“The monastery of La Trappe, is of French origin, and one of the most austere and self-denying orders I have met with.  In this gloomy retreat it gave me pain to observe the infatuation of men, who have devoutly reduced themselves to a much worse condition than that of the beasts.  Folly, you see, is the lot of humanity, whether it arises in the flowery paths of pleasure, or the thorny ones of an ill-judged devotion.  But of the two sorts of fools, I shall always think that the merry one has the most eligible fate; and I cannot well form a notion of that spiritual and ecstatic joy, that is mixed with sighs, groans, hunger, and thirst, and the other complicated miseries of monastic discipline.  It is a strange way of going to work for happiness to excite an enmity between soul and body, which Nature and Providence have designed to live together in union and friendship, and which we cannot separate like man and wife when they happen to disagree.  The profound silence that is enjoined upon the monks of La Trappe is a singular circumstance of their unsociable and unnatural discipline, and were this injunction never to be dispensed with, it would be needless to visit them in any other character than as a collection of statues; but the superior of the convent suspended in our favour that rigorous law, and allowed one of the mutes to converse with me, and answer a few discreet questions.  He told me that the monks of this order in France are still more austere than those of Italy, as they never taste wine, flesh, fish, or eggs; but live entirely upon vegetables.  The story that is told of the institution of this order is remarkable, and is well attested, if my information is good.  Its founder was a French nobleman whose name was Bouthillior de Rance, a man of pleasure and gallantry, which were converted into the deepest gloom of devotion by the following incident.  His affairs obliged him to absent himself, for some time, from a lady with whom he had lived in the most intimate and tender connexions of successful love.  At his return to Paris he proposed to surprise her agreeably, and, at the same time, to satisfy his own impatient desire of seeing her, by going directly and without ceremony to her apartment by a back stair, which he was well acquainted with—­but think of the spectacle that presented itself to him at his entrance into the chamber that had so often been the scene of love’s highest raptures! his mistress dead—­dead of the small-pox—­disfigured beyond expression—­a loathsome mass of putrified matter—­and the surgeon separating the head from the body, because the coffin had been made too short!  He stood for a moment motionless in amazement, and filled with horror—­and then retired from the world, shut himself up in the convent of La Trappe, where he passed the remainder of his days in the most cruel and disconsolate devotion.—­Let us quit this sad subject.”