vast and as magnificent and as beautiful as your Belvoirs and
your Chatsworths, your Wentworths and your Stowes. Try to
imagine the effect of thirty or forty Chatsworths in this
county the proprietors of which were never absent. You
complain enough now of absentees. The monks were never non-
resident. They expended their revenue among those whose
labour had produced it. These holy men too built and planted
as they did everything else for posterity: their churches were
cathedrals; their schools colleges; their halls and libraries
the muniment rooms of kingdoms; their woods and waters, their
farms and gardens, were laid out and disposed on a scale and
in a spirit that are now extinct: they made the country
beautiful, and the people proud of their country."

"Yet if the monks were such public benefactors, why did not
the people rise in their favour?"

"They did, but too late. They struggled for a century, but
they struggled against property and they were beat. As long
as the monks existed, the people, when aggrieved, had property
on their side. And now 'tis all over," said the stranger;
"and travellers come and stare at these ruins, and think
themselves very wise to moralize over time. They are the
children of violence, not of time. It is war that created
these ruins, civil war, of all our civil wars the most
inhuman, for it was waged with the unresisting. The
monasteries were taken by storm, they were sacked, gutted,
battered with warlike instruments, blown up with gunpowder;
you may see the marks of the blast against the new tower here.
Never was such a plunder. The whole face of the country for a