I have now spoken of the Dominicans, Capuchins, and Bernardins. The Franciscans are a not less lively fraternity. When the author of Eöthen was at the Franciscan Monastery in Damascus, he asked one of the monks to tell what places were best worth seeing, in reference to their association with St. Paul. “There is nothing in all Damascus,” said the good man, “half so well worth seeing as our cellars;” and forthwith he invited the stranger to “go and admire the long range of liquid treasures that he and his brethren had laid up for themselves upon earth.” And, adds the author, “these I soon found were not as the treasures of the miser, that lie in unprofitable disuse; for day by day, and hour by hour, the golden juice ascended from the dark recesses of the cellar to the uppermost brains of the friars, dear old fellows! In the midst of that solemn land, their Christian laughter rang loudly and merrily. Their eyes kept flashing with joyous bonfires, and their heavy woollen petticoats could no more weigh down the springiness of their paces, than the filmy gauze of a danseuse can cloy her bounding step.”
Richard the First, as worthless a human being as ever lived, bankrupt in every virtue save that of brute courage, in making legacy of his vices, said he would bequeath gluttony to the priests. It was rather a compliment than otherwise, for the inference was, that they lacked what he was willing to surrender, when he could no longer enjoy it. St. Augustin settled this vexed question as to what was “good living,” when he said, that “the great fast was abstinence from vice.” And in the true spirit of St. Augustin’s prose, rings the rich rhyme in Herrick’s Noble Numbers. “Is this,” he says,
“Is this a fast, to keep
The larder leane
And cleane
From fat of veales and sheep?
“Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish?