50 



Malmesbury Abbey in its Best Bays. 



to give attentive study to sacred music 9 In some of the largest 

 monasteries especially on the Continent, this was pursued enthusias- 

 tically, and on the largest scale. The very father of ecclesiastical 

 music, Gregory the Great, was a monk of St. Andrew, at Rome. 



The organ too, the special creation of Christian music, owes its 

 construction to the monks. At the abbey at Winchester, so far back 

 as the tenth century, there was one (it is recorded) on so enormous a 

 scale as to require seventy men to conduct it. The monks also 

 were the authors of many valuable treatises on music. 



At Malmesbury, the abbey church, as is well known, was not 

 originally the parish church : but it was the church of and belonged 

 to the monastery itself. In some cases, (as at Arundel, about which 

 there was, a year or two ago, a curious dispute in the Law Courts,) 

 one and the same building served both for the parish and for a 

 monastery adjoining. There the monks used the choir or chancel 

 having a private entrance to it, the parish used the rest of the 

 building. At Malmesbury the whole was purely monastic. And 

 without indulging in any fanciful or poetical unreality, any one 

 who has ever been present at the gorgeous church ceremonies which, 

 the Roman Catholic Church knows so well how to arrange, will 

 easily be able, when gazing on the mutilated abbey here, to picture 

 to himself the large building when entire, presenting on High 

 Festival Day, many a splendid and attractive spectacle. 



Another and not less important service there was for which the 

 world is indebted to these establishments. In the troublous days of 

 early England, when war and military life occupied our ancient barons 

 and landed gentry, when their household were all armed men spend- 

 ing half their time in the barrack room or camp, what became of 

 Learning and Literature ? There was no printing, no books, no news- 

 papers. The famous " three RV were at the lowest possible ebb: and 

 I question very much whether any of the barons who signed Magna 

 Charta could have written his name. They affixed their seals. The 

 seal in fact, was the signature. I have often found, attached to old 

 deeds, the wax seal carefully sewed up in a little satin bag, with 

 cotton, leaves, or tow, inside, in order to keep it from injury : because 

 if this seal was destroyed, there being no written name, the token 



