number of monks from forty to sixty, to enlarge the conventual buildings, in which he entertained the kings of England and of France, and to add a great façade to the abbey-church, a contribution to the massive pile of the Marvel which we are no longer privileged to behold. He also labored for the intellectual side of the monastery's life, restoring the library and enlarging it by a hundred and twenty volumes, and composing a variety of works on historical subjects which make him the chief authority for half a century of Norman history.
There is, however, not much concerning monasteries in Robert's chronicle, and even his special essay on the history of the Norman abbeys is confined to externals. Perhaps he was cumbered about much serving; more probably he saw nothing worthy of the historian's pen in the inner life of the institution. When the abbot had a new altar dedicated or renewed the reliquaries of St. Aubert and St. Lawrence, that was worth setting down, but the daily routine of observance was the same at Mont-Saint-Michel as in the other Benedictine foundations, and has remained substantially unchanged through the centuries of monastic history. At any rate no monkish Boswell has done for Normandy what Jocelin of Brakelonde did for contemporary England in that vivid picture of life at Bury St. Edmund's which Carlyle has made familiar in his Past and Present. A monk of Saint-Éyroul, it is true, did a much greater thing in the
