The lesser nobles emulated the grandees, and vied with each other in splendid establishments, banquets, masquerades, and equipages.

The natural consequences of such extravagance followed.

Their estates were mortgaged, deeply and more deeply; then, after a few years, sold to the merchants, or rich advocates and other gentlemen of the robe, to whom they had been pledged.

The more closely ruin stared the victims in the face, the more heedlessly did they plunge into excesses.

"Such were the circumstances," moralizes a Catholic writer, "to which, at an earlier period, the affairs of Catiline, Cethegus, Lentulus, and others of that faction had been reduced, when they undertook to overthrow the Roman republic." Many of the nobles being thus embarrassed, and some even desperate, in their condition, it was thought that they were desirous of creating disturbances in the commonwealth, that the payment of just debts might be avoided, that their mortgaged lands might be wrested by main force from the low-born individuals who had become possessed of them, that, in particular, the rich abbey lands held by idle priests might be appropriated to the use of impoverished gentlemen who could turn them to so much better account.