the belly of your memory may be sweetened within, and thus as
with the panther refreshed, to whose breath all beasts and cattle
long to approach, the sweet savour of the spices it has eaten may
shed a perfume without. Thus our nature secretly working in our
own, listeners hasten up gladly, as the load-stone draws the iron
nothing loth. What an infinite host of books lie at Paris or
Athens, and at the same time resound in Britain and in Rome! In
truth, while resting they yet move, and while retaining their own
places they are carried about every way to the minds of
listeners. Finally, by the knowledge of literature, we establish
Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and the Pope, that all things in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy may be fitly disposed. For it is from
books that everything of good that befalls the clerical condition
takes its origin. But let this suffice: for it pains us to
recall what we have bestowed upon the degenerate clergy, because
whatever gifts are distributed to the ungrateful seem to be lost
rather than bestowed.

Let us next dwell a little on the recital of the wrongs with
which they requite us, the contempts and cruelties of which we
cannot recite an example in each kind, nay, scarcely the main
classes of the several wrongs. In the first place, we are
expelled by force and arms from the homes of the clergy, which
are ours by hereditary right, who were used to have cells of
quietness in the inner chamber, but, alas! in these unhappy times
we are altogether exiled, suffering poverty without the gates.
For our places are seized now by dogs, now by hawks, now by that
biped beast whose cohabitation with the clergy was forbidden of
old, from which we have always taught our nurslings to flee more
than from the asp and the cockatrice; wherefore she, always