ne;[2] and Drake also gave the Spaniards good
reason for believing that he was a devil, and no man.[3]

[Footnote 1: See also D'Ewes, p. 688.]

[Footnote 2: Froude, xii. 87.]

[Footnote 3: Ibid. 663.]

33. This intense credulousness, childish almost in itself, but yet at
the same time combined with the strong man's intellect, permeated all
classes of society. Perhaps a couple of instances, drawn from strangely
diverse sources, will bring this more vividly before the mind than any
amount of attempted theorizing. The first is one of the tricks of the
jugglers of the period.

"_To make one danse naked._

"Make a poore boie confederate with you, so as after charms, etc.,
spoken by you, he unclothe himself and stand naked, seeming (whilest he
undresseth himselfe) to shake, stamp, and crie, still hastening to be
unclothed, till he be starke naked; or if you can procure none to go so
far, let him onlie beginne to stampe and shake, etc., and unclothe him,
and then you may (for reverence of the companie) seeme to release
him."[1]

[Footnote 1: Scott, p. 339.]

The second illustration must have demanded, if possible, more credulity
on the part of the audience than this harmless entertainment. Cranmer
tells us that in the time of Queen Mary a monk preached a sermon at St.
Paul's, the object of which was to prove the truth of the doctrine of
transubstantiation; and, after the manner of his kind, told the
following little anecdote in support of it:--"A maid of Northgate parish
in Canterbury, in pretence to wipe her mouth, kept the host in her
handkerchief; and, when she came home, she put the same into a pot,
close covered, and she spitted in another pot, and after a few days, she
looking in the one pot, found a little young pretty babe, about a
shaftmond long; and the other pot was full of gore blood."[1]

[Footnote 1: Cranmer, A Confutation of Unwritten Verities, p. 66. Parker
Society.]

34. That the audiences before which these absurdities were seriously
brought, for amusement or instruction, could be excited in either case
to any other feeling than good-natured contempt for a would-be impostor,
seems to us now-a-days to be impossible. It was not so in the times when
these things transpired: the actors of them were not knaves, nor were
their audiences fools, to any unusual extent. If any one is inclined to
form a low opinion of the Elizabethans intellectually, on account of the
divergence of their capacities of