of London.—­Godfrey, his successor at Jumieges, was a man conversant with architecture, and earnest in the promotion of learning.  In purchasing books and in causing them to be transcribed, he spared neither pains nor expence.  The records of the monastery contain a curious precept, in which he directs that prayers should be offered up annually upon a certain day, “pro illis qui dederunt et fecerunt libros.”—­The inmates of Jumieges continued, however, to increase in number; and the revenues of the abbey would not have been adequate to defray the expences of the new building, had not Abbot Robert, who, in 1050, had been translated to the see of Canterbury, supplied the deficiency by his munificence, and, as long as he continued to be an English prelate, remitted the surplus of his revenues to the Norman abbey.  He held his archiepiscopal dignity only one year, at the expiration of which he was banished from England:  he then retired to Jumieges, where he died the following spring, and was buried in the choir of the church which he had begun to raise.  At his death, the church had neither nave nor windows; and the whole edifice was not completed till November, in the year 1066.  In the following July the dedication took place.  Maurilius, Archbishop of Rouen, officiated, in great pomp, assisted by all the prelates of the duchy; and William, then just returned from the conquest of England, honored the ceremony with his presence.

I have dwelt upon the early history of this monastery, because Normandy scarcely furnishes another of greater interest.  In the Neustria Pia, Jumieges fills nearly seventy closely-printed folio pages of that curious and entertaining, though credulous, work.—­What remains to be told of its annals is little more than a series of dates touching the erection of different parts of the building:  these, however, are worth preserving, so long as any portion of the noble church is permitted to have existence, and so long as drawings and engravings continue to perpetuate the remembrance of its details.

The choir and extremities of the transept, all of pointed architecture, are supposed to have been rebuilt in 1278.—­The Lady-Chapel was an addition of the year 1326.—­The abbey suffered materially during the wars between England and France, in the reigns of our Henry IVth and Henry Vth:  its situation exposed it to be repeatedly pillaged by the contending parties; and, were it not that the massy Norman architecture sufficiently indicates the true date, and that we know our neighbors’ habit of applying large words to small matters, we might even infer that it was then destroyed as effectually as it had been by Ironside:  the expression, “lamentabiliter desolata, diffracta et annihilata,” could scarcely convey any meaning short of utter ruin, except to the ears of one who had been told that a religious edifice was actually abime during the revolution, though he saw it at the same moment standing before him, and apparently