ade too among those who might have been
expected to be able to answer them. Who and what was Matthew Paris? What
did he do, and what did he write that the learned few should speak of
him with so much reverence, though to the unlearned many he is little
more than a famous and familiar name?

Perhaps before dealing with his personal history, or entering into any
examination of his literary labours, it will be well first to answer the
question--_What_ was Matthew Paris? for it is simply impossible to
estimate rightly the debt we owe to him, or to understand the brief
account that could be drawn up of his career till we have learned to
know something of the _profession_ to which he belonged, and the great
foundation of which he was so distinguished an ornament. By profession
Matthew Paris was a monk. A monk 'professed' is a term indicating the
higher grade to which not every brother in a monastery attained. The
very term 'profession' may be traced to the cloister. In its usual
acceptation it is modern.

To dilate upon the various monastic orders, which were almost as
numerous in the 13th century as the different religious denominations
are in the 19th, would be out of place here. Suffice it to say that the
English monasteries in Henry III.'s time counted by hundreds. But there
were monasteries and monasteries. Some the homes of the scholar, the
devout and the high-minded, the seats of learning and the resting-places
of the studious and the aged, who hated war and tumult, and only longed
for repose. Some that were mere hiding holes for the lazy and the
incompetent, the failures among the younger sons of the gentry, who had
not the power of pushing their way in the world, or whose career had
been a disappointment. Such men, where all else failed, could get
themselves admitted into some smaller religious house by the interest of
the patron; sometimes bringing in a trifling addition to the common
property, sometimes simply 'pitchforked' into a vacancy, it is difficult
to say how. Then they became 'brethren' of the monastery, and sharers in
most of the good things that it could offer; they were almost exactly in
the same position as Fellows of Colleges were twenty years ago, holding
their preferment for life, with this difference, that a Fellowship at
the smallest College in Oxford or Cambridge always implied _some_
qualification for the post. A College Fellow, at the worst, must have
had some claims to learning or culture; whe