There are two survivals about a priest just at the epoch of the Reformation; they are evidently little touches from life. This learned clerk is made to preach a sermon on Charity, and in it to avouch that no man can get to heaven without charity, except only the King’s Grace, God save him! Then, when the royal visitors came down to his parts to make their report, he was interrogated as to what he did and how he passed his time. “I occupy myself in reading the New Testament,” says he. “That is very well,” say the Commissioners; “but prythee, Sir, who made the New Testament?” “That did King Henry the Eighth,” replies the priest, “Lord have mercy on his soul!” There is a strong air of verisimilitude in the salutation of Richard III., as he was collecting his forces in Thicket’s field, by the Northern man: “Diccon, Diccon, by the mis, I’se blith that thaust king”; and there are in the same tract (_Merry Tales and Quick Answers_) a couple of characteristic scraps, the only remaining footprints, as it were, of the Canon of Hereford, whose deficiency in intelligence and scholarship they celebrate. Gossip and satire concerning the priesthood seem, from a very remote period, to have been received with relish and tolerance; but tales exposing the rapacity, ignorance and licentiousness of the cloth were circulated from political motives with even greater eagerness and immunity just prior to that grand climax which abrogated the papal supremacy in England for ever. It is necessary, and not difficult, to distinguish between narrated incidents, which veritably belong to a specific vicinity, and such fictitious variants as are merely localised for the nonce. Of the latter the jest-books, which contributed so largely to the activity of the press from the accession of the Stuarts to their restoration, are rich in examples, as I have already pointed out. _Pasquil’s Jests_ is one of the worst offenders in this way. “How a merchant lost his purse between Waltham and London” is nothing more than a new-birth of the account in _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_, where Ware is the place specified; and “How mad Coomes of Stapforth, when his wife was drowned, sought her against the stream,” reproduces No. 55 of the same older miscellany, which is itself copied and varied from a Latin _fabliau_. Manchester, Hertfordshire, Kingston, Lincolnshire, and other neighbourhoods are fixed as the theatres of adventures in these books, without the slightest eye to topographical fitness. The anterior publications had perhaps set the fashion to some extent, and notably so the Gothamite Tales; but the resuscitation of used matter with some superficial investiture of novelty became a sort of necessity, when the popular demand for these wares increased out of proportion to the supply.