misrule into a wretched village. He was heir to great estates; the
glens and forests round him were his own: and that was the use
which he made of them. On the other side of the torrent, his mother
and his sister, a maiden of wonderful beauty, lived the hermit life,
on a footing of perfect equality with their female slaves, and the
pious women who had joined them.

Basil's austerities--or rather the severe climate of the Black Sea
forests--brought him to an early grave. But his short life was
spent well enough. He was a poet, with an eye for the beauty of
Nature--especially for the beauty of the sea--most rare in those
times; and his works are full of descriptions of scenery as healthy-
minded as they are vivid and graceful.

In his travels through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, he had seen the
hermits, and longed to emulate them; but (to do him justice) his
ideal of the so-called "religious life" was more practical than
those of the solitaries of Egypt, who had been his teachers. "It
was the life" (says Dean Milman {163}) "of the industrious religious
community, not of the indolent and solitary anchorite, which to
Basil was the perfection of Christianity. . . . The indiscriminate
charity of these institutions was to receive orphans" (of which
there were but too many in those evil days) "of all classes, for
education and maintenance: but other children only with the consent
or at the request of parents, certified before witnesses; and vows
were by no means to be enforced upon these youthful pupils. Slaves
who fled to the monasteries were to be admonished and sent back to
their owners. There is one reservation" (and that one only too
necessary then), "that slaves were not bound to obey their master,
if he should order what is contrary to the law of God. Industry was