of St. Evroul, or who sought its shelter for their old age. It is as lively as real life, and also as confused and unassorted. Nothing comes amiss to him—a family history, with the fate of all the members of the house-a great revolution like the conquest and subjection of England-the detailed account, often spirited and vivid, of a deed of arms or a siege; details, equally particular, and though not so vivid yet quite as curious, of the customs and transactions of the time, relating to property, to sales and gifts and rents, and to the various ways in which property was transferred, preserved, or lost; details of the monastic profession, in itself a world of its own, with its vicissitudes, its triumphs, its jealousies, its disasters, its conflicts, its quarrels, its scandals; the manners, the tastes, the occupations, the singularities, the personal appearance, the red hair, or rubicund visage, or short stature, or passionate temper, or shrewd ways, of this or that famous abbot or bishop;-bits of description of natural phenomena, such as remarkable thunderstorms, or flights of falling stars ;-repetitions of supernatural and Dantesque legends which had been told in the cloister, or of the stories brought back from the Crusades, bearing on them the mark of the highly excited imagination of the pilgrims who told them;carefully weighed and balanced summaries of the characters of the great people who pass across his scene, or still better, brief forcible touches, evidently from direct impression, of some leading feature in the abbots or bishops, the barons or knights, and by no means least, the ladies, of that wild time and turbulent society. His great work is a mixture of important history, curious gossip of the country-side, judgments

on persons and things, which but for their form would not discredit a professed moralist of sarcastic humour ; orations composed with dignity, and put into the mouths of great persons, because the Latin historians did the same; and dry annals from the creation or the flood, down to the current year. He is always in danger of mistaking the true means of producing the real effect of things, as it impresses his own feeling; of expressing his sense of what is great, or eventful, or tragic, by inflated words, or of representing what he intends for picturesqueness and vividness by some ridiculously chosen epithet or some grotesque bit of pedantry. But he is not always on his stilts, and often forgets himself, at least for some sentences; and then he writes with discrimination, clearness, and force; his sense of the absurd and ridiculous gets for a moment, at all risk of indecorum, out of the stiff shell of his erudition; and in the story of some pathetic scene, the last moments, for instance, and the leave-taking of some religious man, or the fate of some former favourite of fortune, he is simple, touching, and impressive. These pictures-though of course there is something conventional in them, and where the occasion seems to demand it, the temptation to be rhetorical is irresistible-are many of them remarkably distinct, unlike in their circumstances to any other, each with its own colour and expression and individual character. He saw great things and great men not insensible to their greatness, he was still more deeply impressed with the awful contrasts of this mortal state, and the tremendous march and lessons of God's

I

providence; and through the disfigurement of much ignorance, and turgid writing, and bad taste, it is impossible not to discern and recognize the genuine spirit of faith, the profound and overwhelming sense of the living and supreme government and justice of Almighty God.

من

ANSELM'S life, before he came to England, nearly coincided with the reign of William the Bastard, as Duke of Normandy, and then as King of England Anselm was born in 1033. In 1035, Robert the Great Duke, Robert the Devil, died on his Eastern pilgrimage far from home, at Nicæa; and left his son of seven years old, with the stain of his birth upon him, to meet the scorn and to tame the anarchy of Normandy. In the same year also, 1035, died the other mighty representative of the Norsemen's victory, the great Cnut, leaving in almost equal confusion the realm which, thirty-one years after, the Norman boy-prince, whose reign began with such dark and threatening signs, was to wrest from its right owner, and unite to Normandy by a conquest the most eventful for good and for evil in the history of Christian Europe. Anselm's life, like

the years of the house of Bec, nearly began with the beginning of the Conqueror's reign; and very shortly after the Conqueror's death (1087), the great change in Anselm's fortune came, which transferred him to a new scene, and connected him henceforth with England.

Thus his life, up to the time when he became archbishop, extended almost exactly over the period which saw the moral awakening and the first serious attempts at religious reform and political organization in Normandy. Of these attempts it is too much to say that the impulse came alone from Duke William ; but in no one was the improving spirit of the time more powerful, and in no one, according to the measure of the age, did it find a more intelligent and resolute minister. In his latter days, hard and unscrupulous as he was, an honest and large-hearted purpose in favour of order and right directed his government, whenever an irresistible ambition did not overpower every other thought and feeling.

Anselm arrived in Normandy when the poor helpless boy, who had begun to reign just when he himself was born, had grown up, through disaster, treachery, and appalling dangers, into the greatest man of Western Europe, who at nineteen had beaten down domestic rebellion at Val-ès-Dunes (1047), whose hand had been heavy on his neighbours, on Anjou and Maine, who had taught the French invaders and the French king a stern lesson, once and again, at Mortemer (1054) and Varaville (1058). The religious movement which had begun with the century had gained strength with the progress of William's power, and was taking full possession of the Norman Church. Villiam himself was deeply affected by it. The vague