It would amount to positive negligence, if, in the present sketch, those wanderers that are usually known among ourselves by the appellation of Gypsies, and on the continent by that of Bohemians, on account of their first appearance in that country, were passed over without some notice; but their history has been so learnedly and copiously detailed by M. Grellmann, that it may be thought sufficient on this occasion to advert to the English translation of that excellent work by Mr Raper, published 1787, in quarto. Nor should the mention of the orders of mendicant friars be omitted, who, no doubt, had their prototypes in the knavish priests of Cybele. Of these persons there were four orders,--viz., the Augustinians, the Carmelites, the Dominicans, and the Minorites. They wandered from place to place, professing poverty, and exciting the charity of others. They had assumed and acquired an unlimited control over the consciences of the deluded victims of their artifice, and at length became particularly odious to the monks and the clergy in general, continuing nevertheless to maintain their power and influence, from the marked favour and protection of the Roman Pontiffs, who regarded them as some of their best friends and supporters. In our own country these people encountered a most bitter and inveterate enemy in the celebrated Wickliffe, who, in his sermons and other works, declaimed against them with much vehement eloquence as thieves, hypocrites, and children of Judas Iscariot; telling them that Christ never commissioned any one to appear in the character of a beggar; and that, although he preferred a state of poverty, he never demanded alms himself, nor allowed of others doing it, but in cases of extreme necessity. Another set of ecclesiastical mendicants were those pseudo-monks, who, among many other irregularities, scrupled not to take to themselves wives, whilst their brethren contented themselves with concubines. These were branded by the regular monks with the appellation of _Beghards_, and are specially termed _sturdy beggars_, in a very bitter invective against them by Felix Hammerlein, a civilian and canon of Zurich, in the fifteenth century, who emphatically calls them the legitimate sons of Belial. Many other writers declaimed against them with great acrimony, and some of the more rigid Papists seem to have classed them among the _Lollards_, an appellation that has very much arrested the attention of the learned in etymology, though without any certainty as to its origin.