[Footnote 5:  Measure for Measure, III. i. 90.]

[Footnote 6:  I Hen.  IV., II. iv. 491-509.]

49.  The devils had an inconvenient habit of appearing in the guise of an ecclesiastic[1]—­at least, so the churchmen were careful to insist, especially when busying themselves about acts of temptation that would least become the holy robe they had assumed.  This was the ecclesiastical method of accounting for certain stories, not very creditable to the priesthood, that had too inconvenient a basis of evidence to be dismissed as fabricatious.  But the honest lay public seem to have thought, with downright old Chaucer, that there was more in the matter than the priests chose to admit.  This feeling we, as usual, find reflected in the dramatic literature of our period.  In “The Troublesome Raigne of King John,” an old play upon the basis of which Shakspere constructed his own “King John,” we find this question dealt with in some detail.  In the elder play, the Bastard does “the shaking of bags of hoarding abbots,” coram populo, and thereby discloses a phase of monastic life judiciously suppressed by Shakspere.  Philip sets at liberty much more than “imprisoned angels”—­according to one account, and that a monk’s, imprisoned beings of quite another sort.  “Faire Alice, the nonne,” having been discovered in the chest where the abbot’s wealth was supposed to be concealed, proposes to purchase pardon for the offence by disclosing the secret hoard of a sister nun.  Her offer being accepted, a friar is ordered to force the box in which the treasure is supposed to be secreted.  On being questioned as to its contents, he answers—­

“Frier Laurence, my lord, now holy water help us!  Some witch or some divell is sent to delude us:  Haud credo Laurentius that thou shouldst be pen’d thus In the presse of a nun; we are all undone, And brought to discredence, if thou be Frier Laurence."[2]

Unfortunately it proves indubitably to be that good man; and he is ordered to execution, not, however, without some hope of redemption by money payment; for times are hard, and cash in hand not to be despised.

[Footnote 1:  See the story about Bishop Sylvanus.—­Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i. 79.]

[Footnote 2:  Hazlitt, Shakspere Library, part ii. vol. i. p. 264.]

It is amusing to notice, too, that when assuming the clerical garb, the devil carefully considered the religious creed of the person to whom he intended to make himself known.  The Catholic accounts of him show him generally assuming the form of a Protestant parson;[1] whilst to those of the reformed creed he invariably appeared in the habit of a Catholic priest.  In the semblance of a friar the devil is reported (by a Protestant) to have preached, upon a time, “a verie Catholic sermon;"[2] so good, indeed, that a priest who was a listener could find no fault with the doctrine—­a stronger basis of fact than one would have imagined for Shakspere’s saying, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”