After all, there was a gayer old fellow than Sir John Breton among the poor knights. One Sir Emanuel Cloue is spoken of who appears to have been a very Don Giovanni among the silly maids and merry wives of Windsor. He was for ever with his eye on a petticoat and his hand on a tankard; and what with love and spiced canary, he could never sit still at mass, but was addicted to running about among the congregation. It would puzzle St. George himself to tell all the nonsense he talked on these occasions. When we read how the bishop suggested that the King and Council should discover a remedy to check the rollicking career of Sir Edmund, we are at first perplexed to make out why the cure was not assigned to the religious officials. The fact, however, is that they were as bad as, or worse than, the knights. They too were as often to be detected with their lips on the brim of a goblet, or on the cheek of a damsel. There was Canon Lorying. He was addicted to hawking, hunting, and jollification; and the threat of dismissal, without chance of reinstalment, was had recourse to, before the canon ceased to make breaches in decorum. The vicars were as bad as the canons. The qualifications ascribed to them of being “inflated and wanton,” sufficiently describe by what sins these very reverend gentlemen were beset. They showed no reverence for the frolicsome canons, as might have been expected; and if both parties united in exhibiting as little veneration for the dean, the reason, doubtless, lay in the circumstance that the dean, as the bishop remarked, was remiss, simple, and negligent, himself. He was worse than this. He not only allowed the documents connected with the Order to go to decay, or be lost, but he would not pay the vicars their salaries till he was compelled to do so by high authority. The dean, in short, was a sorry knave; he even embezzled the fees paid when a vicar occupied a new stall, and which were intended to be appropriated to the general profit of the chapter, and pocketed the entire proceeds for his own personal profit and enjoyment. The canons again made short work of prayers and masses, devoting only an hour each day for the whole. This arrangement may not have displeased the more devout among the knights; and the canons defied the bishop to point out anything in the statutes by which they were prevented from effecting this abbreviation of their service, and earning their shilling easily. Of this ecclesiastical irregularity the bishop, curiously enough, solicited the state to pronounce its condemnation; and an order from King and Council was deemed a good remedy for priests of loose thoughts and practices. A matter of more moment was submitted to the jurisdiction of meaner authority. Thus, when one of the vicars, John Chichester, was “scandalized respecting the wife of Thomas Swift” (which is a very pretty way of putting his offence), the matter was left to the correction of the dean, who was