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their prerogative to visit and interfere, looking upon it as aprerogative inseparable from their function, which conferredupon them an inherent right to such privilege. As sove-reigns saw the power of the church daily increasing, theyfelt apprehensions for their own authority, which werenot, at all times, ill founded ; whence princes then claimedthis privilege. There is also room to presume, they oc-casionally had cause to suspect the revenues of such esta-blishments were not always administered as they ought to be;they therefore visited, to remedy this malpractice. Indeed,instances are not wanting where the letters patent of foun-dations stipulates for this authority to the sovereign alone, oroccasionally to the successors of the founder.
Those institutions had, however, still the appearance ofecclesiastical establishments, and in many cases, retainedtheir privileges ; being exempted from all taxes and otherpublic burdens.
In England, the enthusiasm of the people was so verygreat, that the government perceived the daily deteriorationof family estates, from imprudent and irrational bequests;also, perhaps, for the motive in the crown arising from ajealousy of the clergy, that the legislative body saw it ex-pedient to restrain the power of making bequests to ecclesi-astical uses, by a statute called the Statute of Mortmain.
The internal economy of the oldest houses for receptionof sick people ; s not known. Neither is it known whether phy-sicians and surgeons were employed ; but the contrary maybe, we submit, presumed from what we have seen in aformer article, f Apothecaries,) which leads us to suppose,that the religious, who had certainly leisure, and, perhaps,learning enough to read the ancient prescriptions, and some-times even a sufficiency of ingenuity to understand them,might officiate in a medical capacity.
In the hospital at Jerusalem , the knights and brothersattended the sick, bound up the wounds of those who hadmet with any misfortune, and in imitation of the Homericheroes, acted as their physicians. Mohsen, who directsour authority, refers to the old romance of Amadis de Gaul,and to other books of knight-errantry, to observe how muchthese knights exerted themselves to obtain the best reme-dies. Amadis observes the baume de commendeur is one ofthe oldest compositions of this kind used in the days ofknighthood.
Profound knowledge of medicine could not be ex-pected among these military or clerical physicians, even werethe account unintelligible of the skill of the first, as ren-