the tower are full of singular grace and beauty, even now when the abbey is roofless and in part destroyed, while the corbels and mouldings round the lancet-shaped windows are full of luxuriant fancy and charm.  We can divine from them the full and rich spiritual life which brought forth such exquisite flowers of beauty; we can imagine the fine aroma of fervor and saintly peace which brooded over these consecrated aisles.

A few miles below Trim, and an equal distance from the old royal palace of Tara, Bective Abbey stands on the northern bank of the Boyne, with a square, battlemented tower overshadowing its cloistered quadrangle.  The cinque-foil cloister arches, the fillets that bind the clustered shafts of the pillars, the leaf ornaments of the plinths at their base all speak of a luxuriant sense of beauty and grace, of a spirit of pure and admirable artistic work.  This rich creative power thus breaking forth in lovely handiwork is only the outward sign of a full inner life, kindled by the fire of aspiration, and glowing with the warm ardor of devotion.  Bective Abbey dates from about 1150.  We are told that the king of Meath who founded it for the Cistercian order “endowed it with two hundred and forty-five acres of land, a fishing-weir and a mill.”  From this meager outline we can almost restore the picture of the life, altogether idyllic and full of quiet delight, that the old Friars lived among the meadows of the Boyne.

Grey Abbey was founded a little later, in 1193, for the same Cistercian order, where the promontory of the Ards divides Strangford Lough from the eastern sea.  Over the waters of the lough, the red sandstone hills of north Down make a frame for the green of the meadows, as the tide laps and murmurs close to the old monastic church.  Grey Abbey owes its foundation to the piety of a princess of the Isle of Man, wedded to De Courcy, the Norman warrior whose victories and defeats we have recorded.  The great beauty of its church is due to the soaring loftiness of the eastern window, and the graceful daring of the arches which in former days upheld the central tower.

Other Cistercian foundations are commemorated in the names of Abbey-leix in Queen’s county, and Abbey-dorney and Abbey-feale in Kerry; all three dating from after the reformation of the order by Saint Bernard the Younger, though the work of that ardent missionary did not apparently extend its influence to Ireland until a later date.  This reformer of the Cistercians must not be confused with the elder Saint Bernard, whose hospice guards the pass of the Alps which bears his name.  Saint Bernard of the Alps died in 1008, while Saint Bernard the reformer was born in 1093, dying sixty years later as abbot of Clara vallis or Clairvaux, on the bank of the Aube in northern France.  It was at this Abbey of the Bright Vale, or Clara vallis, that Archbishop Maelmaedog resigned his spirit to heaven, five years before the death of the younger Saint Bernard, then abbot there.  This is a link between the old indigenous church and the continental orders of the Friars.