court,-is the measure of what a bold bad king could do, who knew how to use his power. A contemporary picture of the actual state of things in a case like this is valuable. Eadmer was a monk at Canterbury, and describes what passed before his eyes. "The king," he says, "seized the Church at

Canterbury, the mother of all England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the neighbouring isles; all that belonged to it, within and without, he caused to be inventoried by his officers; and after fixing an allowance for the support of the monks, who there served God, he ordered the remainder to be set at a rent and brought into his domain. So he put up the Church of Christ to sale; giving the power of lordship over it to any one who, with whatever damage to it, would bid the highest price. Every year, in wretched succession, a new rent was set; for the king would allow no bargain to remain settled, but whoever promised more ousted him who was paying less; unless the former tenant, giving up his original bargain, came up of his own accord to the offer of the later bidder. You might see, besides, every day, the most abandoned of men on their business of collecting money for the king, marching about the cloisters of the monastery, regardless of the religious rule of God's servants, and with cruel and threatening looks, giving their orders on all sides; uttering menaces, lording it over every one, and showing their power to the utmost. What scandals and quarrels and irregularities arose from this I hate to remember. The monks of the church were some of them dispersed at the approach of the mischief, and sent to other houses, and those who remained suffered many tribulations and indignities. What shall I say of the church tenants, who were ground down by such wasting and misery; so that I might doubt, but for the evils which followed, whether with bare life they could have been more cruelly oppressed? Nor did all this happen only at Canterbury. The same savage cruelty raged in all her daughter churches in England which, when bishop

or abbot died, at that time fell into widowhood. And this king, too, was the first who ordained this woful oppression against the churches of God; he had inherited nothing of this sort from his father: he alone, when the churches were vacant, kept them in his own hands. And thus wherever you looked, there was wretchedness before your eyes; and this distress lasted for nearly five years over the Church of Canterbury, always increasing, always, as time went on, growing more cruel and evil."

The feeling of the time was against fiscal oppression carried on in this wholesale way against the Church. The rough and unscrupulous barons had a kind of respect for the monks, who in peace lived as hard lives as soldiers in a campaign, and seemed so much better men than themselves; and though in passion or quarrel they themselves might often use them ill, they looked with a disapproving eye on a regular system for insulting and annoying them, and for enriching the king out of lands which benefactors had given for the benefit of their souls, and in hope of sharing in the blessings of perpetual prayers. And in the case of Canterbury the pride was touched both of Englishmen and of Norman barons. For Canterbury was a see of peculiar and unmatched dignity in the west, and its archbishop was a much greater person in court and realm than any archbishop of Rouen or Lyons. He was a spiritual father to the whole kingdom; the most venerable among its nobles, the representative and spokesman of the poor and the humble; the great centre of sacred and divine authority, without whose assent and anointing the king's title was not complete, and who was the witness between the

king and his people of the king's solemn promises of righteous government, of mercy, mildness, and peace. The king's council was imperfect while no Archbishop of Canterbury was there to be his adviser. The honour of the English crown and realm suffered, when the archbishopric lay vacant year after year, in the hands of Ralph Flambard and his men; and people talked among themselves that the place which Lanfranc had filled so worthily, there was now Lanfranc's friend to fill.

Whether or not with any thought of this kind, and it probably was so, in the year 1092 Hugh of Avranches, Earl of Chester, an old friend of Anselm's, invited him over to England to organize a house in which he had substituted monks for seculars, St. Werburg's at Chester. Hugh the Wolf, one of the Conqueror's march lords on the Welsh border, is painted for us with much vividness in one of the rude but vigorous portraits which Orderic liked to draw, -a violent, loose-living, but generous barbarian, honouring self-control and a religious life in others, though he had little of it himself; living for eating and drinking, for wild and wasteful hunting, by which he damaged his own and his neighbours' lands; for murderous war against the troublesome Welsh; for free indulgence, without much reference to right or wrong; very open-handed; so fat that he could hardly stand; very fond of the noise and riotous company of a great following of retainers, old and young, yet keeping about him also a simple-minded religious chaplain, whom he had brought with him from Avranches, and who did his best, undiscouraged, though the odds were much against him, to awaken