[767] Al toro y al aire darles calle.
[768] Mature fias senex, si diu velis esse senex.
[769] Quæ peccavimus juvenes, ea luimus senes.
CLERGY.
It's kittle shooting at corbies and clergy.—Scotch.
Crows are very wary, and the clergy are vindictive; therefore it is ticklish work trying to get the better of either. "One must either not meddle with priests or else smite them dead," say the Germans;[770] and Huss, the Bohemian reformer, in denouncing the sins of the clergy in his day, has preserved for us a similar proverb of his countrymen: "If you have offended a clerk kill him, else you will never have peace with him."[771] "The bites of priests and wolves are hard to heal" (German).[772] "Priests and women never forget" (German).[773] "How dangerous it was," says Gross, "to injure the meanest retainer of a religious house is very ludicrously but justly expressed in the following old English adage, which I have somewhere met with:—
'Yf perchaunce one offend a freere's dogge, streight clameth the whole brotherhood, An heresy! An heresy!'"