The doctor winds up this extract from the bills of mortality by the following appropriate remark: "Here we see the moon, as she shines on all alike, so she makes no distinction of persons in her influence:
"——æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas,
Regumque turres."
GLUTTONY OF THE MONKS.
King John, pointing to a fat deer said, "See how plump he is, and yet he has never heard mass!" John might have alluded to the gluttony of the monks, which was notorious in his days; for Giraldus Cambrensis says, that from the monks of St. Swithin's, Winchester, Henry II. received a formal complaint against the abbot for depriving his priests of three out of thirteen dishes at every meal. The monks of Canterbury exceeded those of St. Swithin; they had seventeen dishes every day, and each of these cooked with spices and the most savoury and rich sauces.
ANCIENT BELL-SHRINE.
The annexed engraving represents one of the most valuable and curious ecclesiastical relics of the early Christian Period that has ever been discovered. It consists of a bronze bell-shrine and bell, found about the year 1814, on the demolition of the ruined wall at Torrebhlaurn farm, in the parish of Kilmichael-Glassrie, Argyleshire, and now one of the most valued treasures in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries.
That it must have been deposited in the wall where it was found, for the purpose of concealment at a period of danger and alarm, seems abundantly obvious; but of the occasion of this concealment no tradition has been preserved. Within the beautiful case is a rude iron bell, so greatly corroded that its original form can only be imperfectly traced; yet this, and not the shrine, was obviously the chief object of veneration, and may, indeed, be assumed, with much probability, to be some centuries older than the ornamental case in which it is preserved. Whether it shall be thought to have been an ancient reliquary or a mass-bell, or whatever else may be conjectured of its nature and use, it may fairly be presumed to have remained in the neglected spot in which it was found since the subversion of the Roman Catholic worship in the sixteenth century, when the favoured objects of external adoration and reverence, under the former superstition, came to be regarded with impatient contempt and abhorrence.