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Updated: June 26, 2025
The hypocrites, in perpetual tears, walked about in a wearisome and exhausted manner, as if ready to faint. They wore huge cowls, which hung over their eyes, and the outsides of which were gilded, but the insides of lead.
Below, a little lower than the angels, are Charles and Philip with their wives, on their knees, with white cowls and clasped hands, Charles in his premature age, with worn face and grizzled beard; and Philip in his youth of unwholesome fairness, with red lips and pink eyelids, such as Titian painted him in the Adonis.
When they wanted to eat or drink, they turned down the back-points or flaps of their cowls forwards below their chins, and that served 'em instead of gorgets or slabbering-bibs. When they had well dined, they prayed rarely all in quavers and shakes; and the rest of the day, expecting the day of judgment, they were taken up with acts of charity, and particularly O' Sundays, rubbers at cuffs.
In fair weather the morning sun lay warm there; while the sky showed all the bluer overhead for the dark lines of the adjacent housetops, and upstanding deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and chimney-pots.
So, putting our cowls over our heads, we sallied forth into the black night black and dark save where the light of the fire illumined the horizon, and even cast a faint ray upon our own path. We were not used to journeys in such weather, and I am afraid we made very slow progress, but it was not for want of good will.
Never did a new dress become so soon the fashion. The unpopularity of the minister assisted the quaintness of the device. The fool's-cap livery became the rage. Never was such a run upon the haberdashers, mercers, and tailors, since Brussels had been a city. All the frieze-cloth in Brabant was exhausted. All the serge in Flanders was clipped into monastic cowls.
We can say to ourselves, 'To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valley of the shadow of death, and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass through the gate of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the horror of another world. The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces and their cowls of gilded lead.
Men almost naked, burned to hue of brick-dust; men in untanned sheepskin coats and mantles; men with every kind of headgear, turbans, handkerchiefs, cowls; men with hair and beard matted and flying; now one helped himself to a louder yell by tossing in air the dirty garment he had torn from his body, hirsute as a goat's; now one leaped up agile as a panther; now one turned topsy-turvy; now groups of them swirled together like whimsical eddies in a pool.
Every man in the little fleet was attired in the gorgeous vestments of the plundered churches, in gold-embroidered cassocks, glittering mass-garments, or the more sombre cowls, and robes of Capuchin friars. So sped the early standard bearers of that ferocious liberty which had sprung from the fires in which all else for which men cherish their fatherland had been consumed.
Lent though it was, the fish was of the most esteemed kinds, and it was evident that, like the monks of Melrose, they 'made gude kale. Few of the kindly old faces that Malcolm remembered were to be seen under their cowls.
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