There were, indeed, preachers who were sent round the country to declaim against certain special sins. Their _forte_ lay in attacking one species of guilt, but they were ineffective when preaching on another point. There were preachers whose strength lay in panegyrics upon saints; and others who—I pity them—were great in funereal discourses. Of the latter class was Geminiano, a Dominican, whose “sermones funebres” were published at Antwerp in octavo, 1611. They are ninety-eight in number. He preached over the graves of popes, archbishops, bishops, abbots, soldiers, doctors, rich men and beggars, beautiful women, an emperor, a drowned man, a prisoner who died in jail, an executed criminal, and a murdered man or two; he preached at the interment of merchants, fishermen, ploughmen, and huntsmen—in short, it would be hard to find some over whom John Geminiano did not dolorously hold forth. A sad moment for Geminiano when he first let people understand that his strong point lay in a grave. A really great preacher was never suffered to hide his light under a bushel; according to our parochial system, the most eloquent man of the day may, for aught we know, be perched on the top of a Wiltshire down, or be buried in the clay of a North Devon parsonage, fifteen miles from a railway. The Roman Church had the regular clergy to draw upon for preachers, and as they had no ties, could send them up and down the country, so that the same course of sermons would serve them again and again. Indeed, otherwise it would have been impossible for some of the favourite preachers to have continued providing fresh matter and committing it to memory, for it must be remembered written sermons are not tolerated in the Roman communion. It might be possible for an eloquent man with a lively imagination to continue for long without exhausting himself, but how could a solid and learned preacher, who relied on quotations, continue extracting and committing to memory long paragraphs from the Fathers, Sunday after Sunday, and year after year? Let us take a sermon of Mangotius the Jesuit, for instance. Adrian Mangotius was a Dutchman, and consequently eminently practical and unimaginative. His sermons are good in their way; there is not a bit of originality in them, but the fragments of which they are composed are judiciously selected. In his fifty-ninth discourse, he quotes St. Matthew four times, St. Luke thrice, St. John twice, the Epistles five times, Revelation once, the Old Testament ten times, St. Augustine a dozen times, St. Gregory four times, St. Ambrose twice, St. Jerome twice, St. Bernard twice, St. Thomas Aquinas once, Cicero some three or four times, Plutarch, Sallust, and Virgil once.