Note 309 — The Drawing Room.

The amiable and candid Strype has polluted the pages of his valuable Ecclesiastical Memorials with an account of such horrid practices, supposed to have been carried on in monasteries, as must startle the most credulous Anti-Papist; and which almost leads us to conclude that a legion of fiends must have been let loose upon these "Friar Rushes!" The author tells us that he takes his account from authentic documents—but these documents turn out to be the letters of the visitors; and of the character of one of these the reader has just had a sufficient proof. Those who have the work here referred to, vol. i., p. 256-7, may think, with the author of it, that "this specimen is enough and too much." What is a little to be marvelled at, Strype suffers his prejudices against the conduct of the monks to be heightened by a letter from one of the name of Beerly, at Pershore; who, in order that he might escape the general wreck, turned tail upon his brethren, and vilified them as liberally as their professed enemies had done. Now, to say the least, this was not obtaining what Chief Baron Gilbert, in his famous Law of Evidence, has laid it down as necessary to be obtained—"the best possible evidence that the nature of the case will admit of." It is worth remarking that Fuller has incorporated a particular account of the names of the abbots and of the carnal enormities of which they are supposed to have been guilty; but he adds that he took it from the 3d edition of Speed's Hist. of Great Britain, and (what is worth special notice) that it was not to be found in the prior ones: "being a posthume addition after the author's death, attested in the margine with the authority of Henry Steven his Apologie for Herodotus, who took the same out of an English book, containing the Vileness discovered at the Visitation of Monasteries." Church History, b. vi., pp. 316, 317.