whether rightly or wrongly, we scarcely expect to find in any Norman story.

What moved this rude old vassal to such a gentle thought? He built not far from his castle gates, close beside the pleasant stream-no cell for monks, but a house and a little chapel, where poor and frail old men might be nourished, and rest in peace; might wait and pray serenely after long fevered lives.

Two centuries later, a similar house was founded in Glasgow by the bishop. And, in the same city, at nearly the same date, the good, devout Lady Lochow built, on St. Ninian's Croft, a leper's hospital, which she anxiously cared for and endowed. Works of mercy were not neglected by the mediaval church. Yet, none the less, we wonder over, and ask the story of De Croc,-that beneficent old story with the Steward's strongest vassal for its centre, instead of bishop or lady, whose life could only be made complete by such charities.

And we cannot fill it in. No shadow of detail has come down. Only, in meagre brevity, the fact that, at such a date, Robert De Croc built a house and a chapel for infirm old men; that he prayed the monks of Paisley to take them under their care, and send a priest, who should daily say mass at the altar he had raised; that he promised in return to the monks, all the offerings on the chapel altar; thus owning that monastic feudalism which extended over all Strathgryfe.

And then no more is told us. How many prayerful years the old men spent upon the green burnside, going to and from the chapel, and drawing nearer God perhaps in

these last quiet hours; how loving Robert De Croc went out and in among them, and protected them like a feudal chief, and cared for them like a son; or how with the natural ties of kin, broken in some untold way, they gathered them up, as best they might, round this generous Norman soldier; we must make out for ourselves, for the simple reason that it is not told us.

On the banks of the little Leveran—the haunt of greenness and flowers, still fresh and sweet with violets and primrose clusters, and shady with hazel and birch— there is not now standing one stone upon another of the old men's house and chapel.

But the castle of Robert De Croc has gathered history round it. A son of the second Steward married the daughter of De Croc, and became lord of Crockstone and Darnley, and the ancestor of Mary's husband. And the love and sorrow of the queen has wrapped Croc's town, or "Crookston," in such romance, as makes the poetry of its Norman founding, in King Malcolm's reign, comparatively a forgotten thing.

But honourable distinctions attend the family name. in successive generations: Honours won for wisdom in diplomacy, for gallantry in war-won at home and abroadin France and Italy and Spain. One, Sir John, in reward for military services rendered to Charles Sixth, some time soon after 1424, is created a Marechal of France, and Count d'Evreux and Seignior de Concorsant. Another makes himself famous in the early Neapolitan wars, and receives still larger acknowledgments from the gratitude of Louis Twelfth. Duke of Terra Nova, Marquis de Gyralle

and Squilaggo, Count of Acri, Grand Constable of Sicily and Jerusalem, Viceroy of Naples, Governor of Calabria, Captain of the Gard de Corps, Lieutenant-General of the French army in Italy,in Italy,—are some few of the crowd of titles bestowed on this scion of De Croc. One at a later date is Governor of Milan; another is Governor of Avignon; repeatedly they are commanders of the Scottish Gens d'Armes in France. The family, French and Scottish from the days of its Norman founder, made good, over Europe, its motto, "Avant Darnley."

In the culmination of its glory, when Lord Henry married Mary queen of Scots, another motto was adopted by the queen and the new-made king. The legend, Dat gloria vires (glory gives strength), inscribed on a coin, with the names, Marie et Henricas Dei gratia R. et R. Scotorum, was subsequently proved too strongly and significantly false to call for any comment.

The pleasant little stream, which began its story in the bounty of Robert De Croc, gathers round it other interests, but had no sweeter memories than these its earliest.

THE FAIR ABBEY.

T

LET my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloisters pale;
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy proof;
And storied windows, richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light;—
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced choir below,

In service high, and anthems clear,

As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstacies,

And bring all heaven before mine eyes.

Il Penseroso.

HERE is in the spring woods a moment of ecstatic beauty;-catkins white on the birches; tender, pale seedlings of beech, newly cleft through their shiny heart; the chestnuts, in great rosy knobs, enfolding their fanshaped leaves, their embryo stately flowers; through the forest, a faint purple glow,-a premonition of summer. All who love the spring-time know it, that flush, of waiting, on the landscape, that hour not of fulfilment, but desire.

Then bursts forth a sunshiny day; and, suddenly, in the

night, comes, in exuberance of strength, and with queenly gait, the longed-for summer, bringing that gladness and peace which, hitherto, had only been heralded.

Some such joyous floresence awoke late in the twelfth century; only, as it happened here, the blossoming was not of brown boughs into leaf. The quarried stone had its summer; and in a strange fusion of loveliness, rose those religious thoughts, high aspirations, offerings of faith, and all that beauty, till now but forecast, as the spring-time prophesies of summer.

Paisley was happy that in this space her ecclesiastical life began. The Clugniensian monks crossed the border to build on the White Cart, in the busiest, and perhaps the sweetest period of English architectural history.

It was in the rich transition time, from late Norman to early Gothic, when the Orientalism, brought back by the Crusaders, and grafted on the Romanesque, stirred conceptions of the graceful, solemn loveliness which developed into Gothic architecture. At Carcassone, one hundred and fifty years earlier, the symbolical palm leaves had been

And

wreathed with all reverence in the consecrated stone. slowly but surely would the builders learn how the leaves of their own woodland (twice tender, because they grew round castle bowers and lowlier homes, and made the green gladsome twilight of their English forest chase) might wreath their churches as devoutly as the Crusader's palm.

Besides, about this period, was discovered the use of the chisel, and with it great possibilities in effects of shadow and light. The rich, rude, shallow Norman mouldings, the axe had fairly rendered. But all those delicate darknesses