from Montargis, on the road to Lyons. Vezelay, founded in the ninth century by Count Gerard de Rousillon, so celebrated in old romance, was eight leagues distant from Auxerre. Aureliac, founded by St. Gerald, count of Aurelia, was in the diocese of Clermont. On seeing that little islet of Lerins, on the coast of Antibes, with its arid fields and its meagre tufts of pines, one could never divine the part which this spot of earth played in the history of Christianity in Gaul, from the year 410, when St. Honorat first retired to a hermitage there. But here stood the renowned monastery which was built soon after, from which so many saints were drawn. Bec, founded by Herluin, in 1040, where Lanfranc and Anselm were priors, was in the diocese of Rouen, on the little river Bec, eight leagues west from that city. Faremoutier, founded by St. Fare in 617, was in Brie, on the river Morin, five leagues from Meaux. Flay was in the diocese of Beauvais. Fontevrauld was on the borders of Poitou towards Angou, in the diocese of Poitiers. Liessies, where Louis of Blois was abbot, founded in 751 by Count Wigbert, is in the diocese of Cambray, in Hainault, five miles from Avennes. Premontré, chosen by St. Norbert, for the central house of his order, was in a valley in the forest of Coucy, in the diocese of Laon, which was a desert in the beginning of the twelfth century.

Cisteaux, the mother house of the order, founded by Odo, duke of Burgundy, in 1098, was five leagues from Dijon, in the diocese of Chalons. La Ferté was the first branch house, founded by the Seigneurs de Vergy. The second was at Pontigny, in Champagne, on the river Serain, one league from Ligny-le-Chateau, and four-and-a-half from Auxerre. The third daughter was Clairvaulx, founded in 1115, by Thibaud, count of Champagne. This abbey stood on the river Aube. Morimond, the fourth daughter, founded in 1115 by Odolricus de Agrimont, was on the borders of Lorraine and Burgundy. From these four houses all the Cistercian abbeys in the world took their origin.* Molesme was in Champagne, three leagues from Chatillon-sur-Seine. Cluny was on the river Grone, on the borders of the duchy of Burgundy, five leagues from Mâcon, and fifteen from Lyons. Paray-le-Monial was in Charolais; St. Selectus was near Narbonne; Bourgeul was on the Loire; Malliac, founded in 990, was near Poitiers; St. Columban was in Sens; St. Maglor, founded in 979, and St Mary des Champs in 994, were in Paris: and St. Albin, founded in 966, was in Anjou. Of the origin of the Spanish monasteries, which was later, writers of that kingdom give us this account. They relate, that in the sixth century, Donetus, a monk and disciple of a certain hermit in Africa, foreseeing the violence of the barbarous nations, fled in a ship into Spain with seventy monks, and a quantity of manuscripts. In Spain he was received by an illustrious and religions woman, Minicea, and there he built the monastery of Servitanum, which was the first monastery in Spain. Of these I shall only mention the monastery of Alcoba, so magnificent,

*Notitiæ Abbat. Ord. Cist. per Universum Orbem Lib. i. Hildephons. vitiæ Illust, Episcop. Hisp.

so fruitful in learning, so venerable in antiquity," in which," says John of Bruges, "you discern the authority and sanctity of St. Bernard, and the grandeur of Kings Alfonso and Henry."*

Among the German monasteries of renown, the site of a few of the most illustrious must be present to every one's recollection. The most celebrated," as Trithemius says, 66 were Fulda, founded by St. Boniface, in Franconia towards Hesse and Thuringia. The abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul in Weissenburg, in the diocese of Spires, founded by King Dagobert; that of St. Alban, near Mayence, founded by ancient kings of France; that of St. Gall in Suabia; that of Reichnaw, near Constance, founded by Pirminius, disciple of St. Maur; that of Hirsfeld, four miles from Fulda, founded by St. Lullus; that of St. Mathias, near Treves, the most ancient of all the Teutonic houses; Mediolacensis, in Lorraine, founded by St. Lutwin, who from being duke became a monk and abbot, and archbishop of Treves; the abbeys of St. Maurice at Dolegia, in the diocese of Treves; that of Stavelot, in the diocese of Liege, four leagues from Spa, of immense fame; that of New Corby, in Saxony, founded by the abbot of Corby, in Piccardy, from which came forth apostles to many nations; that of St. Maximinus, near the walls of Treves, which some think existed in the time of Constantine, and in which certainly there were monks in the time of St. Augustin; the abbey of Prum, in the forest of Ardennes, in a valley on the little river Prum, founded in 721 by Bertrade, grandmother of Berta, wife of King Pepin, who had a castle one league from the place, of which Assuerus, count of Anjou, was the first abbot, and Hirschau, eight miles from Spires, founded in 830 by Erlafred, count of Calba, with his sons Nottung and Ermendred, and restored by Pope Leo IX., who was of the family of Dagburgh, and Adelbert, count of Calba, with Wiltrude, his most devout wife.†

Other great Teutonic houses were Gembloux, in a hollow four leagues to the north-west from Namur, founded in 992, by St. Guibert, seigneur de Gembloux, who formed it out of the castle in which he was born. Villers, one of the most illustrious abbeys, not only of Brabant, but of the whole Cistercian order, on account of the great men it has given to the church, seated in a gorge between two mountains, on the way to Nivelle. The Benedictine Abbey of St. Vaast at Arras, which dated from the seventh century, when the successor of St. Aubert, Bishop of Arras, built it over the oratory where the saint was buried; Lobes, founded in 540 by St. Landelin on the Sambre, four leagues from Philippeville, in the diocese of Cambray; Quedlinbourg, in Saxony, in the diocese of Halberstad, founded by blessed Matilda, queen of Germany, and King Henry the Fowler, her husband, of which the abbess was the first princess of the empire; Selingstad, in the diocese of Mayence, founded by Eginhard ; Steinfeldt, in the diocese of Cologne, to which retired the blessed Herman Joseph, at the age of twelve, and the three foundations

*

Joan. Vasai Brug. Rer. Hispan. Chronic. iii.

Trithem, in Chronic. Hirsaugiensis.

of King Dagobert, Elvonensis, in which he was buried, Blandinum near Ghent, and St. Bavon, so called from Count Bavo, who there deposed his knightly arms, became a monk, and died in sanctity.

Of the monasteries in the British islands, two of the most illustrious were Bangor in Ireland founded in the fifth century by St. Comgall, a disciple of Finstan, in the county of Down in Ulster, not far from the sea, where the passage to Scotland was short, and Bangor in Wales, in Flintshire, which Bede calls the most renowned cloister of the Britons, and which was organized and flourishing, when St. Augustin came from Rome.

Here, as indeed in nearly all other countries, the foundation of monasteries was simultaneous with the first preaching of the gospel. The abbey of Glastonbury dates from about the year 300; that of Sherborn in Dorsetshire from 370. The first notice of Dryburgh is prior to the year 522, when St. Moden was its abbot, under whose invocation was one of its chapels. The great St. Columbkill alone founded above an hundred abbeys in Ireland, England, and Scotland, and other islands depending on them. Ireland was covered with these pacific retreats ; which yet were continually multiplying, until the sinister epoch of Henry VIII., whose agents on their arrival found the monks rebuilding many abbeys with greater magnificence than before. In England, however, as we learn from Bede, there were not in the seventh century many monasteries, so that numbers of English nobles and others passed into France, which abounded with them, to retire into abbeys there. "At that time," he says, "the noble princess Eartongathe, daughter of Earcombert, king of Kent, passed the seas and came into France, for the purpose of learning to serve God in such a school of sanctity." Still, even in the seventh century we find several religious houses founded, as those of Chertsey in Surrey, in 666; Barking in Essex, in 680; Malmesbury in Wiltshire, in 670; Gloucester, in 680; St. Swithin in Winchester, in 634; St. Austin at Canterbury, in 605; Dorchester in Oxfordshire, in 635. The most celebrated, which date from the eighth century, were the abbey of Abingdon in Berkshire, founded in 720; those of Winchcomb and Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, in 787 and 715; that of St. Alban in Hertfordshire, in 755; and that of Croyland in Lincolnshire, in 716. The abbeys of Thorney in Cambridgeshire, of Tavistock in Devonshire, and of St. Cuthbert in Durham, date from the ninth century. These were all of the Benedictine order: the abbey of Ramsay in Huntingdonshire, was not founded till the tenth century.

The Cistercians, who possessed so many illustrious houses in England, were first called into it by a noble Englishman, Walter Espec, in 1125, under King

Henry I., to whom there exists a letter from St. Bernard. The first abbey was Furnes, in the diocese of York, and the second Rievaux.*

Such then were a few of the most eminent of these places esteemed divine, and

*Notitia Abb. Ord. Cister. viii

consequently places of divine peace, because, as Hugo of St. Victor says, places cannot be divine, unless they be places of quiet and of peace.* Truly, well might that dove which in its flight marked the circuit of the projected mona-tery of Hautvilliers, be interpreted as signifying the tranquil reign of innocence which was there about to commence ; and one might have accepted as a general denomination, for all similar retreats, the title given to the celebrated monastery of Gomon, on the coast of Bithynia, at the mouth of the Euxine, which was expressly called by the monks, in reference to the tranquillity enjoyed within it, Irene, or the place of peace. The mountain of Pozaytie in Poland, near the river Niem in Lithuania, accordingly changed its name for that of the Mount of Peace, when a Camaldolese monastery was built upon it, by Christopher de Pazzi, grand chancellor of the duke of Lithuania, of the noble Florentine race which had been banished in the preceding century. I might have noticed many other monasteries of equal celebrity, the histories of which, as Fauriel says of the abbeys of Conques, of Aniane, and of St. Guillem-du-Desert, belong essentially to the general history of the country in which they were seated, and even to that of Europe. The monastery of Oliva, for instance, is as closely connected with the history of Prussia as Mount-Cassino is with that of Italy. The interest of many collections of French annals, grows pale before the historical grandeur of St. Medard at Soissons, founded by Clotaire I. where St. Boniface, the apostle of Germany, crowned Pepin, king of the Francs, which Charlemagne favored, which was in turns the beloved retreat of Louis-le-Débonnaire, and the scene of his misfortunes. But these names alone will suffice to bear out my assertion, that the monastic institute, containing, as we shall shortly prove, a whole race of men eminently peaceful, apart from all others that we noticed in the last book, was of such wide diffusion and of such importance in each locality, that half at least of a history of Catholic manners, in regard to the beatitude of the pacific, must be devoted to their consideration. In fact, it embraced millions of men dispersed over the earth, living united and pacifically, tranquil, laborious, obedient, and free.

That the monastic profession was synonymous with a devoted love of peace and of its diffusion, might easily be inferred from what we met with in the last book. Though the complete appreciation of the fact will best be attained after concluding the present, it may be well to commence it by adducing to the point some express testimony. Now from the very nature of the institution, its instructors argue that the object and result must have been pacific; for "from obedience, which was its key-stone," says St. John Climachus, "springs humility, and from humility a placid tranquillity of mind."§ "All perturbations," as Cicero remarks," arise from the will and from an opinion." The stoics said that their fountain was intemperance, and a departure from right reason. Accordingly,

* Annot. in Cœlest. Hier. † Annal, Camaldul. Lib. 77. Hist. de la Gaul, Mérid. iii. 844. Grad- iv.

Tuscul. iv.

in the part of the soul which was reasonable the Pythagoreans placed tranquillity, placid, quiet, and constancy of mind. The monastic rule requiring a life su eminently reasonable, averse to self-will, and the influence of private opinion, to impatience and intemperance in every form, could not, therefore, but conduce to that true and placid rest ascribed to those who embraced it in ages of faith, which, as Paschasius Radbert says, "reason every where composes, and the serenity of religion commends."* Accordingly, we find, that peace is always represented as the chief characteristic of the monastic state. St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Augustin, are never weary repeating that it is this, above all things, which recommends it to the human race. So it continued to be in every age. We find a letter from the celebrated abbot of Corby, Wibald, to the monks of Hastières, with this superscription, "To the prior and the brethren of that place, Deo et paci militantibus."+ When one of the courtiers of the emperor Frederic II. was moved to embrace the monastic habit, St. Francis gave him the title of Brother Pacific, to express that he had escaped from the world's turmoils and pageantries. Vincent of Beauvais, or his continuator, styling monks the true pacific, applies to them the epithets in holy writ, of "glorious men, rich in virtue, studious of beauty, living at peace in their domains, and obtaining glory in the generations of their nation."+

"Behold men without contestations," exclaims the Church, in reference to those who chiefly came from amongst them, "true worshippers of God, keeping themselves pure from all evil work, and continuing in their innocence." "Many things might be said in his praise," says a monk of Villers, of Charles, the eighth abbot of that house, in the seventh century, "but there is one of which we should make especial mention that never, from the day when he first entered the order, did the sun set upon his wrath; but, considering that he was bound by the monastic vow, he forgave, with the utmost benignity, all excesses committed against him, watching carefully over the purity of his conscience and the tranquillity of his heart" that is, he realized the monastic ideal: he was the type of the institution. In effect, as the rule of the seraphic father expressly requires, "monks of every order were to be at peace with those who hated peace;" when they went through the world they were not to litigate, nor to contend with words, but to be mild and pacific.|| "Now I counsel, admonish, and exhort my brethren in our Lord Jesus Christ, that when they go through the world, they should not quarrel nor contend with words, nor judge others, but that they should-be meek, peaceful, modest, tractable, and humble, gently speaking to all as is right." They were to have a pacific heart towards those who disturbed their peace, towards those who hated peace. Of the pacific, who say with our modern writers of the Anglican school, that "in times of peace, with peaceful men, no temper of mind should be more en

* Vit Wale. Ap. Martene, Vet. Script. et Mon. collect. ii. 450. § Hist. Mon. Villar. ap. Martene Thes. Auec. iii.

Spec. Mor. i. part. iv.

| Reg. S. Franc. c. 3.