g its _petit possible_ to warn big-bones
of his danger, thus ending his faithful services by an act of farewell
loyalty--and the unlucky _demoisel_ scuttling away to her
rabbit-warren, only to find all the spiracles and peeping-holes
preoccupied or stopped, and her own 'apparel' unhappily locked up '_in
the abbot his coffer_,' so as to render hopeless all evasion or
subsequent denial of the fact, that ten big-boned 'indusia' (or
shirts) lay interleaved in one and the same 'coffer,' _inter totidem
niveas camisas_[55] (or chemises)--all this framed itself as a little
amusing parenthesis, a sort of family picture amongst the dreadful
reports of ecclesiastical commissioners.

[Footnote 55: '_Camisas_:' _i. e._ chemises; but at one time the word
_camisa_ was taken indifferently for shirt or chemise. And hence arose
the term _camisado_ for a night-attack, in which the assailants
recognised each other in the dark by their white shirt-sleeves,
sometimes further distinguished by a tight cincture of broad black
riband. The last literal camisado, that I remember, was a nautical
one--a cutting-out enterprise somewhere about 1807-8.]

No _suppression_ of the religious houses had originally been designed;
nothing more than a searching _visitation_. And at this moment, yes,
at this present midsummer of 1856, waiting and looking forward to the
self-same joyful renewal of leases that then was looked for in
England, but not improbably, alas! summoned to the same ineffable
disappointment as fell more than three centuries back upon our own
England--lies, waiting for her doom, a great kingdom in central
Europe. She, and under the same causes, may chance to be disappointed.
What was it that caused the tragic convulsion in England? Simply this:
regular and healthy visitation having ceased, infinite abuses had
arisen; and these abuses, it was found at last, could not be healed by
any measure less searching than absolute suppression. Austria, as
regards some of her provinces, stands in the same circumstances at
this very moment. Imperfect visitations, that cleansed nothing, should
naturally have left her religious establishments languishing for the
one sole remedy that was found applicable to the England of 1540. And
what was _that_? It was a remedy that carried along with it
revolution. England was found able in those days to stand that fierce
medicine: a more profound revolution has not often been witnessed than
that of our mighty Reformati