The number of residentiaries was consequently reduced (a measure of necessity, which involved much subsequent inconvenience and legal dispute,) and the buildings themselves were with difficulty preserved from the injuries of time.[80] Neither did the schism end here. Before, however, we go further, it may due to ourselves to remark, that it is not because an historian of the reformation, protestant though he be, finds pleasure in thus uncovering the nakedness of the Roman catholic church, that he dwells so exclusively on its peccant parts, nor yet because he is not aware that better things may be said of it; but simply because his subject leads him to develope those defects, both in its doctrine and discipline which paved the way for its eventual overthrow, not to recount the virtues which, in spite of such defects, preserved it so long. At the same time, he naturally feels some satisfaction in vindicating his own church from a comparison by which it is thought to suffer, and which represents it as full of discord and division, whilst the church which it supplanted was at unity with itself. Such was not, we see, the case. Time has, indeed, hushed all report of the bickerings of men who lived three or four centuries ago, and it may be invidious to awake the echo; but tenderness to the dead must not betray us into injustice to the living, and however error may be concealed, it must not be consecrated by the grave. But to return: hitherto we have represented the friars as the enemies of the secular clergy only, whether cathedral or parochial. They had their stone, however, to cast at the monks. It was their pleasure to contrast their own affected poverty (which lasted just so long as they could not help it) with the gallant bearing, profuse expenditure, and ample retinues of these latter, who, in their turn, expressed their contempt for them, not the less cordially, perhaps from a consciousness that the contrast was striking. In a manuscript which once belonged to a learned Benedictine, and is now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is a drawing of four devils hugging four mendicant friars, one of each order, with great familiarity and affection.[81] But other weapons, offensive and defensive, were used besides ridicule. Thus the greater monasteries would occasionally rouse themselves, and found a small college or hall at the universities for their own novices, that they might not resign to their antagonists, without a struggle, the entire possession of those ancient seats of learning. So, again, when their members proceeded to degrees, they would often do it with studious costs and popular display, turning the occasion into a holiday spectacle, which might be set in balance against the miracles, mysteries, and other theatrical attractions of the mendicants.[82] These latter, however, might have long laughed at such artifices, had they continued true to one another; but the arrow which pierced them to the heart was