Excerpt from The Lausiac History of Palladius My interest in monasticism was first awakened in 1904, when I was a theological student at Cambridge, by the publication of the second volume of Abbot Cuthbert Butler's Lausiac History of Palladius. The appearance of a new work of scholarship, however excellent, would have meant little to me at that time, but my imagination was struck by the dinner which the theological teachers at Cambridge combined to give the author in hour of the completion of his arduous task. Somehow I had t associated monks with dinner-parties, and they appeared to me henceforward in a more human and attractive guise. In 1908 I began to study monasticism, taking Abbot Butler's works as my guide, and have never since lost interest in the subject. During the past year I have tried, during the few leisure hours which were alone possible under war conditions, to forget the tragedies of the time by making a translation of the Lausiac History. I do t kw whether an ordinary critical text, where an editor merely gives the finishing touches to the labour of his predecessors, is copyright so far as the right of making a translation is concerned. But in this case the text belongs to Abbot Butler in a special way, since before him all was chaos. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.