St. Swithin's might fairly have met its the extreme for any adequate check to enemies in the gate. be kept over the miscellaneous expenses. Such a system, or such a want of system, could hardly work well. It was small wonder indeed that the income of St. Swithin's had declined; the strange thing is that the decline As a matter of fact, it worked exhad not been greater. The whole of tremely badly. To judge from the exits financial administration seems to a isting rolls, the obedientiaries of St. modern eye one might hope to the Swithin's, notoriously wealthy as the eye of a college bursar of the sixteenth house was, moved in an atmosphere of century to have been almost planned perpetual debt. As often as not the with a view to produce insolvency. year's working ended in a loss; oftener Instead of the income of the convent still the balance is on the wrong side. being treated as a whole, and appor- Much of this no doubt was occasioned tioned year by year according to the by unavoidable claims of hospitality, requirements of the several depart- for St. Swithin's stood on the highroad ments, the various estates and sources to southern France; but much, one of income had been, centuries before, cannot help seeing, arose from sheer parcelled out among the various offi- mismanagement. The accounts of alcers, so many to one, so many to an- most every office are loaded and clogged other, and the old method had never with a list of payments mostly to the been abandoned. Each officer had brethren, fees, stipends, courtesies (or thus his own income, and each his own presents of money), pittances (or extra expenditure. A more unfortunate ar- table-expenses), compliments in the rangement could hardly have been shape of wine or beer, fair-money, invented. It took no account of the pocket-money, perquisites of one kind annual variations in expenditure which or another, which, customary as they must and did affect the various offices, may have been, no college auditor in especial such as that of the warden would dream of passing. Almost the of works, who in one year might have whole of the chamberlain's income of no more than a few roof-tiles to re- over £1,000, which was supposed to be fasten, in the next, restorations or ex- devoted to the clothing, bedding, and tensions to the amount of three or four cleanliness of the monks, and which years' income. There was small in- one would have ventured to regard as ducement to watch his expenditure in sufficient to keep some five-and-thirty the one case, still less hope of avoiding men well clad, well bedded, and very debt in the other. The whole char- clean indeed, was frittered away in acter of the duties attached to an office these questionable payments. The might in the course of years completely bishop, for example, received a courchange, but the income must remain tesy of £12, and the prior one of the same. When the officer depended, £40. The brethren have £20 each, by as did for example the almoner, mainly way of pocket-money apparently. The on the produce of a single estate, an chamberlain's fees for himself and seraccident, the breach of a sea-wall or vants (including the "O," or annual the burning of the manorial farm, festival of his office) amounted to over might paralyze his whole department; £55. Presents of wine to the prior, for there was no definite method of the cellarer, the infirmarian, the boymeeting such a disaster. Then again, bishop, the guestmaster, and the breththe income of the priory was collected ren on the mass lists, amount to £7 by half-a-dozen different men, each 16s. These are only samples taken at with his own little bill for the expenses random from a long list. The chamof collection and the supervision of the berlain must have been, one cannot estates, and each from time to time, as help thinking, an extremely popular, as the offices changed hands, hampered by well as an extremely courteous official. ignorance of his new duties. Worst But there was a serious side to the of all, it must have been difficult in question. These illegitimate payments absorbed, in the case of the six offices | The work of the almoner requires of which we have rolls in the late fif- among other servants a sub-almoner, a teenth or sixteenth century, a good eighteen per cent. of the united income. Nor, unless the book-keeping of the priory had improved since the fourteenth century, could the treasurer's cheerful habit of mixing up capital and income, and eking out any deficiency in the latter by the sale of some of the convent property or the grant of an annuity for cash, have tended to improve the priory's financial position. butler, and an accountant, and his annual outfit of cape, tunic, and ridingboots is a serious item (£14); and yet the duties of that officer were, so far as we can ascertain, of the lightest character. The almoner indeed was a sinner against monastic simplicity in more respects than in the costliness of his apparel. His estate of Hinton, conveniently situated some eight miles east of Winchester, was, as Dean Kitchin says, a favorite place of resort for him and his friends; and their annual expenses while staying there, over and above the fare provided by the farmer (and charged against the priory), were no trivial matter. Nor was the almoner by any means alone in his periodical craving for rural pleasures. The accounts are by no means the only unsatisfactory feature in the life of the brethren of St. Swithin's which the rolls present to us. Scandals, we have said, there were none; but it is clear that in more things than revenue had times changed at St. Swithin's since the early days when prior and monks alike took their turns at the To one familiar charge it is satisfacplough or in the bakehouse. The mon- tory to find that the brethren could astery itself, from being the humble plead not guilty. There was no gorabode of poor men, had become a mandizing at St. Swithin's. The seriwealthy and powerful corporation. Its ous meals of the day were two, dinner head had developed into something scarcely less than a great noble, in some cases at least possessed of large private means. He had his own official residence and income, his own household in his livery, and apparently a very definite idea of the dignity which pertained to the office of prior of St. Swithin's. We find him at one time holding his court in full state in St. Giles's Fair, at another with a train of friends and followers making a kind of progress through the monastic estates; not so engrossed in spiritual duties as to be above keeping a few couple of hounds, or turning down hares for coursing. The actual work of the house is now performed by a train of servants; the brethren are no more than the heads of their several departments. The dignity of several of them has become so weighty as to demand an official residence and household, and figures, that would have seemed strange indeed to St. Benedict, appear in the list of wages. The larderer, it seems, cannot get on without a chaplain, a clerk, a bursar, and a groom, to say nothing of a few lesser underlings. at noon and supper between six and seven; besides this there was a bowl of porridge for breakfast, and for any who desired it a cup of ale and a hunch of bread was ready in the refectory at three when the after-dinner sleep was over. The kitchen-bills, it must be allowed, are strangely heavy; £2,100 for the year's fare, exclusive of bread, beer, and wine, to a modern mind would call for liberal reductions. But if the fare was plentiful it certainly was in no sense luxurious, even at Christmas or on the festival of St. Swithin himself; and upon fast-days there is equally plain proof in the daily bills of fare that dinner and supper were each a very sorry business. Fastdays too were disagreeably numerous before the Reformation. There was not only the long season of Lent in which to subdue the wilful appetite, but all Advent and every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday throughout the year. At such seasons the boards must have been painfully bare, for the only admissible catables were fish, eggs, and vegetables, and upon occasion such small mercies as figs or raisius. Thus on Wednesday, November 14th, 1492, | poor nuns in the Sisters' Spital, conthe bill of fare for the two meals was scientiously cutting them down to salt ling, eggs, and an entrée of oysters. half pay when a disaster crippled his On Sundays the diet was rather more finances. The kitchener had no doubt liberal, two or three extra dishes of a large amount of broken meats to disfish being added. But happily the pose of; but so far as can be ascerwhole year was not made up of fast-tained that was the beginning and end days, and for an example of an average of the almsgiving of St. Swithin's.1 As bill of fare we may take that of New for the more serious problems of a Year's Day, 1493. Upon that occasion great city, the world of misery and sin the brethren had for the two meals, which lay outside the convent gates, moile (a dish of grated marrow and the miasma physical and moral, the bread), beef and mutton, numbles (the sickness and disease, the vice and tenderer cuts from a haunch of veni- crime, which haunted the purlieus of a son), steaks as an extra dish, and bread medieval city, there is not the slightest and beer at discretion, as our neighbors trace discernible in the rolls that the say. Sometimes instead of the moile good men at St. Swithin's knew or they had brose, or toasts soaked in the cared anything about them. Still less dripping of the roasting meat; soup was it their business to save souls. often figures as a supper dish; fish- For such work there was the city parballs, or rissoles, tansy pudding, batter, sons, not to speak of the friars. A custards, calves' feet, tripe, all appear pretty thing indeed to expect his reveramong their side-dishes. On festivals ence the vice-prior to take up with there was no more than the slightest open-air preaching at the Butter Cross, increase in the character of the dinner; or the almoner to go exposing himself perhaps a dish of spiced vegetables and to the risk of every new case of fever an extra entrée. in Water Lane. Even with these seventy-two accountrolls before one's eyes in black and white, it is difficult to understand, despite the courtesies and other payments of the kind, how some five-and-thirty monks contrived to get through so large an amount as £18,500 per annum. But one can be clear that there were certain objects upon which the income was not spent. It was not spent upon education. A couple of scholars at Oxford, a very few boys, sometimes not one, in the convent school, was all that was left of St. Swithin's zeal for learning. Nor was it spent upon the poor. It is impossible indeed to discern where at St. Swithin's the monastic poor-relief of which we hear so much comes in. One might suppose that the object of an almoner's office is to distribute alms; but one would be quite in error in attributing such duties to the almoner of St. Swithin's. Upon a few days in the year he gave away, as did the anniversarian and the prior, a good many score of loaves; he made an allowance of clothing and 3s. 6d. a week to each of the fifteen or twenty The impression is in fact forced upon one that there was at St. Swithin's, model house as it may have been, in more ways than one, in the expenditure, in the social life, and in the results, a good deal that must have jarred painfully on the minds of men like Fox and Gardiner; and makes it no wonder that the one devoted to other purposes the college he had designed to found at Oxford for the monks at St. Swithin's, and that the other was turned into an ardent adherent of monastic reform. It is plain that there had been serious mismanagement in the priory's resources; serious carelessness, too, as to running into debt. Its whole system was hopelessly and absurdly antiquated. But that is not all, nor nearly all. It is not what the brethren did so much as what they failed to do, which is in fact the heaviest charge which their 1 It is, however, only fair to point out that there are in the two treasurer's rolls of the thirteenth by the prior, which may include alms in the modcentury a couple of entries of sums of money given ern sense. own accounts lay against them. The usefulness. The new chapter was to priory had completely outgrown or had become something of a theological colforgotten the purposes for which it lege; it was to maintain twelve divinity had been founded. The world had students, pension as many old soldiers, been moving on; they had not only contribute liberally to the poor and to failed to move with it; they had not the making of highways. Pecuniarily even stood still; they had positively they would all, individually as well as receded. They ate and drank and en- collectively, rather gain than lose. joyed their pittances, their afternoon naps, and the services in their glorious church, and made merry at their O's and exchanged their courtesies, sublimely unconscious that a new England had come into being in which they were at best centres of stagnation. It is the intense pettiness, the moral feebleness of these courtesies and pittances in the days when, for example, the New Learning was struggling for existence; it is the utter failure of the house to play the part its founder had designed it to play in the national life, which moves one's indignation. And, as Chaucer's priest asked, "If gold ing an end of the famous shrine of rust, what shall iron do?" If this was the case at one of the intellectual centres of England, what was the state of the provincial convent, buried in the recesses of some remote county? There was not a murmur of resistance to the royal commissioners when they arrived at the priory in 1538. They found the prior and all the couvent, they reported, very conformable. The mayor and citizens, if we are to believe the commissioners' report, were so enthusiastic in their support of the royal intentions as to attend in person and give laud and praise to God and the King's Majesty. Conformable as the convent might be, and well assured as their future was, it must have been a sore wrench to them to watch through the night these royal iconoclasts mak St. Swithin's, in which the commissioners were disgusted to find no gold nor jewels, and in the domestic portion of the convent, owing to the foresight of the late prior, so little plate that they Probably the brethren of St. Swith-could not in common decency make it in's felt something of this themselves. less. The church-plate proper, crosses Certainly they had no opposition to and images, chalices, pectorals, candleoffer to the royal scheme by which they sticks, paxes turned out better. Much were converted into a dean aud of it was wrought in gold, in particular chapter. Probably, too, the knowl- part of the high altar, which the comedge of the summary way in which the missioner pulled down, grumbling Tudor sovereigns were apt to take sorely at their trouble, after the deorder with people who kicked against struction of St. Swithin's shrine, the pricks, was not without its effects though they were careful to protest on their deliberations. A more potent against the imputation that they did it reason was the excellent terms which more for the sake of the treasure than Bishop Gardiner had secured for them. for destroying "the abomination of The change was rather to be a change idolatry." Altogether the royal treasin name than in reality. Prior Kings-ury did not do badly. In spite of its mill was to become the "first original metallic deficiencies the shrine turned and modern dean; " room would be found among the twelve prebendaries and twelve peticanons for such monks as cared to continue the religious life. There was no question of any change in beliefs; to some considerable extent the old common life, or as much of it as still survived, was to be kept up. There would be increased freedom certainly, and increased opportunities of out to be worth some £16,000; and the total amount of treasure which passed into the royal coffers was, 1,035 ounces of gold, 13,886 ounces of silver gilt, and three hundred ounces of silver and parcel gilt, to say nothing of certain crosses of emerald and gold which seem to have miscarried; in all cousiderably more in modern values than £75,000. hated By the early months of 1541 all was no Frenchman, but of the at an end. The priory and all its pos- Piedmontese - rivals in life, and, there sessions had been surrendered to the in Grasse at least, rivals of necessity in king; and by letters patent of March | labor. Indoors, it was a sorrow to be 28th, 1541, St. Swithin's, under its new brooded on, and it made a dire lonelititle of the Church of the Holy Trinity, ness. purged of its "idolatry " and with the great bulk of its old estates and something more re-granted to it, was free to enter upon the career of enlarged use-Months passed, and life became enfulness which had been marked out for it. From The Nineteenth Century. A DREAM OF PROVENCE. ORGEAS and Miradou had lived together together with no third since the mother had gone from them; and that was thirteen years ago, when Miradou was five. Since then it was her father who had cared for her; the mother's name was never named between them. Had she died amongst them in her recognized place, they must from time to time have talked of her, as well as mourned. Those two hearts, made for affection-made for it so much that it was the air they breathed, the bread they fed on must have kept of her their tenderest memory. Death, had he come to her there, could never have really separated them could not have banished her from all their thought. Some communion still was possible. But the mother had no likeness to these two. Callous at first, and then a disgrace and a humiliation, she had gone out of their lives forever. One luminous night, between two shining days of August, she and a Piedmontese lover had tramped towards Italy - by the long mule paths (was it?) and the olive groves, and then by the bare hills. The foreman came home from the printing press, and none but the little child was at home to greet him. But the child had taken her place. durable - years, and life became sweet. Parents and children, in France, are the best of friends, generally; even when no special circumstance and no peculiar demand for affection bring them more closely together. With Orgeas there was the special circumstance and the peculiar demand. Link upon link was formed, of interest, kindness, and association. That was the visible chain. But the invisible? Well they were parent and child, with a mysterious and profound affinity. As Orgeas was not wanting in imagination, for a man of his class, he recognized that if, because of his deep love of her, Miradou sufficed for him, not in a measure quite so unlimited could he suffice for Miradou. Her childish instinct for comradeship, her girlish longing for the confidence and gaiety that may exist between equals, Orgeas never restrained. She was helpful at home, in all material things, and in her recognition of his love for her altogether responsive. But there was no excuse for laying on her few young years the burden of later times. She was happy at home; and beyond home, in the great sunshine, in the sparkling southern day, Miradou, with her clear eyes and all her figure's lines, laughed herself into womanhood. Yet if, since childhood, she had known no trouble greater than the little bafflings which give a piquancy to attained pleasure, and no exertion harder than the labor which just sweetens rest, it was not circumstances that were at the bottom of that; no outside influence - not even a father's -had brought it about; it was not In Grasse, produced to order. Some of her happy course, to the fa At first, of course, to Orgeas, the disaster had seemed irreparable. Out of doors, a shame greatest of all because the lover was no Grassois and 1 The masculine termination of the feminine name is a Provençal characteristic. Ave Maria! is Vou saludi Mario! days she owed, of |