THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
tries: and should be curiously observed and held in honour, for these vestiges of antiquity are becoming scarce. But let this be enough to say concerning it; and let us begone to the glorious Salmons, who have opened their mouths very wide. Here we asked the Host to put us in a room by ourselves, for the common rooms were replete and roaring with laughter from many throats; but he said that he would set us in a chamber where there was good company and not too much of it; and this pleased us better than privity would have done. So we go down a long passage and mount three steps and find ourselves in a low room looking on the garden of the Inn, and in it are the ecclesiastic we saw on the way and a young gentleman gallantly dressed, who was speaking when we came in, and was manifestly a stranger from the land over sea. And from his talk it appeared that he was giving the clergyman some notions of the Ecclesiastical Polity of France and of the various oddities and queer theological habits certain of the sacred personages had in that realm, and at his account our Welsh churchman was evidently much pleased; for the cassocks like to hear how their brethren abroad are faring. With this odd brace we made haste to be acquainted, and gave and received titles, localities, coat-armour, ancestry, estates, styles, dignities, and all such epithetic ware, for without this truck we could not be true commensals nor give opinions on any matter. And firstly the churchman; who told us that he was named David Phillips of Fleur-de-Lys in the shire of Cardigan,
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