the nation,
and gave that general relief which the poor-laws are intended to afford.

Piers Plowman is indeed a satirist; but he plainly charges the monks
with want of charity.

Little had lordes to do to give landes from their heires
To religious that have no ruthe though it raine on their aultres;
In many places there the parsons be themself at ease,
Of the poor they have no pitie and that is their poor charitie.

[537] Schmidt, Hist. des Allemands, t. i. p. 374.

[538] See Fosbrooke's British Monachism (vol. i. p. 127, and vol. ii. p.
8) for a farrago of evidence against the monks. Clemangis, a French
theologian of considerable eminence at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, speaks of nunneries in the following terms:--Quid aliud sunt
hoc tempore puellarum monasteria, nisi quaedam non dico Dei sanctuaria,
sed Veneris execranda prostibula, sed lascivorum et impudicorum juvenum
ad libidines explendas receptacula? ut idem sit hodie puellam velare,
quod et publice ad scortandum exponere. William Prynne, from whose
records (vol. ii. p. 229) I have taken this passage, quotes it on
occasion of a charter of king John, banishing thirty nuns of Ambresbury
into different convents, propter vitae suae turpitudinem.

[539] Mosheim, cent. vii. c. 3. Robertson has quoted this passage, to
whom perhaps I am immediately indebted for it. Hist. Charles V., vol. i.
note 11.

I leave this passage as it stood in former editions. But it is due to
justice that this extract from Eligius should never be quoted in future,
as the translator of Mosheim has induced Robertson and many others, as
well as myself, to do. Dr. Lingard has pointed out that it is a very
imperfect representation of what Eligius has written; for though he has
dwelled on these devotional practices as parts of the definition of a good
Christian, he certainly adds a great deal more to which no one could
object. Yet no one is, in fact, to blame for this misrepresentation,
which, being contained in popular books, has gone forth so widely.
Mosheim, as will appear on referring to him, did not quote the passage as
containing a complete definition of the Christian character. His
translator, Maclaine, mistook this, and wrote, in consequence, the severe
note which Robertson has copied. I have seen the whole passage in
d'Achery's Spicilegium (vol. v. p. 213, 4to. edit.), and can testify that
Dr. Lingard is perfectly correct. Upon the whole, this is a striking p