way consulting us? Which of you enters the schools to teach or to
dispute without relying upon our support? First of all, it behoves you
to eat the book with Ezechiel, that 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 jealous of the
love of us, and never to be appeased, at length seeing us in some
corner protected only by the web of some dead spider, with a frown
abuses and reviles us with bitter words, declaring us alone of all the
furniture in the house to be unnecessary, and complaining that we are
useless for any household purpose, and advises that we should speedily
be converted into rich caps, sendal and silk and twice-dyed purple,
robes and furs, wool and linen: and, indeed, not without re