f cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and
wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof
from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept
up) a perpetual ooze; for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through
which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light. Such as
they are, a well-kept dog would object to accept a night's lodging in
them; and if they had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic
tongues would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger perhaps
supposes that they were the very dungeons of which he has heard such
terrible things. He asks his guide, and his guide tells him they were
the monks' dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping
roof above them, was the self-chosen home of those poor men. Through
winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer sunshine,
generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at
last lay down and died.

It is all gone now--gone as if it had never been; and it was as foolish
as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would have been mischievous, to
revive a devotional interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have
produced but one more unreality in an age already too full of such. No
one supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived; that any
man, however earnest in his religion, would have gone looking for earth
floors and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he could get
anything better. Either we are wiser, or more humane, or more
self-indulgent; at any rate we are something which divides us from
mediaeval Christianity by an impassable gulf which this age or this epoch
will not see bridged over. Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists,
however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected, and were
endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in our educational system; a
very serious blank indeed, and one which, somehow, we must contrive to
get filled if the education of character is ever to be more than a name
with us. To try and teach people how to live without giving them
examples in which our rules are illustrated, is like teaching them to
draw by the rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without
designs in which to study the effects; or to write verse by the laws of
rhyme and metre, without song or poem in which rhyme and metre are
exhibited. It is a principle which we have forgotten, and it is one
which the old Catholics did n