ure; he was a classical
schoolmaster, and was pompously occupied, when I first saw him,
reading through his spectacles, with his head raised aloft, the seven
Penitential Psalms in Latin, out of the Key of Paradise, to a circle
of women and children, along with two or three men in frieze coats, who
listened with profound attention.

A little to the right of Syntax, were a man and woman--the man engaged
in teaching the woman a Latin charm against the colic, to which it seems
she was subject. Although they all, for the most part, who were in the
large room about us, prayed aloud, yet by fastening the attention on any
particular person, you could hear what he said. I therefore heard, the
words of this charm, and as my memory is not bad, I still remember them;
they ran thus:

_Petrus sedebat super lapidem marmoreain juxta cedem Jerusalem et
dolebat, Jesus veniebat et rogabat "Petre, quid doles?" "Doleo vento
ventre." "Surge, Petre, et sanus esto." Et quicunque haec verba non
scripta sed memoriter tradita recitat nunquam dolebit vento ventre_.

These are the words literally, but I need not say, that had the poor
woman sat there since, she would not have got them impressed on her
memory.

There were also other countenances in which a man might almost read
the histories of their owners. Methought I could perceive the lurking,
unsubdued spirit of the battered rake, in the leer of his roving eye,
while he performed, in the teeth of his flesh, blood, and principles,
the delusive vow to which the shrinking spirit, at the approach of
death, on the bed of sickness, clung, as to its salvation; for it was
evident that superstition had only exacted from libertinism what fear
and ignorance had promised her.

I could note the selfish, griping miser, betraying his own soul, and
holding a false promise to his heart, as with lank jaw, keen eye, and
brow knit with anxiety for the safety of his absent wealth, he joined
some group, sager if possible to defraud them even of the benefit of
their prayers, and attempting to practise that knavery upon heaven which
had been so successful upon earth.

I could see the man of years, I thought, withering away under the
disconsolation of an ill-spent life, old without peace, and gray without
wisdom, flattering himself that he is religious because he prays,
and making a merit of offering to God that which Satan had rejected;
thinking, too, that he has withdrawn from sin, because the ability
of comm