Gregory the Great was conferred on him by Pope Pius the Ninth.

It was for the ruined Church of Vergt, near Périgord, that he recited one of his happiest compositions, "La Gleyzo Descapelado" -the unroofed church.

I was naked; and never can I forget how, in my boyhood, the Church many a time clothed me. Now, in my manhood, I find her bare, and I would cover her in my turn. O give, then, give, all of you, that I may have the joy of doing once for her what she has so often done for me!

The tower of the Church of Vergt is called "le clocher de Jasmin," and his name is carved upon it. The last acts of Jasmin, whom Lamartine called, "the truest of modern poets," were for the poor and suffering, and his last poem, an Act of Faith. After his holy death, Cardinal Donnet, of Bordeaux, spoke of him as the "St. Vincent de Paul of Poesy;" and the comparison has a peculiar fitness. The poems of Jasmin reveal in their author the soul of a child, the heart of a woman, and the strong and sober intellect of a man. Their most sparkling gaiety is always pure, and their seriousness never degenerates into morbid gloom. The stream, whether in sunshine, or shade, flows on, fresh, full, and clear, into the boundless sea.

ART. V.-ARCHBISHOP LANFRANC AND HIS
MODERN CRITICS.

PROPOSE to weave a few discursive pages, which shall relate, directly or indirectly, to Archbishop Lanfranc, a character whom it has, of late years, been rather the fashion to decry; and I address myself to the task, not as his apologist, not as his admirer, not as his votary, but as hoping to show how very materially our estimate of men who lived in a very different age and under very different circumstances from our own may be modified by the labor improbus which busies itself with minutia that lie along the paths of historical inquiry.

The net result of the generally received accounts of Lanfranc is pretty much as follows:-That, despite the advantages of noble birth and polite education, an education which set him secure from the worst dangers peculiar to court and camp, he had so far

you have made your gifts a beneficent power; and your muse is a Sister of Charity." In fact, between 1825 and 1854, Jasmin gave no less than twelve thousand "Readings" for benevolent purposes.

*He died in 1854.

neglected his highest interests as, when between forty and fifty years of age, to be unable to say his prayers, and that only when in peril of death from cold, from hunger, and from the beasts of the forest, was he alarmed into the resolution of leading a better life; that, delivered from his terrible danger, he retired to a cloister, whence, after some years, he only too willingly emerged to do what might be possible to a monk, but would have been impossible to a man of honour; that, having thus won the confidence of William, then Duke of Normandy, and subsequently King of the English, he devoted himself ever after to the service of that prince, and signalized his tenure of the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury by conduct, which, however pleasing to his patron, was unfriendly to the English people and disloyal to the Apos tolic See.

And, first, as to an inconsiderable detail, the social advantages of his birth. In a letter to Queen Margaret of Scotland [Ep. 61] he speaks of himself as ignobilis. The description is absolute and unqualified-"hominem extraneum, vilem, ignobilem." Orderic, however, who was very precise in matters of this kind, and was for many reasons unlikely to make mistakes in this particular instance, tells us that he was "ex nobili parentelá ortus, Papiæ civibus." The solution of the difficulty is, I apprehend, very simple. The meaning of the substantive nobilis is one and invariable; the meaning of the adjective nobilis is manifold. John Gilpin was not a nobilis, but he was a citizen of credit and renown; and being a citizen of credit and renown was precisely what Orderic and his contemporaries would have described by the phrase nobilis civis. Our Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths was not at its institution designed to comprise none but men of birth; and yet its constituent members, though not nobiles, were all of them, no doubt, nobiles aurifabri, and the Corporation itself a nobile collegium aurifabrorum. In short, a nobilis miles is a gallant knight; a nobilis ecclesia, a venerable church; a nobilis sonipes, a prancing steed; a nobilis senator, a wor shipful alderman, or an honourable member, or a noble lord; a nobilis civis a worthy citizen; a nobilis grammaticus, a ripe scholar; and so on; the meaning of the adjective ever varying in accordance with that of its substantive, just as the colour of the chameleon changes with the food on which that reptile feeds.

Lanfranc's relations at Pavia were, nobiles cives; but they were not nobiles. They would seem also to have been men of robust physique, and no one phrase could more aptly express these two ideas than that of nobilis parentela.

But enough of this. More important considerations await us. in respect of Lanfranc's career, first as monk and then as prelate. The story of his conversion from the secular state to the religious,

as told in Gilbert Crispin's "Life of Abbot Herlwin," differs somewhat from the account preserved in the "Chronicon Beccense;" but the two narratives are easily harmonized. According to most of our modern writers the resultant of the two narratives is to this effect. After a brilliant and successful career at Avranchesin the quality of public lecturer on the liberal arts Lanfranc set forth, no one knows why, on a journey to Rouen, inflated with intellectual pride, and worldly-minded to the core. All went well until one evening when, having crossed the river Risle, he fell amongst thieves, who stripped him naked and tied him to a tree. It had not been their first intention to treat him thus, but only to rob him of what he had about him; which cannot have been much if, as Sir F. Palgrave has it, he "tramped" instead of riding; but he annoyed them by offering them his cloak, which they had been generous enough to remit him. So then, the common account continues, they stripped him naked, and beat him, and tied him to a tree. They likewise tied his clericus or clerk to another tree. According to some, it was as night approached, according to others, it was as day drew nigh, that he took it into his head to say his prayers, when he found, to his confusion, that he did. not know them. "Il voulut réciter par cœur quelques prières vocales, et il fut confus de n'en savoir aucune," so says the Père Longueval; and so say numberless others, down to M. de Remusat, who informs us that "l'érudit, le jurisconsulte, le philosophe Lanfranc ne savait pas une prière par cœur," and to M. de Crozals, who only the other day wrote as follows:-" Le savant professeur ne trouve dans sa mémoire aucune prière. Jamais. jusque là il n'avait mis ses pensées à Dieu." And, of our own contemporaries here at home, the Dean of St. Paul's says that he "could remember nothing, neither psalm nor office," whilst the less merciful Mr. Freeman describes him as "ignorant of Scripture and Divine things;" and Dean Hook, least accurate and least merciful of all, not satisfied with confusing the two. accounts, ties him to the tree, naked, but with his cap on his head

a new and original translation of cappa-and unable to repeat a single "prayer, psalm, or hymn," so careless had he been of "the affairs of his soul!" But I must continue the story as usually told. The ungodly professor, mortified and alarmed at finding that he was little better than a heathen, now proposed a sort of compromise to heaven. Let God deliver him, and he would turn monk. The deliverance was granted; and no sooner were his own bonds loosed than he untied his clerk and-proh pudor-presented himself in naturalibus, naked but not ashamed, naked and without apology, to the abbot of the nearest monastery, Herlwin, Abbot of Le Bec.

Now, the truth is that Lanfranc, so far from being eaten up

with pride and all the rest of it, when he set forth on his memorable journey, had long indulged a very different frame of mind. He was already bent upon leaving the world, as the most earnest people of the time were wont to do; and had only delayed, as being uncertain whether to live as a recluse, as a monk, or as a hermit. He had had enough of crowded lecture-rooms and rounds of applause, and was resolved that, should he choose the cloister in preference to the hospice or the hermitage, he would enter some obscure little monastery, none of whose inmates was by any means likely to know who he was; and all this, not from satiety of renown, but because half-and-half sacrifices are of little value, if any.

To suppose that such a man, after such convictions undergone, and after such a resolution taken, should know so little of Divine things as not to be able to say a single prayer, is really too ridiculous.

He had not crossed the Risle when the robbers waylaid him; he was ultra fluvium Rislam to the historians who wrote at Le Bec, and therefore on the western side, the side towards Avranches. Neither did the robbers tie him to a tree naked. Is time so precious that none of us have ever yet stopped to reflect what the consequences of such exposure from sunset to dawn would be in such a climate as that of Normandy, and in the damp air of the basin of the Risle? Is time so precious that we have all forgotten how Virgil words his precept to plough and to sow when the winter's cold has so far abated that you may do so without special protective covering?

I do not remember to have come across any passage, in so much as I know of the literature of Lanfranc's contemporaries and near successors, in which the word nudus must of necessity mean naked; aud I fail to see why that literature, if it be worth reading at all, should not be read with the same sort of care as we bestowed on the Georgics when we were at school. St. Anselm in one of his dialogues (De Casu Diaboli, I.) speaks of a monk without his frock as nudus; and Guibert of Nogent (De Vita Suâ, IX.) employs the word to describe a knight without his armour-nudum se eorum misericordiæ proposuit. What the robbers did was to keep the old cloak (vetus chlamys) which Lanfranc had offered them, in the vain hope of recovering the bulk of his baggage; but they stripped him of nothing, and nudus is the very word by which to describe a man who has been deprived of the protective covering with which he had intended to keep off the keen night air.

And now for his carelessness about his soul, and his ignorance of Scripture and Divine things, of psalms and hymns and offices. It was evening when he was tied to the tree; and tied to that

tree he stood, wearied, famished, and in danger of death, "revolving the sad vicissitude of things," and the vanity of human ambition. He could but guess, and vaguely guess, the passage of the hours, unless, indeed, the overhanging foliage was sparse enough, and the night clear enough, for him to see something of the firmament. Still, the hours passed away, until, to his joy, the faintest, tenderest gleam of reviving day lived in the sky, when, with the devotion of a man who was already a monk at heart, he began to recite the two monastic offices of what are now called matins and lauds, but were then termed laudes nocturnæ and laudes matutina. These I need not particularly describe; suffice it to say that, apart from hymns, versicles, responses, and antiphons, they comprise, as described in the "Rule of St. Benedict," in addition to the Te Deum, the Benedicite, and the Benedictus, no less than one-and-twenty psalms and two lessons out of St. Paul's Epistles. All this the half-dead captive endeavoured to recite from memory, and failed; and because he failed, we are to believe that he tried to pray, and tried in vain ; and knew nothing of his Bible. We might as well be told that there are twenty thousand Protestant clergymen in England and Wales who know not how to pray, because they cannot do an hour's duty without a book. And the mistake is the more inexcusable, as the terms employed in Milo's narrative are technical terms of clear, precise, and unmistakable meaning; terms as clear, precise, and unmistakable as the "saying office" of the Catholic, and the "doing duty" of the Protestant; and, last and worst of all, terms with which students of the contemporary literature can scarcely fail to be familiar. There are no less than six of them :—(1) laudes debita, (2) laudes debitas persolvere, (3) laudis officia persolvere, (4) servire tibi; and in the sequel, (5) officia nocturna, (6) laudis sacrificium persolvere. Here are a few passages in illustration of them :-(1) "Quâdam tempore adveniente horâ quâ laudibus lauderetur Deus surgit à lecto et ad ecclesiam ire disposuit" ["Vita Roberti Regis," Migne, cxli. 922A]. (2) "Nocturnas laudas fraterna devotio persolverať” [“ Vita B. Odonis," cxxxiij. 97c]. (3) "Factum est cum quodam nocte matutinis laudibus persolvendis inheresset" ["V. B. Idæ.,” clv. 443c]. (4) “Circa horam tertiam . . . . debitum officium solvente" ["V. B. Emmerammi," cxli. 979B]. (5) "Nocte quodam priusquam fratres ad debita servitutis officium processissent" "V. B. Simeonis Crespeiens," clvi. 1217c].

....

But these are mere technical details, it will be objected. Precisely so. Herein lies their value. It is much more satisfactory to have commonplaced a few passages which make proof conclusive, than to uphold my contention by arguments which might