BY THE REV. AUGUSTUS JESSOPP, D.D. Hon. Canon in Norwich Cathedral, Hon. Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, and Hon. Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge FOURTEENTH IMPRESSION TO MY FRIEND AND SOMETIME TUTOR, FRANCIS WHALLEY HARPER, CANON OF YORK, I OFFER THIS VOLUME AS A TOKEN OF MY GRATITUDE [These Essays have appeared at various times in "The Nineteenth Century," and are now printed with some alterations, corrections, and additions.] CONTENTS. I. THE COMING OF THE FRIARS II. VILLAGE LIFE

Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again!--_Lord Tennyson._ When King Richard of England, whom men call the Lion-hearted, was wasting his time at Messina, after his boisterous fashion, in the winter of 1190, he heard of the fame of Abbot Joachim, and sent for that renowned personage, that he might hear from his own lips the words of prophecy and their interpretation. Around the personality of Joachim there has gathered no small amount of _mythus._ He was, it appears, the invent

"The rude forefathers of the hamlet..." [In the autumn of 1878, while on a visit at Rougham Hall, Norfolk, the seat of Mr. Charles North, my kind host drew my attention to some large boxes of manuscripts, which he told me nobody knew anything about, but which I was at liberty to ransack to my heart's content. I at once dived into one of the boxes, and then spent half the night in examining some of its treasures. The chest is one of many, constituting in their entirety a complete apparatus for th

         "Now I think on't, They should be good men; their affairs as righteous: But all hoods make not monks." [The commemoration of the birth of Martin Luther, which people would have called his quater-centenary if they had not been deterred by the terrific appearance of so huge a word, was the occasion of many preachments and much lecturing, besides a great deal of heroic talk in public and private. With so much to encourage cynicism and persiflage among us it was comforting to find that the

"So they died! The dead were slaying the dying,      And a famine of strivers silenced strife:          There were none to love and none to wed,          And pity and joy and hope had fled, And grief had spent her passion in sighing;      And where was the Spirit of Life?" From across the Channel during the last few months [Footnote: February, 1884.] there have come to us tidings of a visitation of pestilence which have seemed to some men very disquieting, and to some heavy with menace. From Ita

When Bishop Bateman started on his journey upon the King's business, in March 1349, he can scarcely have turned his back upon his diocese without some misgivings as to what might happen during his absence. In some parts of Norfolk a very grievous murrain had prevailed during the previous year among the live stock in the farms, and though this had almost disappeared, there was ample room for anxiety in the outlook. If the plague had not yet been felt to any extent in East Anglia, it might burst f

. . . . "so famous, So excellent in art, and still so rising." Some years ago I found myself in a Northern capital, and committed myself to the guidance of a native coachman, whose business and pride it was to drive me from place to place, and indicate to me the important buildings of his majestic city. He was a patriotic showman, and I am bound to say he showed us a great deal; but the most memorable moment of that instructive day was when he stopped before, what seemed to us, a respectable man

"Did you ever hear tell of Lodowick Muggleton?" "Not I." "That is strange. Know then that he was the founder of our poor society, and after him we are frequently, though oppro-briously, termed Muggletonians, for we are Christians. Here is his book; I will sell it cheap." --LAVENGRO. Scrupulous veracity was hardly a characteristic of the late George Borrow. A man of great memory, he was also a man of fertile imagination, and where the two are found in excess, side by side in the same intellect, t