"74.

It may suffice to state generally that a large number of rebels have been shot with arms in their hands, that a great number of prisoners have been tried and hung, shot, or flogged, and that a considerable number of prisoners are still in hand awaiting trial by court-martial."

"77. We have been singularly fortunate in capturing or shooting a large number of the principal ringleaders in the Rebellion, and many of whom were personally concerned in the atrocious butcheries of the 12th October in the Morant Bay Court House, or in the subsequent destruction of life and property further to the eastward, as the rebellion extended in that direction. Very many acknowledged their guilt.before their execution."

Paul Bogle, were apparently captured quite | when armed, and Governor Eyre speaks of without resistance. In all the eighty para- those caught with arms in their hands as graphs in which Governor Eyre narrates only some out of the many hanged and his measures for the suppression of the in- shot), or receive with praise for their evisurrection, there is not one furnishing any dence of promptitude and energy such, senevidence at all beyond the Morant Bay riot tences as these in the report of a Lord-Lieuitself that there was anything to be called tenant for the disturbed districts? a "rebellion." Even that riot had not proceeded to any act of violence till after the volunteers had fired into the mob, and Governor Eyre, whose account seems perfectly candid, admits that "as far as we could learn, no ladies or children had as yet been injured." Mr. Gordon, who is spoken of by the Governor as "himself the chief cause and origin of the whole rebellion," was the son of a white man and the husband of a white lady, and exceedingly unlikely therefore to have been the instigator of anything like a massacre of whites and mulattoes. Governor Eyre's despatch contains the following, and only the following, traces of anything like organization of resistance to the Government: -(1) The Morant Bay riot itself, the leaders of which, Paul Bogle and others, had pretty certainly been organ- Even Lord George Gordon was tried izing some sort of resistance to the authori- fairly at Westminster, and acquitted of the ties for some days back, -the original graver crime with which he was charged; quarrel being apparently a dispute as to the but then his less fortunate namesake was ownership of an abandoned plantation call- not a peer, and was a man of colour. Mr. ed Stony Gut, claimed by the negroes. (2) Eyre, believing himself to have evidence of Subsequent plundering parties in neighbour- Mr. Gordon's dangerous designs, might ing parishes-as Governor Eyre thinks in- rightly enough have "taken upon himself dependently organized — accompanied by the responsibility" of that gentleman's some fresh murders. (3) The capture of capture; but how far he was justified negroes with arms in their hands. (4) The in taking upon himself the responsibility of issue by post, attributed to Mr. Gordon, of his illegal trial and condemnation by courtcertain circulars containing "seditious lan- martial for what was at worst probably a guage" and political "misrepresentations." misdemeanour, and not apparently comThis is all-literally all- Governor Eyre's evidence for the existence of a rebellion which he thinks would either have resulted in the loss of the colony to the mother country, or "an almost interminable war and an unknown expense."

Now, what we assert is, that all, and much more than all, of these dangerous and threatening symptoms have repeatedly occurred in our own manufacturing districts in former times, the rumoured" atrocities" on the murdered persons at Morant Bay,- for none of which Governor Eyre appears to have any evidence, but "it is said alone excepted, and when we remember how many of the worst of the rumoured atrocities in India disappeared entirely under close scrutiny, these rumours do not add to the strength of the case. But who would justify letting loose the soldiery to shoot volleys at all suspicious knots of Englishmen in "disturbed" districts (even

66

mitted under the régime of military justice at all, he may yet learn unpleasantly in the due course either of law or of Ministerial criticism.

Governor Eyre's despatch, unless it were accompanied, or should be followed, by documents of a very different description indeed, is the confession of a political panic clouding the minds of gallant men, and leading to gross cruelty and injustice. If England is to come out of this matter without a permanent stain upon her honour and her justice, we must have a searching investigation into all its circumstances, and, should present appearances be confirmed, an immediate censure on those principally responsible. If there is any vestige of good faith in our political professions, what all the world would cry out for, if the persons shot, hanged, and flogged in such numbers, had been Irishmen or Englishmen, we must not refuse because they have been brown or black.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.—NO. 1126.-30 DECEMBER, 1865.

From the Dublin University Magazine. GLASTONBURY ABBEY, PAST AND PRESTHE RISE AND INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH MONACHISM.

ENT.

times as a phantasy, was once a fact, a great universal fact; it was a fact for twelve or thirteen centuries; and when we remember that it extended its influence from the sunny heights of Palestine, across ONE of the most subtle operations of Europe, to the wild, bleak shores of westtime is the tendency it has to transform the ern Ireland, that it did more in the world facts of one age into the phantasies of for the formation and embellishment of modanother, and to cause the dreams of the ern civilization than all the governments past to become the realities of the present. and systems of life that accompanied it in Far away in the remote distance of history, its course; that the best portions of ancient when a lonely monk in his cell mused of literature, the materials of history, the vessels going without sails and carriages secrets of art, are the pearls torn from its without horses, it was a dream -a mere treasure-house, we may form some idea of dream, produced probably by a brain dis- what a fact the monastic life must have ordered by over-study, long vigils, and been at one time, and may venture to asfrequent fasts, but that dream of the thir- sert that the history of that phase of exteenth century has become the most incontrovertible fact of the nineteenth, a fact to whose influence all other, hitherto immovable facts, are giving way, even the great one the impregnability of the Englishman's castle; for we find that before the obstinate march of one of these railway facts a thousand Englishmen's castles fall prostrate, and a thousand Englishmen are evicted, their avocations broken up, and themselves turned out upon the world as a new order of beings outcasts with compensation. So with science; a man illuminates the darkness of a remote age by asserting that the sun was immovable, and that, contrary to the belief of the majority, it was the world that moved, and the phantasy had well nigh cost him his life; but a timely recantation of a dream so pernicious, although the indignant protest" Eppure si muove was appended, saved the rash philosopher. It was a dream, a dangerous, delusive dream, but it is now the fundamental principle of as- One of the most firmly rooted prejudices tronomy. There are few things more sub- of modern times is that of obstinately and lime than that recantation of the great unreasonably condemning the whole monasGalileo; he felt that his living body would tic system as a life of laziness and sensualibe of more service to the world than his ty. That these vices were prevalent in the charred bones, therefore he signed the re- monasteries of England at the period of cantation; and conscious that all bulls, the Reformation there can be no doubt, canons, and infallible doctrines could not even allowing for a little pious exaggeraaffect the truth, he added the grim satire, tion on the part of interested investigators; "Eppure si muove.' The heretic had re- but to suppose that they were always the canted, but the philosopher was saved, and concomitants of a phase of life which had the world still moved on. The monastic flourished for so many centuries, and had life, so commonly regarded in these later produced some of the most distinguished THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXI. 1437.

istence, as in frock and cowl it prayed,
and watched, and fasted; as in its quiet
cloisters it studied, and copied, and labour-
ed; as outside its walls it mingled its in-
fluence with the web of human destiny,
and as in process of time, becoming wealthy
and powerful, it degenerated, and went the
way of all human things-this mighty
influence in the world lost its vitality and
its substance, and became what it is how-
a shadow; we say that the history of the
development of this extinct world, however
defective the execution of that history may
be, will include in its review some of the
most interesting portions of our national
career, will furnish a clue to many of the
mazes of historical speculation, or at least
may be suggestive to some more able in-
tellect of a course of investigation which
has been very little followed, and a mine of
truth which to a great extent still remains
intact.

and noble names in history, is unjust and unreasonable. The very nature and instinct of Protestantism forbids all sympathy with the monastery as a religious institution; it belonged to an age when religion was contemplative, but the nature of the present is such that its religion, like itself, must be active and vital. Still less sympathy does it show for that other form of monastic life the convent. It has ever been a stumbling block to the Protestant mind, more especially to that of the Anglican fold, that a Church which boasts of its unbroken descent from a married Apostle should insist upon having a celibate priesthood, and having that celibate priesthood, should find it necessary to maintain large establishments of unmarried female devotees, shut out from all communication with the external world as rigidly as the inmates of an eastern harem; and when Protestantism hears of the occasional desertion of one of its beautiful daughters for the retirement and seclusion of the Romish convent, it is apt to attribute the worst of motives, to write the most indignant letters, impotent as it is to comprehend the passionless mystic ties which bind the female and the sacerdotal heart. However, it is but just to add that hostility to female conventual life is not at all confined to Protestantism, since some of the most enlightened Roman Catholics, men now canonized in the hagiology of that Church, have left their testimony against it upon record. Ignatius Loyola, when founding his comprehensive and marvellous order, was troubled by the importunities of some noble ladies to undertake the care of their consciences, and to form an establishment for them under his rule, but, aiming at the high and arduous destiny which he had in view, and evidently conscious, to an almost morbid degree, of the danger which accompanied such institutions, he persistently refused, and rested not until he had sheltered himself under the protection of Papal sanction. In the hagiology of Rome, and occupying no mean place in it, is a St. Clare, whose history is the prototype of that of many a young lady of the present day, who has made similar sacrifices, but will never attain to like honours. The daughter of the noble house of Ortolana, she had early manifested an inclination to a religious life, and was said to be in the habit of wearing beneath garments of the most costly character, and adorned with the brightest jewels, the penitential girdle. St. Francis of Assisi, who had just founded his marvellous brotherhood, the Order of Mendicant Friars,

learning of the fame of this young devotee, procured more than one interview with her, the result of which was that she eloped from the house of her parents, was conducted by him to the Porzioncula, where the monks received her, and placed her in sanctuary, in the church of St. Paul until she could be received into a convent. This young lady lived to be canonized by Pope Alexander the Fourth, in language which will sound familiar to modern ears, so accustomed to the punning of dramatic extravaganza: "Clara claris præclara meritis, magnæ in cœlo claritate gloriæ ac in terrâ miraculorum sublimium, Clare claret." Two other sisters, Agnes and Beatrice, in spite of the agony of their father, and the vigilance of his armed retainers, followed in her wake, under the same spiritual guidance; but the point of this narrative, which is culled from the Life of St. Francis, according to the Romish version, and therefore must be authentic, is, that St. Francis himself (who was a wise and good man) in after life, when his brethern were competing with each other as to who should gather together the greatest number of female converts, exclaimed, with grim satire, "Alas! at the moment when God forbade us wives, Satan has, I fear, given us sisters."

However, setting aside this morbid dislike of Englishmen for female conventual establishments, with which we shall have but little to do, still our objection to the monastic life generally ought not to hinder us from awarding to it the meed of praise justly due to it, not only as a social institution, admirably adapted to the wants of the period in which it existed, but due also to the work which it silently accomplished during that long syncope of European history, the Dark Ages. At a time when laws were badly administered, and the country often torn by internal contentions, and always subject to the violence of marauders, it was absolutely necessary that there should be some asylum for those thoughtful, retiring spirits who, unable or unwilling to take part in the turmoil of the times, were exposed to all its dangerous vicissitudes. In an age, too, when the country possessed no literature, the contemplative and the learned had no other means of existence than by retiring to the cloister, safe out of the reach of the jealous superstition of ignorance and the wanton barbarity of uncouth violence. The monastery then was the natural home of these beings - the deserted, the oppressed, the meek spirit who had been beaten in the world's conflict, the untimely born son of genius, the scholar,