ing him to
mastership, will you make a conflagration, a parish-curse or
world-curse of him?

Chapter X

Government

How Abbot Samson, giving his new subjects seriatim the kiss of
fatherhood in the St. Edmundsbury chapterhouse, proceeded with
cautious energy to set about reforming their disjointed
distracted way of life; how he managed with his Fifty rough
_Milites_ (Feudal Knights), with his lazy Farmers, remiss
refractory Monks, with Pope's Legates, Viscounts, Bishops, Kings;
how on all sides he laid about him like a man, and putting
consequence on premiss, and everywhere the saddle on the right
horse, struggled incessantly to educe organic method out of
lazily fermenting wreck,--the careful reader will discern, not
without true interest, in these pages of Jocelin Boswell. In
most antiquarian quaint costume, not of garments alone, but of
thought, word, action, outlook and position, the substantial
figure of a man with eminent nose, bushy brows and clear-flashing
eyes, his russet beard growing daily greyer, is visible, engaged
in true governing of men. It is beautiful how the chrysalis
governing-soul, shaking off its dusty slough and prison, starts
forth winged, a true royal soul! Our new Abbot has a right
honest unconscious feeling, without insolence as without fear or
flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell
the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal
there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain
unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to
expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them
of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we
said, who can suffer from them, and for them; bear the burden
their poor spindle-limbs totter and stagger under; and in virtue
_thereof_ govern them, lead them out of weakness into strength,
out of defeat into victory!

One of the first Herculean Labours Abbot Samson undertook, or the
very first, was to institute a strenuous review and radical
reform of his economics. It is the first labour of every
governing man, from _Paterfamilias_ to _Dominus Rex._ To get the
rain thatched out from you is the preliminary of whatever
farther, in the way of speculation or of action, you may mean to
do. Old Abbot Hugo's budget, as we saw, had become empty, filled
with deficit and wind. To see his account-books clear, be
delivered from those ravening flights of Jew an