CHAPTER VIII.
ON THE TRACK.
“We grieve not o’er our abbey lands, e’en pass they as they may,
But we grieve because the tyrant found a richer spoil than they;
He cast aside, as a thing defiled, the remembrance of the just,
And the bones of saints and martyrs he scattered to the dust.”
Neale.
It was in vain that Bishop Latimer besought the tyrant, mad after the spoils which a venal parliament had given him, to let at least some of the monasteries remain as the houses of learning. Few countries could boast of such shrines as those which adorned like jewels the shires of England—but all were ruthlessly sacrificed, from the fane which rose over the mighty dead at Battle, to the humblest cell which but sheltered half-a-dozen poor brethren or sisters.
Such was the value of the noble library at Glastonbury that Leland, an old English antiquarian, tells us, when first he beheld it, “The sight of its vast treasures of antiquity so struck me with awe, that I hesitated to enter.”