the same character
as in the usual tenth-century buildings of Southern Gaul. With the
exception of the masonry of its side walls there is nothing in the
existing remains of the abbey church itself earlier than its
reconstruction at the close of the eleventh century. The building has
been so utterly wrecked that little architectural detail is left; but
the broad nave, with its narrow side aisles, the absence, as in the
Aquitanian churches, of triforium and clerestory, and the shortness of
the choir space, give their own individual mark to St. Honorat. Of the
monastic buildings directly connected with the church only a few rooms
remain, and these are destitute of any features of interest. They are
at present used as an orphanage by the Franciscans whom the Bishop of
Frejus, by whom the island was purchased some fifteen years ago, has
settled there as an agricultural colony, and whose reverence for the
relics around them is as notable as their courtesy to the strangers who
visit them. If it is true that the island narrowly escaped being turned
into a tea-garden and resort for picnics by some English speculators, we
can only feel a certain glow of gratitude to the Bishop of Frejus. The
brown train of the eleven brothers as we saw them pacing slowly beneath
the great caroub-tree close to the abbey, or the row of boys blinking in
the sunshine as they repeat their lesson to the lay-brother who acts as
schoolmaster, jar less roughly on the associations of Lerins than the
giggle of happy lovers or the pop of British champagne.

There is little interest in the later story of St. Honorat, from the
days of the Saracen massacre to its escape from conversion into a
tea-garden. The appearance of the Moslem pirates at once robbed it of
its old security, and the cessation of their attacks was followed by new
dangers from the Genoese and Catalans who infested the coast in the
fourteenth century. The isle was alternately occupied by French and
Spaniards in the war between Francis and Charles V.; it passed under the
rule of Commendatory abbots, and in 1789, when it was finally
secularized, the four thousand monks of its earlier history had shrunk
to four. Perhaps the most curious of all the buildings of Lerins is that
which took its rise in the insecurity of its mediaeval existence. The
Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of the church, is
at once a castle and an abbey. Like many of the great monasteries of the
East, it