C. Hugo.  A tub for Varila!  Stand on the table, now, toss back thy hood like any Franciscan, and preach away.

C. Wal.  Idleness, quoth he [Conrad, mind you],—­idleness and immorality?  Where have they learnt them, but from your nobles?  There was a saucy monk for you.  But there’s worse coming.  Religion? said he, how can they respect it, when they see you, ‘their betters,’ fattening on church lands, neglecting sacraments, defying excommunications, trading in benefices, hiring the clergy for your puppets and flatterers, making the ministry, the episcopate itself, a lumber-room wherein to stow away the idiots and spendthrifts of your families, the confidants of your mistresses, the cast-off pedagogues of your boys?

Omnes.  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.  That was his sermon.

Abbot.  Paul and Barnabas!  What an outpouring of the spirit!—­Were not his hoodship the Pope’s legate, now—­accidents might happen to him, going home at night; eh, Sir Hugo?

C. Hugo.  If he would but come my way! 
For ’the mule it was slow, and the lane it was dark,
When out of the copse leapt a gallant young spark. 
Says, ’Tis not for nought you’ve been begging all day: 
So remember your toll, since you travel our way.’

Abbot.  Hush!  Here comes the Landgrave.

[Lewis enters.]

Lewis.  Good morrow, gentles.  Why so warm, Count Walter? 
Your blessing, Father Abbot:  what deep matters
Have called our worships to this conference?