The Reichstag of Worms, by cutting off all possibility of reconciliation, rather gave further edge to the popular revolutionary side of the movement than otherwise. The whole progress of the change in public feeling is plainly traceable in the mass of ephemeral literature that has come down to us from this period, broadsides, pamphlets, satires, folk-songs, and the rest. The anonymous literature to which we more especially refer is distinguished by its coarse brutality and humour, even in the writings of the Reformers, which were themselves in no case remarkable for the suavity of their polemic. Hutten, in some of his later vernacular poems, approaches the character of the less-cultured broadside literature. To the critical mind it is somewhat amusing to note the enthusiasm with which the modern Dissenting and Puritan class contemplates the period of which we are writing--an enthusiasm that would probably be effectively damped if the laudators of the Reformation knew the real character of the movement and of its principal actors. The first attacks made by the broadside literature were naturally directed against the simony and benefice-grabbing of the clergy, a characteristic of the priestly office that has always powerfully appealed to the popular mind. Thus the "Courtisan and Benefice-eater" attacks the parasite of the Roman Court, who absorbs ecclesiastical revenues wholesale, putting in perfunctory _locum tenens_ on the cheap, and begins:-- I'm fairly called a Simonist and eke a Courtisan, And here to every peasant and every common man My knavery will very well appear. I called and cried to all who'd give me ear, To nobleman and knight and all above me: "Behold me! And ye'll find I'll truly love ye." In another we read:-- The Paternoster teaches well How one for another his prayers should tell, Thro' brotherly love and not for gold, And good those same prayers God doth hold. So too saith Holy Paul right clearly, Each shall his brother's load bear dearly. But now, it declares, all that is changed. Now we are being taught just the opposite of God's teachings:-- Such doctrine hath the priests increased, Whom men as masters now must feast, 'Fore all the crowd of Simonists, Whose waxing number no man wists, The towns and thorps seem full of them, And in all lands they're seen with shame. Their violence and knavery Leave not a church or living free.