“Salvation lies not in tight lacing,” Carlyle quips in the opening of Book II of Past and Present by way of defending the loose structure of his comparative study of English society in the early 1840s. Critics still disagree sharply in their estimates of Carlyle's political argument, but the loosely-laced structure of Past and Present has allowed Book II, with its portrait of twelfth-century monasticism and Abbot Samson, to remain fairly immune to controversy. In fact, most readers, whether they applaud or dismiss the rest of Past and Present, would agree with A. M. D. Hughes that “it is in virtue of this interlude … that the book belongs among the classics of our tongue.” Several editors have gone so far as to sever Carlyle's tenuous connection between past and present altogether, printing the section devoted to Abbot Samson separately under a new title.