it can, grows to a strange enough Reality; and we have to ask
with amazement, Is this your Ideal! For, alas, the Ideal always
has to grow in the Real, and to seek out its bed and board there,
often in a very sorry way. No beautifullest Poet is a Bird-of-
Paradise, living on perfumes; sleeping in the aether with
outspread wings. The Heroic, _independent_ of bed and board, is
found in Drury Lane Theatre only; to avoid disappointments, let
us bear this in mind.

By the law of Nature, too, all manner of Ideals have their fatal
limits and lot; their appointed periods, of youth, of maturity
or perfection, of decline, degradation, and final death and
disappearance. There is nothing born but has to die. Ideal
monasteries, once grown real, do seek bed and board in this
world; do find it more and more successfully; do get at length
too intent on finding it, exclusively intent on that. They are
then like diseased corpulent bodies fallen idiotic, which merely
eat and sleep; _ready_ for 'dissolution,' by a Henry the Eighth
or some other. Jocelin's St. Edmundsbury is still far from this
last dreadful state: but here too the reader will prepare
himself to see an Ideal not sleeping in the nether like a bird-
of-paradise, but roosting as the common woodfowl do, in an
imperfect, uncomfortable, more or less contemptible manner!--


Abbot Hugo, as Jocelin, breaking at once into the heart of the
business, apprises us, had in those days grown old, grown rather
blind, and his eyes were somewhat darkened, _aliquantulum
caligaverunt oculi ejus._ He dwelt apart very much, in his
_Talamus_ or peculiar Chamber; got into the hands of flatterers,