THE ECCLFSIASTICAL HISTORY OF OLD PLYMOUTH. 347 
threaded the muddy streets and unpaved roads bare-footed and 
bare-headed, often leaving the prints of their bleeding feet upon 
the ground, in gowns of the coarsest cloth, which the most eco- 
nomical poor-law guardian of this 19th century would be ashamed 
to offer to the most refractory pauper in a parish workhouse. St. 
Francis had provided carefully for the poverty of his order. If 
the gospel net, woven out of purple and fine linen, had hitherto 
rather scared than caught the fish it was intended to enclose, the 
founder of the mendicant orders took care that it should be as 
coarse and home-spun as poverty itself could make it. 
With leprosy the utmost men could do was to banish it, as I 
said just now, "to shut it out, to ignore its existence, and close 
their eyes ; not, however, without misgivings that it might break 
out, like God's vengeance, among their own sons and daughters; 
that Miriam and Aaron might perchance be excluded from the 
camp, and leave their families plague-spotted and despised. But 
St. Francis was a simple-minded man ; he adopted those means for 
grappling with the evil that none but an enthusiast and a visionary 
would have taken." 
In conformity with his own practice, we are told that St. 
Francis enjoined his friars to dwell in the leper hospitals, and there 
learn a lesson of humility. Whoever desired admission into his 
order, noble or ignoble, was commanded an attendance on leprous 
patients. If by the establishment of leper hospitals, and a general 
improvement of the towns, that terrible scourge has so completely 
disappeared that its very name is disarmed of all meaning, it was 
no phantom then, " no poor paper lantern with a candle-end in it." 
Mankind gained truer notions of it, and of their duty towards 
those who were afflicted by it ; — but St. Francis set the example. 
And so the friars worked ; and in less than half a century after 
the founding of the order it numbered thirty-three provinces, con- 
taining upwards of eight thousand convents, and, it is said, no less 
than 200,000 members. The numbers may be exaggerated; but 
in the following century it is stated that in the dreadful plague 
of the black death no fewer than 124,000 Franciscans fell victims 
to their zeal for the care of the sick, and for the spiritual minis- 
tration to the dying. 
St Francis set his face against learning. He had seen the results 
of learned leisure, and would allow his followers none of it ; books 
were forbidden, bare necessaries only tolerated, and with a style 
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