was spoiled for all other entertain-ion. The monks were puzzled to know ments. "I was thinking of that supper what the two talked about when they at Clairvaux," he would say forever walked up and down together by the after, if chidden for his silence; and side of the stream, for they noticed no matter where he was, his host would that when alone with Laurence the hang his head and sigh. It was no fierce, gibing look died out of Guyot's fault of Laurence's if the feast to wel-face, and that there was almost a ring come Guyot proved a failure. But of tenderness in his voice. They wondainty food counts as naught when a dered, too, what he wrote on the tiny death's head is at the board; and the sheets of parchment he had so often in guest of the evening was worse than a his hand. They swore they did not death's head. He examined the choic- care a whit for his scribblings, but est dishes with a critical air; and when then they lied; for there was hardly the precious old golden liqueur was one amongst them but would have given passed round, he put it aside with the tip of his little finger for Guyot's a scornful gesture, crying roughly, good word — in a neatly rounded coup"Water for me." A water-drinker at let, of course. Clairvaux ! A chilling silence fell upon the monks; they could not even eat, for they felt as if those keen, bright eyes were noting every bite they took. Nor were Guyot's words pleasanter than his manners. He cut short his host's gentle, purring platitudes most ruthlessly; and when they asked him what holy pilgrims he had met in Palestine, his only answer was a cruel, sneering laugh. The very stories he told, witty though they were, had an unsavory ring in monkish ears; for they were all in ridicule of drunkenness, gluttony, and sloth. His eyes became more fierce, his laugh more mocking, as the night advanced.

The abbot sat with a frown on his brow. He loved "fat, sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights;' but Guyot had a "lean and hungry look," a thing his soul abhorred. There was a lack of reverence, too, in the stranger's manner, an open scorn for the powers that be, which sorely chafed the courtly dignitary. What did this wolf want in his sheepfold ? Clairvaux was not built for such as he. If it had not been for the fear that Guyot would betake himself to the rival house at Cluny, he would soon have shown him to the door. As it was he decided that, for the time at least, the traveller must be humored.

To the astonishment of his fellows, Brother Laurence openly espoused the cause of the new arrival, and soon became his friend and constant compan

These Benedictine monks, with all their faults, were of a kindly, sociable nature; and when once they had become accustomed to Guyot's rough ways, they began to entertain for him quite a friendly feeling. His temper was uncertain, of that there could be no doubt, but then, as a compensation, he had a perfect genius for talking. Just from time to time, as if to whet their appetite, he would give them a taste of his skill as a raconteur. One might have heard their laughter miles away that night he first described how St. Peter won the jugglers, a story he had heard from a friend, he said. There was a smack of profanity as a rule about his tales, but the monks for that did not laugh the less heartily. A queer, hard look always came into his eyes when Crusaders were mentioned; and the accounts he gave of their doings in Palestine would hardly have editied the faithful. He jeered at himself, however, more than at his fellow Crusaders. He had a taste, he used to say, for dying in his bed, and that was why he had always taken to his heels as soon as a Saracen appeared. "We have had enough of crusades against the Saracens," he cried one night. "It's one nearer home we want now, one against he paused and smiled.

So long as he only gibed and flouted Guyot was humored to the top of his bent; but when his sneer was changed for a grave rebuke, his mockery for

He

stern indignation, when his innuendoes | welcome relief after the noisy revelry and dainty narratives gave place to in which he had been living. fierce denunciations and solemn ser- passed many pleasant hours in the mons, the abbot decided that life with library, which was well stocked with him in the house was not worth hav-manuscripts, for the abbot, a man of ing; he must go, yes, even though he no common learning, would have barwent to Cluny. It was the flutter of a petticoat a pink one if tradition may be relied upon that brought matters to a crisis. Now, to the last day of his life, the abbot held a theory that a woman was at the bottom of the strange transformation Guyot had undergone; and the story of why he left Clairvaux points in the same direction. Nothing, surely, but deep-seated hatred of the sex could make a man refuse to live where the shadow of a woman had fallen.

tered his soul away, it was said, for a rare book. The busiest place in the monastery was the writing-room, for the monks of Cluny were justly proud of their skill as scribes and illuminators. At the supper-board the talk was all of new designs and quaint devices, of the number of twirls that might be given to an H, and how the gauntness of an I could be concealed. They seemed to think that the very raison d'être of their monastery was this manufacturing of missals. At first the abbot treated Guyot with marked attention, and showed a kindly interest in his concerns. He shared to the full his views with regard to the doings of

One night, some four months after his arrival, returning from the chapel somewhat later than usual, he was the victim of a strange hallucination. In the long, dark corridor, close to the Crusaders, and listened with an apabbot's room, he seemed to see a proving smile when Guyot railed woman. He had but time to note her against gluttony and license: "It is a large blue eyes, and her golden hair, scandal that the Mother-Church tolerand then she vanished. "A vision of ates such abuses," he would exclaim. Our Lady! What an honor for Clair-"You are right, Brother Guyot, we vaux!" the monks exclaimed when he must make a clean sweep of such told them; and one of them began at swine." once a poem in commemoration of the event. Guyot listened to their chattering for a moment with an odd smile, and then strode away to pay the abbot a visit. What passed between the two was never known; but Guyot left the monastery that day; whilst the abbot went about for months with a scared, anxious expression; and turned pale and crossed himself whenever Guyot's name was mentioned.

But when Brother Guyot attacked other abuses worldliness, avarice, and the like the abbot changed his tone. "This Guyot is a meddling fellow," he confided to his scribe. • I should be well content if he would go." And Guyot went, muttering as he did so, "Dry boues." From that day to the day he died, he wandered from abbey to monastery, from monastery to hermitage; in some of them he stayed but a day, in others months. Sometimes he thought he had found the resting-place he was seeking, so carefully were all signs of evil hidden away; but no matter how fair the seeming, the canker was always there. In one house the monks were lewd and gluttonous; in another grasping and mean; in another again, spiteful and From Clairvaux Guyot went to worldly; whilst hypocrisy was a vice Cluny, where he met with a cordial they seemed all to share in common, welcome. There was a dignified re- and most of them, gross ignorance as pose about the abbey which came as a well. "Oh, God, is there not one?

When Guyot quitted Clairvaux, he was bound by a solemn promise to return for Brother Laurence as soon as he had found a house where the monks were God-fearing and honest. There must have been such in France, one might think; but, although the old cordon-bleu waited for years, Guyot never returned to fetch him.

Not one?" Guyot was heard to mut- | wrath are reserved for Rome, this ter from time to time. As he wan- "vivier plein de vermine," as he styles dered on year after year, his face it. Still, as he asks with a sneer, what became so gaunt, his eyes so fierce, better could be expected of a city of that strangers shrank back in fear at which the founder was a fratricide, his approach. Meanwhile the leather and his nobles felons? "The pope," case, in which he kept his parchments, he says in a passage that reveals his steadily increased in bulk; and when things went ill with him, he used to clutch it and glare around in a way that gave his enemies bad dreams. He named his book "The Bible," and if questioned why, would answer, "Because all that it contains is true."

own lofty ideals, "should be perfect in
steadfastness, in holiness; the great
ensample, the Polar star by which all
Christendom should regulate its do-
ings." And instead of that

Rome nous suce et nous englout,
Rome détruit et occit tout.

Whether true or not, Guyot's Bible is a terrible book, or rather a series of And Rome is only another name for terrible pamphlets, for there is but the pope. History justifies to the full little doubt that it was an after-thought Guyot's judgment of his spiritual chief: to weave it into one long poem. It was Celestine III. was then reigning in the finished in 1204, just twelve years after | Vatican. When he has done with the he entered Clairvaux. pope, Guyot gives his attention to the monks. In his opinion "Il font mout peu de ce qu'il doivent, Il surmangent et il surboivent." What he had learnt whilst living in their midst, stands him in good stead; and the pictures he draws of priests and their In his deways are lively reading. scriptions of the Holy Orders, his verve gauloise carries him sometimes, it must be confessed, beyond the limits of strict decorum; but he is too thoroughly in earnest to be ever really coarse.

now

In spite of its roughness, there is a certain charm about the quaint, rugged verse in which this twelfth century Bible is written. It makes one think instinctively of a great barren rock from which storm waves have torn away every loose stone. The dominant note of Guyot's style is strength, of his matter, ruthlessness; mere prettiness is as repulsive to him as hypocrisy. He seems to have been some what Ishmaelitish in his feelings, for he deals out hard blows all round. Perhaps in Then comes the turn of kings and his earlier poems-no copy of these is now extant-he had tried gentler princes. With regard to the treatment arguments, and had found his contem- to be meted out to these, Guyot's poraries did not understand them. Let wishes are clear and well defined; he As popes us hope so at least, for the cruel invec- would like to burn the lot. tives in his later writings need some destroy the immortal part of men, he extenuation. Not that he ever in- says, by distorting the deity, kings dulges in mere vulgar personal abuse; destroy the mortal by ignoring humanwith the exception of the pope and the ity. They who should be the fathers king, it is not individuals he attacks of their people, are their cruellest taskbut classes, professions, nations, nay, masters; and rob them, not of gold the whole world: "Puant et horrible" alone, but of those they love, of freeare amongst the epithets he hurls at dom, and all that makes life worth his century; and he mourns aloud for living. There is an impassioned digthe grand old heroic age that has gone nity in his language as he speaks of these royal scourges : Scourges, yes, but not the scourges of God: He would scorn to use such instruments." As Elijah of old, Guyot in his Bible stands alone, one against a countless multitude, and calls down vengeance on the

before.

Li siècle fu ja biauz et granz,
Or est de garçons et d'enfanz.
But, although he rages against hu-
manity at large, the vials of his fiercest

Ahab of his day. But the age of mira- | Comte et ceux de St. Quiriace," in pre

cles was past; no consuming fire came in answer to his summons. Philip Augustus lived and prospered.

In this our day, when railing against the powers that be is the fashion, it is hard to realize all Guyot risked by giving thus free rein to his tongue. The French king was not the man to tolerate joking at his expense; in his eyes hanging, drawing, and quartering would have been a woefully inadequate punishment for the audacity of questioning his right to work his will. The fact of Guyot's dying with his head on his shoulders is a conclusive proof that Philip Augustus never read a line of his poem.

cisely the same terms as he arranges for the division of calves and lambs. Evidently in his mind, serfs and cattle were synonymous terms. In this, however, he was wrong, for the latter had an advantage over the former. A horse when no longer of use to his master was put out of his misery, but a man was left to linger on and die in a ditch. Guyot is keenly touched by the spectacle of these men who have no pleasure in the present, no hope in the future, no joyful memories of the past, but who yet work on sturdily, bravely, convinced that in this way alone God is to be reconciled. Guyot is at war with his century; it is a mean, despiHaving said his worst of dignitaries, cable century, he declares; its Chrisspiritual and temporal, Guyot proceeds tianity is a lie, its chivalry, a sham; to administer chastisement to more the one thing he finds in it worthy lowly mortals. Here he gives proof of of admiration is the infinite patience a spirit of moderation, which does credit of the poor. Popes, kings, monks, to his artistic instincts. In the cen- barons, knights-yea, troubadours, are sures he deals out with a lavish hand all contemptible; serfs alone merit to knights, squires, doctors, and traders, there is little of the fiery indignation he hurls with such keen delight at their betters. They are foolish and perverse rather than vile - silly sheep, rather than wolves. He gibes at them, scolds them, threatens them, and tries to force them to renounce their petty meanness and hypocrisy ; but he never despairs of them. For them a whipping-post is enough; but for the great ones of this world a fiery furnace is needed.

When he comes to speak of the poor, Guyot is as one transformed. He who, as the abbot of Clairvaux had told him, knew not the meaning of the word reverence, describes, with the truest and humblest reverence, the sufferings of the lowly. A charter granted by Henry the Liberal, Count of Champagne, to the monks of St. Quiriace at Provins, gives a curious picture of the condition of the laboring classes in Guyot's time. This Henry the Liberal was counted quite a reformer in his day, and was held to be miles in advance of his contemporaries. Yet we find him arranging for le partage des enfants qui naîtront de mariages entre les serfs du

66

honor.

Yes, Guyot's Bible is in truth a terrible book; a more scathing denunciation of all sorts and conditions of men was perhaps never written. The halo of romance, which some few feats of noble heroism have cast around this twelfth century, is torn aside with ruthless hands; and it stands before us in all its selfishness, its sordidness, its bigotry, and its vice. Well might Guyot sneer and gibe at it, sing "Tekel" over it, for he had sifted it as wheat, and found in it no good thing. No good thing? Nay, not quite so bad as that, for even the ferocious Guyot before he died was forced to confess :

J'ai veu delez l'ortier
Florir et croistre le rosier
Se les orties sont poignanz

Les roses sont beles et chières.

We have no record of Guyot's death; there is proof, however, that he lived for some years after his Bible was finished.

Guyot was an iconoclast by instinct; for him whatever is, is wrong; but he was no reformer. He had the eyes of a lynx for detecting abuses, but no

power of devising schemes for their love-lorn poets, Philomel," and perhaps

redress. The only programme he ever advanced was for the regeneration of princes, and this was to be effected by roasting them. Perhaps his impotence helped to secure his impunity. Fierce, vigorous, and telling as were his denunciations of those around him, he was merely a preacher, and a preacher becomes formidable only when he has found a man of action to reduce his preaching to practice. There is something strangely pathetic in the thought of this gaunt, lonely, old man eating out his heart with rage because men will not listen to his warnings. He knows so thoroughly, feels so intensely, what is wrong; knows too, feels too, more keenly, that he is not the man to set it right.

none

EDITH SELLERS.

From The Argosy.

A BIRD LYRIC.

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,

The world should listen, then, as I am listening

now.

So sang Shelley in his great bird

song,

and such in substance has been

the best illustrations of songs dedicated to them are the verses of Shelley and Wordsworth addressed to the skylark, and the odes of Milton and Keats to the nightingale.

Each poet perceived some, until then undiscovered, trait in the bird in whose honor he wrote; to Wordsworth the skylark was

Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of heaven and
home,

while in the same bird Shelley recog-
nizes a spirit akin to his own :-
A poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heedeth not.

Again, to Milton the nightingale's "liquid notes,"

First heard before the shallow cuckoo's bill,

Portend success in love;

while the self-same song wafts Keats to a dream-clad life in which his own and mankind's sorrows are left far behind.

It might be interesting to pursue still further the analysis of those four lyrics, and, in so doing, we should probably the homage which the race of feathered find in each case that not only does the singers has ever received from the pen poet, by dint of his capacity for symof the world's song-birds. pathy, recognize much of his own indiFrom the day when the Saxon min-viduality in the bird of whom he writes, strel-poet saw in a sparrow's flight but that his very temperament absorbs through the lighted banqueting-hall an so much from the melody to which he emblem of man's journey through time, listens as to make him, and him alone, even to the present day, poets have the fittest channel to convey that phase universally recognized an inner mean- of the melody to mankind. ing in a bird's life and song, and have striven to translate it to their fellow

But our attention must mainly be directed to the last-mentioned, and perhaps the most perfect and unapproachable, of this quartette of bird-lyrics, Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." And first, then, as to the actual history of the poem.

In his friend's garden at Hampstead Keats would hear in the spring evenings

those wakeful birds Burst forth in choral minstrelsy.

Coleridge.