under their wrongs as to make it prudent to
keep them down, with a strong hand, if they
are to be kept down at all. But this is
keeping them down with a plough-share;
and it must have required immense
ingenuity to bring the lively Neapolitans into
the state in which the traveller will find them
now. The fact is, there is no joking with the
authorities, and the people know it and keep
at home, quiet as mice, lest they should be
whipped up by policemen and sent to keep
company with Poerio, or never more be heard
of. The Italians, indeed, have been so snubbed
and bullied that, in a few years, we shall see
them desert public places altogether.

Going out, we fall in again with the two
Englishmen, and go, all three together, to eat
cauliflower salad at the Café de l'Europe over
the way, being, by this time, hungry. They
happen to be acquaintances, though we did
not recognise each other at first; your true-bred
Britons never do.

ROGER THE MONK.

EVERY one that has read (and who, claiming
benefit of clergy, has not read?) the Ingoldsby
legends, must have a distinct remembrance
of Roger the Monk. Every reader of that
collection of wit, playful fancy and jocose
learning must have simpered, or smiled, or
"loffed heartylie" at the famous lines

            "And Roger the Monk
             Got excessively drunk:
So they put him to bed, and they tucked him in!"

We have grown so accustomed to consider
Roger the Monk merely in the light of an
ecclesiastic, who, in the dubious period of
chronology known as "once upon a time"
got "excessively drunk," that any other
claims he may have had either to notice or
celebrity have been overlooked or forgotten.
You may—says the saw—as well hang a
dog as give him a bad name: Roger the
Monk has been branded as a toper by the
facetious bard of Tappington Everard; and
though it is very probable that he was a pious,
learned, and virtuous ecclesiastic prior to
his indulgence in fermented beverages, and
although we are assured by Master Ingoldsby
himself, that repenting, Roger subsequently
joined the Teetotal Society, and assume that
he walked in many processions with many
banners, yet the brand of the wine-pot
will stick to Roger the Monk as indelibly
as the D to a deserter, or the fatal letters
F. O. R. C. A. T. to the shoulder of a French
convict; and the convivial ecclesiastic will be
known as an incorrigible drunkard till Jack
Cade come again, and it be death to have a
knowledge of reading and writing.

Roger the Monk did something more
indeed than get excessively drunk. I have
a Roger to deal with, and you will listen
to me. Not Roger Bacon, the inventor of
gunpowder, chemistry, and the brazen head;
but another Roger, another monk, a historian
and not a savant. My Roger is Roger de Wendover,
a monk of the Abbey of St. Alban's,
afterwards prior of Belvoir, from which
preferment he was deposed by Walter de
Trumpington, twenty-second Abbot of St. Alban's,
on the ground of his excessive extravagance
(dissolute Roger!), and ultimately a monk
again in his own Abbey of St. Alban's, where
he died in the year 1237, on the 6th of May
thereof.

Very little indeed is known of Roger the
Monk. He was promoted in the reign of John,
and his degradation took place soon after the
accession of Henry the Third. He might
have droned his life away in the obscure ease,
and amidst the unfructifying erudition of a
provincial monastery—have been duly tolled
for at his death by a bandy-legged sacristan,
chanted and prayed over by his brethren, and
as completely forgotten immediately afterwards
as the Walderes, Sugwalds, Egulfs,
Wigeres, Kinewales, Suiwulfs, Wulsis, Estans,
and many more, his name might have been
writ in water had it not occurred to him
(astute Roger ) to write a chronicle called The
Flowers of History, containing an abridged
narrative of the history of the world from its
creation till the year 1235, the nineteenth
year of King Henry the Third. The first part
of The Flowers* extends from Adam and Eve
to A.D. 447, when Hengist and Horsa, and
those stout Saxons came over to England to
amuse the Britons with a species of acting
charade embodying the popular fable of
the farmer who called in the huntsman
and hounds to destroy the hares in his
garden. All this Roger has copied from the
most mendacious Greek and Latin authors,
and from that audacious writer—that dark-age
Dumas—Geoffrey of Monmouth. The
second part comprises from A.D. 447 to circa
A.D. 1200. In this Roger has consulted
Sigebert of Gemblours, Hermanns Contractus,
William of Malmesbury, the Byzantine
historians, Bede, Cedrenus, &c. With respect
to this second part being an authentic
history I may content myself with
remarking that the members of the Jewish
persuasion may attach credibility to it,
but that I won't. The third part extends
from 1200 to 1235, and in it, says Roger's
editor, "he rises into the character of an
original writer." I am truly glad to hear of
that elevation, but I am concerned to say
that he does not rise in my estimation as a
teller of truth.

*Roger de Wendover's Flowers of History; the Latin
Edition, by the Rev. H. O. Coxe, of the Bodleian Library,
published by the English Historical Society. Translated
by J. A. Giles, D.C.L., late fellow of Corpus Christi
College, Oxford. H. G. Bohn, London. 1849.

I have been reading Roger lately very
attentively and patiently. I have marked
his assertions, digested his anecdotes, weighed
his periods, plodded through his crabbed
paragraphs. I have risen from the perusal