honest unconscious feeling, without insolence as without fear or
flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell
the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal
there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain
unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to
expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them
of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we
said, who can suffer from them, and for them; bear the burden
their poor spindle-limbs totter and stagger under; and in virtue
_thereof_ govern them, lead them out of weakness into strength,
out of defeat into victory!


One of the first Herculean Labours Abbot Samson undertook, or the
very first, was to institute a strenuous review and radical
reform of his economics. It is the first labour of every
governing man, from _Paterfamilias_ to _Dominus Rex._ To get the
rain thatched out from you is the preliminary of whatever
farther, in the way of speculation or of action, you may mean to
do. Old Abbot Hugo's budget, as we saw, had become empty, filled
with deficit and wind. To see his account-books clear, be
delivered from those ravening flights of Jew and Christian
creditors, pouncing on him like obscene harpies wherever he
shewed face, was a necessity for Abbot Samson.

On the morrow after his instalment, he brings in a load of money-
bonds, all duly stamped, sealed with this or the other Convent
Seal: frightful, unmanageable, a bottomless confusion of Convent
finance. There they are;--but there at least they all are; all
that shall be of them. Our Lord Abbot demands that all the