tion and anecdote, and are eminently qualified to arrest the attention, and arouse the consciences of the hearers.
The good Bishop possessed the art of never suffering the attention of his audience to flag. He carefully avoided wearing his subject thread-bare, and the moment he saw that his shot had taken effect, he opened a new battery from another point altogether, yet aimed at the same object.
His knowledge of the Bible is wonderful, even for a Roman Catholic Post-Mediæval preacher; his sermons teem with Scriptural illustrations of the most apposite character, culled from every portion of Holy Writ. It is not that he affects quotations from Scripture in the manner of Helmesius, who, in an Advent sermon, could make one hundred and severity-five quotations, but that he found in his Bible an inexhaustible store of illustration for every subject which he handled.
The majority of Mediæval sacred orators, and their immediate followers, seemed to think, and consequently speak, in Scripture terms, but De Barzia preaches to unlettered men, who knew little or nothing of their Bibles, beyond the broad outlines of sacred history, and who would not recognize quotations from the prophetic books or the Epistles. He therefore avoids these to a considerable extent, unless he can point them out severally as words of Scripture, and confines himself chiefly to the narrative portions of the inspired volume. He selects an incident which can bear upon his subject, relates it in the most vigorous style, and then applies it with force and effect.
And these happy selections show such thorough ac-
