cheerfully apprise you. That this was a very great Abbey, owner
and indeed creator of St. Edmund's Town itself, owner of wide
lands and revenues; nay that its lands were once a county of
themselves; that indeed King Canute or Knut was very kind to it;
and gave St. Edmund his own gold crown off his head, on one
occasion: for the rest, that the Monks were of such and such a
genus, such and such a number; that they had so many Carucates
of land in this hundred, and so many in that; and then farther
that the large Tower or Belfry was built by such a one, and the
smaller Belfry was built by &c. &c.--Till human nature can stand
no more of it; till human nature desperately take refuge in
forgetfulness, almost in flat disbelief of the whole business,
Monks, Monastery, Belfries, Carucates and all! Alas, what
mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous
Pedantry dig up from the Past Time, and name it History, and
Philosophy of History; till, as we say, the human soul sinks
wearied and bewildered; till the Past Time seems all one
infinite incredible grey void, without sun, stars, hearth-fires,
or candle-light; dim offensive dust-whirlwinds filling universal
Nature; and over your Historical Library, it is as if all the
Titans had written for themselves: DRY RUBBISH SHOT HERE!


And yet these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and dubiety;
they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious purpose
they were built for! Yes, another world it was, when these black
ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiseling, first saw
the sun as walls, long ago. Gauge not, with thy dilettante
compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven's-
Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God's-Houses, the Golgotha