he might find a lodging.

"I know of none,"

me

said the shepherd, "unless it be in a place watered by springs in the lands of the powerful vassal Weissart."-" Canst thou show the way to it?" asked the saint. "I cannot leave my flock," replied the shepherd. Deicole thrust his staff into the ground, and the shepherd on his return from showing the saint the way, found his sheep lying quietly around the miraculous staff. Weissart, the cruel castellan, threatens vengeance against Deicole; but his wife Berthilde has a great veneration for the minister of God. Deicole enters the castle; the serfs eagerly come forward to help him off with his cloak he declines their aid, and hangs it up on one of the sun's rays, which entered through the loop-hole of a tower. (Boll. t. 11, p. 202.)

Giraldus, a native of Wales, relates in his Topography of Ireland, that, St. Kewen being at prayer with outstretched hands, a swallow entered at the window of his cell, and laid an egg in one of his hands. The saint did not drop his hand, nor did he close it, till the swallow had laid all her eggs

and hatched her brood.

In memory of this act of kindness and patience,

the statue of the hermit in Ireland is holding å swallow in one hand.

The Abbot Turketull had in his possession one of St. Bartholomew's thumbs, and he used it to sign himself in times of danger from storms and lightning.

:

The barbarians were fond of hermits. They were soldiers of different classes, equally tried, equally hardy, with themselves, sleeping on the ground, dwelling upon the rock, delighting in distant pilgrimages, in the vastness of deserts and forests. Thus hermits conducted battles encamping at night in cemeteries, they there composed and sang to the armed multitude the Dies ira and the Stabat mater. The Anglo-Saxons beheld no fewer than ten kings and eleven queens forsake the world and retire into convents. We must beware, however, of suffering ourselves to be misled by words: these queens were wives of pirate Northmen, arriving in barks, keeping their wedding in chariots, like the daughters of Clodion the Hairy, fair and beautiful Norwegian women, who had given up the gods of the Edda for the God of the Gospel, and the Walkiries for angels.

MIDDLE AGES.

MANNERS CONTINUED.

VIGOUR AND END OF THE BARBAROUS AGES.

To endeavour to sketch methodically a picture of the manners of those times would be at once to attempt an impossibility and to belie the confusion of those manners. On the contrary, all those scenes must be thrown pell-mell, just as they followed each other, without order, or were entangled in one common action, at one and the same moment. There was no unity, but in the general impulsion which carried society onward to improvement, by the natural law of human existence.

On the one hand chivalry, on the other the insurrection of the rustic population, all sorts

of licentiousness in the clergy, together with all the ardour of religion. Itinerant monks, travelling on foot or riding on sorry mules, preached against all these scandals, and were burned alive for their pains by the priests, whom they reproached for their dissolute lives, and drowned by the princes whose tyranny they attacked. Gentlemen, lying in wait near the high roads, robbed travellers, whilst other gentlemen became in Spain, in Greece, in Dalmatia, lords of renowned cities, to whose history they were utter strangers. There were courts of love, in which arguments were held agreeably to all the rules of Scottism, and of which the canons were members; troubadours and minstrels, roving from castle to castle, lashing the men in satires, praising the ladies in ballads; citizens divided into guilds, holding festivals in honour of their patrons, in which the saints of Paradise were mingled with the deities of fable; dramatic representations, miracles and mysteries in churches; feasts of fools; sacrilegious masses; gravy soups eaten upon the altar; the Ite missa est responded to by the three brayings of an ass; barons and knights engaging at these mysterious repasts to make war upon nations,

vowing upon a peacock or a heron to fight to the death for their ladye-loves; Jews slaughtered and slaughtering one another, conspiring with lepers to poison the wells and springs; tribunals of all sorts, sentencing, by virtue of all kinds of laws, to all sorts of punishments, accused persons of all classes, from the heretic flayed and burned alive, to adulterers bound together naked and led in public through the crowd; the complaisant judge, substituting an innocent prisoner, instead of the wealthy murderer, condemned to die; to crown the confusion, to complete the contrast, the old society civilized after the manner of the ancients perpetuating itself in the abbeys; the students at the universities reviving the philosophic disputes of Greece; the tumult of the schools of Athens and Alexandria mingling with the din of tournaments, feasts, and tiltings. Lastly, place, above and out of this so agitated society, another principle of action, a tomb the object of all affections, of all regrets, of all hopes, which was incessantly drawing beyond sea sovereigns and subjects, the valiant and the guilty, the former to seek enemies, kingdoms, adventures, the latter to fulfil vows, to atone for crimes, to appease remorse-and you have a picture of the middle ages.