Jocelin_ is, as it professes to be, unwrapped from its thick
cerements, and fairly brought forth into the common daylight, so
that he who runs, and has a smattering of grammar, may read.

We have heard so much of Monks; everywhere, in real and
fictitious History, from Muratori Annals to Radcliffe Romances,
these singular two-legged animals, with their rosaries and
breviaries, with their shaven crowns, hair-cilices, and vows of
poverty, masquerade so strangely through our fancy; and they are
in fact so very strange an extinct species of the human family,--
a veritable Monk of Bury St. Edmunds is worth attending to, if by
chance made visible and audible. Here he is; and in his hand a
magical speculum, much gone to rust indeed, yet in fragments
still clear; wherein the marvelous image of his existence does
still shadow itself, though fitfully, and as with an intermittent
light! Will not the reader peep with us into this singular
_camera lucida,_ where an extinct species, though fitfully, can
still be seen alive? Extinct species, we say; for the live
specimens which still go about under that character are too
evidently to be classed as spurious in Natural History: the
Gospel of Richard Arkwright once promulgated, no Monk of the old
sort is any longer possible in this world. But fancy a deep-
buried Mastodon, some fossil Megatherion, Ichthyosaurus, were
to begin to speak from amid its rock-swathings, never so
indistinctly! The most extinct fossil species of Men or Monks
can do, and does, this miracle,--thanks to the Letters of the
Alphabet, good for so many things.

Jocelin, we said, was somewhat of a Boswell; but unfortunately,
by Nature, he is none of the largest, and distance has now