a mouse approaching to lick it; alluding to the allurements
of the abbesses to draw young women into their convents; while sometimes
I have seen a sow in an abbess's veil, mounted on stilts: the sex marked
by the sow's dugs. A pope sometimes appears to be thrust by devils into
a cauldron; and cardinals are seen roasting on spits! These _ornaments_
must have been generally executed by the monks themselves; but these
more ingenious members of the ecclesiastical order appear to have
sympathised with the people, like the curates in our church, and envied
the pampered abbot and the purple bishop. Churchmen were the usual
objects of the suppressed indignation of the people in those days; but
the knights and feudal lords have not always escaped from the "curses
not loud, but deep," of their satirical pencils.

As the Reformation, or rather the Revolution, was hastening, this custom
became so general, that in one of the dialogues of Erasmus, where two
Franciscans are entertained by their host, it appears that such
satirical exhibitions were hung up as common furniture in the apartments
of inns. The facetious genius of Erasmus either invents or describes one
which he had seen of an ape in the habit of a Franciscan sitting by a
sick man's bed, dispensing ghostly counsel, holding up a crucifix in one
hand, while with the other he is filching a purse out of the sick man's
pocket. Such are "the straws" by which we may always observe from what
corner the wind rises! Mr. Dibdin has recently informed us, that Geyler,
whom he calls "the herald of the Reformation," preceding Luther by
twelve years, had a stone chair or pulpit in the cathedral at Strasburg,
from which he delivered his lectures, or rather rolled the thunders of
his anathemas against the monks. This stone pulpit was constructed under
his own superintendence, and is covered with very indecent figures of
monks and nuns, expressly designed by him to expose their profligate
manners. We see Geyler doing what for centuries had been done!

In the curious folios of Sauval, the Stowe of France, there is a copious
chapter, entitled "_Heretiques, leurs attentats_." In this enumeration
of their attempts to give vent to their suppressed indignation, it is
very remarkable that, _preceding the time of Luther_, the minds of many
were perfectly _Lutheran_ respecting the idolatrous worship of the Roman
Church; and what I now notice would have rightly entered into that
significant _Historia