that city
commonly are coupled with great and scandalous wickedness. They wallow
in the bed of riches and wealth, and make their alms the coverlet to
cover their loose and lascivious lives. From hence are the churches so
fairly built and adorned. There are not above fifty churches and
chapels, cloisters and nunneries, and parish churches in the city; but
those that are there are the fairest that ever my eyes beheld, the
roofs and beams being, in many of them, all daubed with gold, and many
altars with sundry marble pillars, and others with Brazil-wood stays
standing one above another, with tabernacles for several saints, richly
wrought with golden colors, so that twenty thousand ducats is a common
price of many of them. These cause admiration in the common sort of
people, and admiration brings on daily adoration in them to those
glorious spectacles and images of saints; so Satan shows Christ all the
glory of the kingdoms to entice him to admiration, and then he said,
'_All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship
me_' (Matthew, iv. 8, 9). The devil will give all the world to be
adored.

"Besides these beautiful buildings, the inward riches belonging to the
altars are infinite in price and value, such as copes, canopies,
hangings, altar-cloths, candlesticks, jewels belonging to the saints,
and crowns of gold and silver, and tabernacles of gold and crystal to
carry about their sacrament [the Saviour of the world in the form of a
wafer] in procession, all of which would mount to the worth of a
reasonable mine of silver, and would be a rich prey for any nation that
could make better use of wealth and riches. I will not speak much of
the lives of the friars and nuns of this city, but only that they there
enjoy more liberty than in Europe--where they have too much--and that
surely the scandals committed by them do cry up to Heaven for
vengeance, judgment, destruction.

"It is ordinary for the friars to visit their devoted nuns, and to
spend whole days with them, hearing their music, feeding on their
sweetmeats; and for this purpose they have many chambers, which they
call _loquatories_, to talk in, with wooden bars between the nuns and
them; and in these chambers are tables for the friars to dine at, and
while they dine the nuns recreate them with their voices. Gentlemen and
citizens give their daughters to be brought up in these nunneries,
where they are taught to make all sorts of conserves and pre