Ritters given up to luxuries, to secular ambitions; ritters no longer clad in austere mail and prayer; ritters given up to wantonness of mind and conduct; solemnly vowing, and quietly not doing; without remorse or consciousness of wrong, daily eating forbidden fruit; ritters swelling more and more into the fatted-ox condition, for whom there is but one doom.

How far they had carried it, here is one symptom that may teach us.
In the year 1330, one Werner von Orseln was Grand-master of these Ritters.

The Grand-master, who is still usually the best man they can get, and who by theory is sacred to them as a Grand-Lama or Pope among Cardinal-Lamas, or as an Abbot to his Monks,--Grand-master Werner, we say, had lain down in Marienburg one afternoon of this year 1330, to take his siesta, and was dreaming peaceably after a moderate repast, when a certain devil-ridden mortal, Johann von Endorf, one of his Ritters, long grumbling about severity, want of promotion and the like, rushed in upon the good old man; ran him through, dead for a ducat; [Voigt, iv.

474, 482.]--and consummated a PARRICIDE at which the very cross on one's white cloak shudders! Parricide worse, a great deal, than that at the Ford of Reuss upon one-eyed Albert.
We leave the shuddering Ritters to settle it, sternly vengeful; whom, for a moment, it has struck broad-awake to some sense of the very questionable condition they are getting into..