d semper, quod ab omnibus,"
is the rule of Vincent of Lerins; its monk Salvian painted the agony of
the dying Empire in his book on the government of God; the long fight of
semi-Pelagianism against the sterner doctrines of Augustin was chiefly
waged within its bounds.

Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more famous period of the
monastic history of Lerins which extends to the massacre of its monks by
Saracen pirates at the opening of the eighth century. The very look of
the island has been changed by the revolutions of the last hundred
years. It is still a mere spit of sand, edged along the coast with
sombre pines; but the whole of the interior has been stripped of its
woods by the agricultural improvements which are being carried on by the
Franciscans who at present possess it, and all trace of solitude and
retirement has disappeared. A well in the centre of the island and a
palm-tree beside the church are linked to the traditional history of the
founders of the abbey. Worked into the later buildings we find marbles
and sculptures which may have been brought from the mainland, as at
Torcello, by fugitives who had escaped the barbaric storm. A bas-relief
of Christ and the Apostles, which is now inserted over the west gate of
the church, and a column of red marble which stands beside it, belong
probably to the earliest days of the settlement at Lerins. In the little
chapels scattered over the island fragments of early sarcophagi,
inscriptions, and sculpture have been industriously collected and
preserved. But the chapels themselves are far more interesting than
their contents. Of the seven which originally lined the shore, two or
three only now remain uninjured; in these the building itself is either
square or octagonal, pierced with a single rough Romanesque window, and
of diminutive size. The walls and vaulting are alike of rough
stonework. The chapels served till the Revolution as seven stations
which were visited by the pilgrims to the island, but we can hardly
doubt that in these, as in the Seven Chapels at Glendalough, we see
relics of the earlier coenobitic establishment.

The cloister of the abbey is certainly of a date later than the massacre
of the monks, which took place according to tradition in the little
square of wild greensward which lies within it; but the roughness of its
masonry, the plain barrel roof, and the rude manner in which the low,
gloomy vaulting is carried round its angles, are of