Note 167 — BOOK II. (continued 3)

In Spain and Italy there is, upon every Holy Thursday, a procession of disciplinants, or people who do penance in sackcloth, carrying a flambeau in one hand, and in the other a scourge, with which they belabour their own shoulders, in such a manner, that the very street is sometimes coloured with their blood: some of these disciplinants, however, are mere hypocrites, who under their sackcloth wear women’s stay’s, buff jackets, and even plates of tin; so that they are often detected from the sound of the stroke: and at Rome nothing is more common than to hear the people who accompany these devotees, call out, according to the report of the application, ‘Guipponi di Buffalo!—Busti di Donna! and Corrazini di Latta!’