The favored classes of the Canadians were devoted to social amusements; excursions by day, parties for gaming, and the dance at night, occupied their summer; and in winter, sleighing, skating, snow-shoeing, and evening réunion, turned that dreary time into a season of enjoyment. Lively, free, and graceful in manners, their vanity and want of education were little noticeable in the intercourse of daily life.[154] They were inclined to ostentation and extravagance;[155] the means, often unscrupulously procured, were squandered with careless profusion, and they generally endeavored to keep up an appearance of wealth beyond that which they really possessed. Henri de Pont Brian, bishop of Quebec, in his remarkable address to the Canadian people immediately before the conquest, draws a dark picture of the religious and moral condition of the inhabitants at the time, and attributes the threatened danger to the "especial wrath of Heaven for the absence of pious zeal--for the profane diversions--the insufferable excesses of games of chance--the contempt of religious ordinances--open robberies--heinous acts of injustice--shameful rapines. The contagion is nearly universal." Making every allowance for the worthy ecclesiastic's probable exaggeration of the causes which excited his indignation, the evidence of their own spiritual pastor must bear heavily against the reputation of the French colonists. The clergy were usually classed in the second rank of Canadian precedence; in actual importance, however, they had no superior. Those holding the higher offices of the Church were chiefly or exclusively of French origin, and some among them were men of high talents and attainments; the parochial ministers and curates were generally colonists, sprung from the humble orders of society, locally educated, and limited in their ideas. Nevertheless, their influence over the still simpler parishioners was very great. These inferior clergy were placed under the absolute control of their bishops, by them promoted, removed, or dispossessed at pleasure; a certain degree of jealousy, therefore, not unnaturally mingled itself with the curate's reverend awe of his alien prelate, whose lessons of humility were often less strongly inculcated by example than by precept. Although many of the country priests exerted themselves zealously against the English, under the impression that a heretic conquest would be the ruin of their Church, they were not altogether contented with the intimacy of the connection that bound them to France. The idea had arisen, increased, and ripened among them, that from their own body a discriminating government could have selected wise and holy men upon whose heads the apostolic miter might have been judiciously placed. The arrival of a new bishop or other ecclesiastical dignitary from France was no more a matter of rejoicing to the reverend fathers of Canada than that of a Parisian collector or intendant to the provincial merchant and farmer.