The author has bestowed much labor and research on the work, which he now presents to the American public. He has endeavored to make it amusing as well as instructive. He has, therefore, avoided dry and tedious dissertations; he has mingled story and anecdote with solid matter and brought before the American reader in a connected view, what he found scattered in many books, chiefly in foreign languages. As no writer in our language has occupied this field of religious literature, he hopes that the unlearned reader will find in these monks much that is new to him; and if it be not also interesting and instructive, the fault must be in the author's mode of presenting it, rather than in the subject matter of the book.
