"Not his the mien of Christian priest,
But Druid's from the grave released,
Whose hardened heart and eye might brook,
On human sacrifice to look;

And much, 't was said of Heathen lore,
Mixed in the charms he muttered o'er.
The hallowed creed gave only worse
And deadlier emphasis of curse.
No peasaut sought that Hermit's prayer,
His cave the pilgrim shunned with care,
The eager huntsman knew his bound,
And, in mid chase called off his hound;
Or, if in lonely glen or strath,
The Desert-dweller met his path,
He prayed, and signed the cross between,
And terror took Devotion's mien.

Sir Walter Scott.

SOLEMN and supernatural visitings always associated themselves in my youthful mind with the word Friar; an indefinite

but terrific notion of something dark, and grim, and cruel. I attribute this early prejudice to a system of reward and punishment, somewhat whimsical indeed, but put in practice by the fairest and kindest dame that ever helped to spoil an only son, whose mother she was not. In an old corner house in the Minster Close, at there was a certain best bedroom, and, in a corner cupboard of the same, were two figures with moveable head and hands; both were equally grotesque, though each was of very opposite semblance. The one represented a friar of the Dominicans, and the other had the motley habit, bauble, cap and bells of the mediæval jester. These figures, (both of them invested in my imagination with superhuman attributes), were only disclosed to my gaze on great occasions, that is, either when I was particularly good, or particularly the reverse; and the awful menacing manner in which the old friar was made to raise his hand, shake his head, and wag his beard at me, had always the desired effect in the latter case. Most vividly have I, at this moment, in my re

membrance his high peaked cowl, which of all his other appurtenances mostawakened my curiosity, astonishment, and awe; and even now I can feel somewhat of the eagerness with which I ever turned from the merry looks and gay gestures of the fool, to rivet my gaze on the dark robe and severe attitude and ghastly countenance of the friar.

It was early in the thirteenth century, that the Pope, alarmed at the increasing influence and enlarged revenues of the monastic orders, and viewing with indignation and dismay their virtual indepen. dence of Rome, and its natural results, their relaxation in watching the progress of heresy, (then germinating), and in keeping the laity to their blind submission to the papal power, began to look anxiously around for some new ally whose devout attachment to the Romish hierarchy might not be weakened or diverted by separate interests or exclusive possessions of their own, which their authority should be derived, as their very existence depended upon the supreme pontiff alone.

And thus did the four orders of preaching friars, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Carmelites, and the Augustines, form the last pillar of that extraordinary fabric of gold, and brass, and clay, the Roman Catholic Church. The experiment was eminently successful.- The mendicant emissaries of an overworn superstition spreading themselves upon the paths of the four winds, more than supplied the energies requisite to confirm its tottering edifice; and through them their tiaraed master was principally enabled, for the next three hundred years, to set his foot upon the necks of emperors and of kings.

Of course the monks beheld these upstart clerical orders with immitigable abhorrence; and while the friars from their itinerant pulpits launched the most fiery denunciations upon the selfishness and indolence of the monks, and lashed their reported peccadilloes with the most scorpion-like satire, the monastics in retaliation never added an arch to their stately cloisters, never introduced an ornament to their cathedrals, never carved an abbot's oaken throne, gilded a roof, or painted a wall, without introducing some contemptuous effigy of a friar; and the woodwork of their choirs, the corbels of their battlements, and the capitals of their pillars were made the vehicles of ludicrous and frequently obscene caricatures of these mendicant preachers. There are numberless proofs of this mo

nastic enmity in the older minsters of England, and especially in the ancient colleges of her universities; and as a setoff for the bitterness with which the itinerant friars declaimed against the established orders that had so long enjoyed the immunities of the cloister, who has not read good old Camden's account of Friar Donald's preaching at St. Paul's Cross? where, having observed “that Our Lady was a virgin, and yet at her pilgrimages there was made many a foul meeting," he loud cried out, “ye men of London! gang on yourselves with your wives to Wilsdon in the devil's name, or else keep them at home with you, with a sorrow!"

Wonderful, that with such conflicting interests, and such jarring enginery Rome should have been able for centuries upon centuries to maintain her enormous empire, an empire not of the bodies only but of the souls of men. Wonderful, that mere earthly wisdom, and for the most sordid of earthly purposes, could originate, execute, and maintain so vast, so varied, and so sublime an architecture as her services, her ministers, and her institutions compose!

Speaking in a mere worldly sense, it is perfect. All that can command veneration, all that can excite astonishment, all that can inspire rapture, are there combined, to overawe, to enslave, to delight, and to delude the soul.

The gorgeous pomp and circumstance of the Vatican—the magnificence of the gothic cathedral—the inconceivable glory of its shrines and chapels and monuments -the enchanting solemnity of its rites, the pictorial beauty of its processions, were much, and went far towards accomplishing the daringly grand project of universal domination over mind; but if we seek the main lever in this great enterprise of the god of this world, we shall find it in that subtle, that masterly concentration of aim and energy, developed in the formation in the first instance of the monastic, and subsequently of the preaching societies.

The monastery, navelled in high old woods, withdrawn up the secluded hollow of its narrow verdant valley, a clear stream washing its walls-its dependent cotes, its grange, its mill, huddled beneath its lordly walls-the soaring steeple, solid and stately-the broad and radiant windows-the shadowy cloisters- the sepulchral crypt-what accessories and auxiliaries to devotion, to meditation, to peace!-from yonder wicket no poor man ever turned away unrelieved, no wanderer

:

unsheltered in yon majestic refectory the noble or the knightly guest sate amidst decorous but unstinted hospitality; and, by the glimmering light shooting from the narrow loopholes of yonder cells did science and art, amidst the long darkness of a barbarous age, find at once protection, cultivation, and respect. Yet in that sequestered Eden, in those uninvaded cloisters, in that peaceful solitude-what fierce intruders broke upon the spirit! how was it dashed back upon itself, and what wars and fightings arose within it! Blighted hopes, clouded prospects, affections crossed, or fortunes overthrown; the consciousness of crime, the festering of injury, the grasping of ambition, had all to assume the cowl of religion; and while each was suffering from his own griefs, or lingering over his own prospects, all were alike enjoined to abjure and to forget everything but the welfare of their church and the observance of her discipline. Oh! who can tell the grievous conflicts, the struggles between heaven and earth, that have raged in many a cloistered bosom! the very stone walls of their sacred prison knew not; they witnessed perhaps the clenched hand, the smitten breast, the upturned eye, the form flung down in half-unhallowed prayer, but the actual glare of the fire that burns within, when man stalked through those unfeeling cloisters, or shuddered in those narrow cells, a ghost and spectre to himself, haunted by his own memories, goaded by his own desires, yet maimed and manacled for ever, the captive of irrevocable vows-who can conceive!

As for the friars, theirs might seem a happier lot, because of greater libertyfree rangers of the country and the town, they had access alike to the pulpit and the market-place, were received with respect at the Baron's table of Dais, and with something of adoration by the good wife of the citizen,-they moved at their pleasure from place to place, and everywhere found themselves the centre of an attentive and admiring audience. The pleasant river side, in the meadows, the deep shelter of the summer wood, or the grassy alleys of the garden, were alike open to their sandalled feet, and great was the joy and manifold the bustle, when the sudden storm or the approach of night compelled the cowled wanderer to take shelter in the lonely grange; the most savoury rasher from the flitch on the smoke-blackened rafters, the freshest eggs, the sweetest curds, cheese for which Gammar was unrivalled, the huge brown loaf fresh from the fragrant oven burst

ing through its crisp yellow crust, and the gigantic tankard whose amber ale foamed like a whirlpool over its brim, and dimmed its silver sides with misty coolness, all combining to embellish the blazing hearth-vault in winter,—or in summer, the old seat in the rose embowered porch, whereupon the Franciscan or Carmelite might find it his pleasure to sit. And more (it was thought), far more than repaid was this liberal hospitality, by the displayed stores of the ample reliquary, or the narration of some recent miracle they had wrought; or, if that failed, some pious legend highly creditable to the peculiar order of the reverend guest.

But this very liberty, which was a source doubtless of much enjoyment, led in many instances to the discredit and even disgrace of the wandering friars. Many a scandalous chronicle, industriously encouraged by their inveterate adversaries the monks, was circulated at their expense, and to the no small detriment of their character for selfdenial and sanctity. The minstrels and disours, who with some reason looked upon the holy itinerants as interlopers with their fireside and wayside privileges, eagerly caught up these stories, and gave the friars a conspicuous but by no means enviable place in the ballads and tales as popular then, as now, among high and low in England. Nay, their very excellences were, in those benighted times, converted into weapons against them. Many of their body were among the first to imbibe and foster the new learning (as it was termed), and in those days the name of heretic needed not that advance in the liberal sciences, for which many of these ecclesiastics began to distinguish themselves, to be connected with the title of sorcerer. The popular cry, once raised, found no difficulty in swelling its echoes with murder, lasciviousness, and such like imputations; until, at length, if a brawler and bloodthirsty character, a dealer with satan, or a betrayer of credulous damsels, was wanted for some scurril ballad or licentious play, the cowl and gown of the barefooted friar were found as germane to the matter as anything else.

The great Roger Bacon, the glory and ornament of the Franciscan order, was a splendid victim to this prejudice. The well merited title of the wonderful doctor, which his transcendent talents and invaluable discoveries won for him from his admirers, was eclipsed by the opprobrious appellative of magician,

inflicted on him by the stupidity and malignity of his enemies. Gunpowder, the camera obscura, the principal properties of the telescope, and the burning glass, together with innumerable other acquirements in art and science, distinguished this eminent friar, with a lustre that seemed portentous and preternatural to the thick darkness upon which it shone. His lectures were interdicted; he was confined to his cell; and his seclusion, which lasted ten years, terminated not long before his death, which occurred in 1292.

It cannot be denied, nevertheless, that the great personal liberty allowed to the friars in contradistinction to the rigid confinement of their rivals the monks, together with the extraordinary influence with which their prescriptive character of sanctity invested them, offered no small temptations to these wandering ecclesiastics; and doubtless, in many instances, led to gross and criminal abuse of their great privileges and immunities. Neither history nor tradition are deficient in examples of frightful atrocity thus perpetrated under the chartered garb of the friar-and the story I am now going to relate, is just an imaginary and romantic chronicle founded on the same thesis.

High festival was maintained with extraordinary solemnity during the twelve nights of Christmas in the great baronial hall at GOLDENROOD CASTLE.

This apartment, always of paramount magnificence and importance in feudal mansions, was eminently grand at Goldenrood; large enough to have contained all the turbulent barons of the realm, with their burly followers, in armed conclave-and lofty enough for the nave of some enormous minster. Though indeed it was difficult to speak with accuracy of its height, for its roof neighboured the very cope of heaven, rising in a long steep gable, traversed by stupendous beams of solid oak, whose rudely carved architraves sprang in bold arcs from large brackets carved into knots of flowers, and foliage, and grim faces of men and monsters.

The walls were partly hung with heavy and dismal-looking arras, of red and black pattern-work, and partly painted in gorgeously barbaric imagery, wherein heathen mythology, medieval allegory, monastic legend, and family tradition mingled in most marvellous concord. The Dais was at the upper end, approached by three broad steps that traversed the entire breadth of the

room, and, like the costly shrine of some favourite saint-narrow, deep, and tall, the everlasting oriel stood a particoloured and elaborate tabernacle at the head of the high table.

The peculiar feature, however, which distinguished the castle hall at Goldenrood, from any mansion of our own day, and indeed from those immediately succeeding the remote period of which I write, was this; that instead of the vaulted and arched fireplace, with its emblazoned manteltree surmounted by stag antlers, and its mighty recess, that formed a kind of winter pavilion for the castle guests, the hearth at Goldenrood was situated in the centre of the hall pavement, where a monstrous iron receptacle, ornamented, according to the pleasure of the baron or knight, either with his family supporters, or some other fantastic and fabulous effigies, and designated a Reredoss, stood heaped with piles of wood or seacoal, as some dread altar might have stood in the vasty temple of Jupiter the thunderer, in pagan times.

Broad and beaconing, it may be conceived, was the flame that ascended from this shrine of the feudal penates; and its volumes of smoke, after gracefully encircling the hall, at midheight, with their floating canopy, departed through the centre of the steeply roof, by an orifice or lantern, sufficiently large to carry off such portions of the surging vapour, as did not prefer lingering behind to listen to the hall-fire gossip. This aperture was termed the lovery, or louvre, from the French word l'ouvert, and constituted a sort of cupola proportionate to the dimensions of the hall, and of such shape and figure as might suit the convenience or caprice of my lord the chatellain. Sometimes it was square with a spiral pyramis, leaded like the rest of the hall roof, with its sides open, yet so contrived as to exclude the rain; and sometimes a rotunda with a beautiful bell-shaped dome covered with well burnished copper, and surmounted by a mighty orb and weathercock of the same materials, generally graven in the figure of the family crest. It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that the stately and celebrated palace of pictures, in the French metropolis, derives its title from this source; or that the lantern on our oldfashioned dovecotes, and the campaniles on some of our primitive village churches, are only humble imitations thereof. Windows of the round Norman arch, shewed by the depth of their recess the prodigious solidity of the

walls.

They were narrow in their external orifice for the purpose of security, but bevelled inwards so as to admit as large a portion of light as possible; and stood ranged in cross lights very high up in the wall; while in the gable end over the table of Dais, a round headed window of bolder proportions looked down the hall, its panes dark with ancestral gules and gold, and its stonework lavishly fretted like the rest, with the barbaric ornaments of chevrons and beakheads.

Corslets, helmets, coats of mail, shields, lances, pikes, maces, halberts, &c., added their iron garniture to the hard paintings and truculent tapestry of the hall at Goldenrood, investing it with every possible characteristic of awe, melancholy, and gloom, ill suited we should think to a place of festivity. Yet such it was, in common with the halls in other aristocratic residences of the time, which, equally dismal in their furniture, and forbidding in their appearance, were still the only apartments whose size admitted of hospitable assemblies or festal exhibitions. In the castle hall alone could the pageant be exhibited, in the castle hall alone could the masque be performed, the stately braule, the merry morisco dance, the mystic mummery, all demanded the solemn dignity and theatric amplitude of the castle hall; and those stated leviathan festivals, at which half a county clashed goblets together, must have been held under the canopy of heaven, but for the magnificence-the vast, the grim, the glimmering magnificence-of the castle hall.

It was, however, when the tables were drawn, and the guests were gathered in a circle, truly necromantic, round about the mighty reredoss and its dragon-like flame, for the amusement of story-telling, that the castle hall of Goldenrood looked most picturesque. The conflict, between glow and gloom, as each advancing and retreating by turns shook their fantastic banners through the depths of the vaulted chamber; the strong hard contrast produced by the fire on the features and figures that surrounded it, saluting with roseate brightness what it touched, and leaving in ebon blackness what it could not reach ;-the prominent glare and profound shadow that Rembrandt loved, sharing between them the figures and variegated costume of the mantled baron, the unhelmed knight, the hooded Franklin, the silk-attired dame, the half-veiled maiden, and the countless grades of dependents and servitors, not forgetting the white-wanded seneschal, or the gaudily

garbed knave or jester, altogether composed a picture, before which our modern tableaux might humbly vail their heads. In the centre of these patrician fireworshippers, the gigantic reredoss shot upwards its flaming columns, which, mighty as they were, cleft but a pathway for themselves through the opaque vastitude of gloom, whose blackness they disclosed, but could not illuminate; while, redly tinged by the swarthy lustre, ere it lost itself in the overpowering gloom, sullen volumes of smoke brooded over the beams of the open-work that supported the soaring roof, like clouds from which scowling demons might be supposed to hang, listening gloomily to the annals of their own diablerie. Thus, though a large lighted lantern of transparent colours, hung over the high table, yet such was the bewildering vastness of that ancient hall, that an assemblage of more than fifty guests, high-born, and richly habited, gathered around a fire in its centre, large enough for the Beltane, resembled (to a fanciful eye) a group of shipwrecked mariners or benighted travellers, huddled together round their ineffectual watchfire, in the midst of a moonless and tempestuous moor!

On the present occasion, the festivities which always distinguished the solemn season of Christmas, were more brilliant and joyous than usual at Goldenrood Castle; for on the approaching feast of the Epiphany, a splendid bridal was to be celebrated between the Lady Leonora, daughter and heiress of Roland de Mainefort, the lord of the castle, and Sir Ildebrand Blondel, the handsome and gallant knight of Wingfield. Guests of every grade and quality had been bidden to Goldenrood, and it had been given out that all whosoever, who chose to present themselves at its portal, invited or uninvited, would meet the same cordial welcome; an intimation which, on this occasion, was not known in one single instance to be falsified.

Accordingly, at that social hour of evening in which we open our scene upon the baron's hall, in the thirteenth century—the third Henry, that weak, but amiable monarch, being in the zenith of his long and turbulent reign-we behold the guests of Goldenrood forming a vast and motley assemblage around the reredoss. The table of dais, and those of various inferior grades, were forsaken; and the revellers, to whom the skilful and punctilious etiquette of the seneschal had duly assigned the seat their