The scoundrel!
C. Wal. Was he not?--But hear again--Immorality? roars he; and who
has corrupted them but you? Have you not made every castle a weed-
bed, from which the newest corruptions of the Court stick like
thistle-down, about the empty heads of stable-boys and serving
maids? Have you not kept the poor worse housed than your dogs and
your horses, worse fed than your pigs and your sheep? Is there an
ancient house among you, again, of which village gossips do not
whisper some dark story of lust and oppression, of decrepit
debauchery, of hereditary doom?
Omnes. We'll hang this monk.
C. Wal. Hear me out, and you'll burn him. His sermon was like a
hailstorm, the tail of the shower the sharpest. Idleness? he asked
next of us all: how will they work, when they see you landlords
sitting idle above them, in a fool's paradise of luxury and riot,
never looking down but to squeeze from them an extra drop of honey--
like sheep-boys stuffing themselves with blackberries while the
sheep are licking up flukes in every ditch? And now you wish to
leave the poor man in the slough, whither your neglect and your
example have betrayed him, and made his too apt scholarship the
excuse for your own remorseless greed! As a Christian, I am ashamed
of you all; as a Churchman, doubly ashamed of those prelates, hired
stalking-horses of the rich, who would fain gloss over their own
sloth and cowardice with the wisdom which cometh not from above, but
is earthly, sensual, devilish; aping the artless cant of an
aristocracy who made them--use them--and despise them.
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