Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/71

 In spite of fair Zelinda's charms, And all her bards express, Poor Lyce made as true a stream, And I but flattered less."

I spent in Manchester my first English Sabbath; and as I had crossed the border, not to see countrymen, nor to hear such sermons as I might hear every Sunday at home, I went direct to the Collegiate Church. This building—a fine specimen of the florid Gothic—dates somewhere about the time when the Council of Constance was deposing Pope John for his enormous crimes, and burning John Huss and Jerome of Prague for their wholesome opinions; and when, though Popery had become miserably worn out as a code of belief, the revived religion of the New Testament could find no rest for the sole of its foot amid a wide weltering flood of practical infidelity and epicurism in the Church, and gross superstition and ignorance among the laity. And the architecture and numerous sculptures of the pile bear meet testimony to the character of the time. They approve themselves the productions of an age in which the priest, engaged in his round of rite and ceremony, could intimate knowingly to a brother priest, without over-much exciting lay suspicion, that he knew his profession to be but a joke. Some of the old Cartularies curiously indicate this state of matters. "The Cartulary of Moray," says an ingenious writer in the North British Review, "contains the Constitutiones Lyncolnienses, inserted as proper rules for the priests of that northern province, from which we learn that they were to enter the place of worship, not with insolent looks, but decently and in order; and were to be guilty of no laughing, or of attempting the perpetration of any base jokes (turpi risu aut jocu), and at the same time to conduct their whisperings in an under tone. A full stomach,