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"Confound you, you've pulled me short, and I was about becoming downright pastoral. Apropos of kissing, I understand Sir Arthur won't allow the convents to be occupied by troops." "And apropos of convents," said I, "let's hear your story; you promised it a while ago." "My dear Charley, it's far too early in the evening for a story.
She cast a side glance at him to see if he would resent this. But he only nodded slowly. "Had enough convents abroad, eh?" "Yes and Kieth, convents are different there anyway. Here even in the nicest ones there are so many COMMON girls." He nodded again. "Yes," he agreed, "I suppose there are, and I know how you feel about it.
The fury of the buccaneers was mainly directed against the monks, and when they sacked a town, they never failed to pay an especial visitation to the convents.
This gives a fresh and lively appearance to the city, and you are reminded of Calabrian scenery, the lightness and simplicity of the dwellings contrasting with the grandeur and majesty of the monastic buildings in the distance. Texas had no convents, but the Spanish missions were numerous, and their noble structures remain as monuments of former Spanish greatness.
The system of seclusion and celibacy adopted in Convents is altogether unnatural, and subverts all the appointments of Jehovah in reference to the duties and usefulness of man; while the impenetrable secrecy, which is the cement of the gloomy superstructure, not only extirpates every incentive to active virtue, but unavoidably opens the flood-gates of wickedness, without restraint or remorse, because it secures entire impunity.
So convent life lost its austerity, and as the Council of Trent had not yet issued its stern orders commanding asceticism, prayers were occasionally offered accompanied by syncopated music. The blooming daughters of great houses were consigned to convents on slight excuse. "To a nunnery go, and quickly, too," was an order often given and followed with alacrity.
A great many of the Bannister girls had been educated at convents, and when a Bannister had done a thing once it was apt to be done again. Becky was nineteen, and her school days were just over. She knew nothing of men, she knew nothing indeed of life. The world was to her an open sea, to sail its trackless wastes she had only a cockle-shell of dreams.
Of the new town spread all around the monuments, the wealthy city which had sprung, as though by enchantment, from the ancient impoverished soil, the great convents and the great hotels, you could, at this distance, merely distinguish a swarming of white facades and a scintillation of new slates; whilst, in confusion, far away, beyond the rocky mass on which the crumbling castle walls were profiled against the sky, appeared the humble roofs of the old town, a jumble of little time-worn roofs, pressing timorously against one another.
The principal studies pursued in these convents appear to have been poetry and music, the elements of which were necessary to the young prophet when he was called to take a part in the worship of Jehovah.
To one so far gone in poetic antiquity, Ghent is not the most likely place to recall his attention; and I know nothing more about it, than that it is a large, ill-paved, dismal-looking city, with a decent proportion of convents and chapels, stuffed with monuments, brazen gates, and glittering marbles.
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