Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/12

6 through the land, the Continental branches of the monastic orders grasped the opportunity of once more planting colonies on the fruitful British soil.

At the present day every order and congregation is represented amongst us, and the vast army of monks and nuns is many thousand strong. London, true to its encyclopædic character, embraces them all. Monasteries and convents are found in every large city in England, and often enough as one glides through our loveliest shires one sees from the train, nestling in the quiet valleys as in days of old, the severe quadrangular structure of some modern monastery. Any important ecclesiastical function in London attracts numbers of monks in their quaint mediæval costumes. After three long centuries they have started from their graves and are walking amongst us once more.

It is true that the fact is not much appreciated outside their own sphere, for the modern monks are not wholly unaffected by the world-evolution. The Benedictine does not bury himself with dusty tomes far from the madding crowd: he is found daily in the British Museum and nightly in comfortable hotels about Russell Square. The Grey Friar, erstwhile (and at home, even now) bareheaded and barefooted, flits about Suburbia in silk hat and patent leather boots and silver-headed cane. The irrepressible Jesuit is again found everywhere. Still, whatever