I am able to add further information concerning the _Cagots_. They are a miserable race, mostly beggars, or employed only about the meanest and filthiest work, abounding in leprosy and other cutaneous diseases, and in the most loathsome vermin; houseless, half-clad, inhabiting stables, barns, or any casual place of shelter, generally mutilated and lame, outcasts from society, reputed to lead infamous lives, indulging in the most horrible practices, even of cannibalism, and worse offences than that. Their brand used to be an eggshell on their clothes, and the custom was to pierce their feet with an iron. Scaliger derived their name from "Canis Gottus," and their origin has been assigned to some one of the northern nations which penetrated into the south of France and north of Spain in the third and fourth centuries before our era. On this may I be allowed to forward a Query or two? What is their language? What are their own traditions concerning their origin? I am confirmed in my opinion that they are no way analogous to the Cretins; the latter being diseased, and Cretins because they are diseased; the _Cagot_ being diseased and filthy, and despised because he is a _Cagot_, an individual of a degraded and outcast race of men. THEOPHYLACT. TEXTS BEFORE SERMONS. (Vol. iv., p. 344.) In the early church the sermon was delivered immediately after the reading of the Scriptures (_Const. Apost._ lib. viii. c. 5.), and sometimes preached without any text; at other times, upon more texts than one; but most commonly the text was taken out of some paragraph of the Psalms or Lessons, as they were read. Origen expressly calls Sermons, _explanations of the Lessons_ (Orig. _cont. Cels._, lib. iii.). The Fathers sometimes so ordered the matter, as to preach upon the Psalm, the Epistle, and the Gospel all together, when they happened to be on the same subject. Thus St. Augustine (_Serm._ x. t. x. p. 112.) preached upon the subject of praise and thanksgiving, out of the Epistle, the Psalm, and the Gospel together, because they each had something relating to his subject. (_Bingham_, book xiv. ch. iv. § 17.) This may have given rise to the present plan of textual preaching. During the middle ages we frequently meet with the terms _postilla_, _postillæ_, _postillare_, and the like (from _post illa verba Scripturæ sacræ_), denoting sometimes merely expositions of Scripture, and sometimes popular discourses founded upon a passage just before read. In England, about the year 957, Elfric, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, required the priest in each parish to explain the Gospel of the day, the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer, on Sundays and holydays. (Canon XXIII. Ælfrica, Wilkins, _Concil._ tom. i. p. 253.) The same person afterwards compiled Homilies in the Anglo-Saxon language, which for some time continued to be read in the English Church. (Cave, _Historia Literaria_, tom. ii.)