Thoughts such as these form a hesitating prelude to an expression of opinion on a controverted question.  They will serve, however, to indicate the limits within which the said opinion is supposed to be hazarded.  And in fact, neither in this nor in any historical subject is the conclusion so clear that it can be enunciated in a definite form.  The utmost which can be safely hazarded with history is to relate honestly ascertained facts, with only such indications of a judicial sentence upon them as may be suggested in the form in which the story is arranged.

Whether the monastic bodies of England, at the time of their dissolution, were really in that condition of moral corruption which is laid to their charge in the Act of Parliament by which they were dissolved, is a point which it seems hopeless to argue.  Roman Catholic, and indeed almost all English, writers who are not committed to an unfavourable opinion by the ultra-Protestantism of their doctrines—­seem to have agreed of late years that the accusations, if not false, were enormously exaggerated.  The dissolution, we are told, was a predetermined act of violence and rapacity; and when the reports and the letters of the visitors are quoted in justification of the Government, the discussion is closed with the dismissal of every unfavourable witness from the court, as venal, corrupt, calumnious—­ in fact, as a suborned liar.  Upon these terms the argument is easily disposed of; and if it were not that truth is in all matters better than falsehood, it would be idle to reopen a question which cannot be justly dealt with.  No evidence can affect convictions which have been arrived at without evidence—­and why should we attempt a task which it is hopeless to accomplish?  It seems necessary, however, to reassert the actual state of the surviving testimony from time to time, if it be only to sustain the links of the old traditions; and the present paper will contain one or two pictures of a peculiar kind, exhibiting the life and habits of those institutions, which have been lately met with chiefly among the unprinted Records.  In anticipation of any possible charge of unfairness in judging from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to judge—­all wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained stories.  Let it remain, to those who are perverse enough to insist upon it, an open question whether the monasteries were more corrupt under Henry VIII. than they had been four hundred years earlier.  The dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no reasonable person would desire that bodies of men should have been maintained for the only business of singing masses, when the efficacy of masses was no longer believed.  Our present desire is merely this—­to satisfy ourselves whether the Government, in discharging a duty which could not be dispensed with, condescended to falsehood in seeking a vindication for themselves which they did not require; or whether they had cause really to believe the majority of the monastic bodies to be as they affirmed—­whether, that is to say, there really were such cases either of flagrant immorality, neglect of discipline, or careless waste and prodigality, as to justify the general censure which was pronounced against the system by the Parliament and the Privy Council.