The passenger who now goes by the cathedral, and associates the idea of the inside with that of respectful silence and the simplicity of Protestant worship, little thinks what a noise has been in that spot, and what gorgeous processions have issued out of it.
Old St. Paul's was famous for the splendour of its shrine, and for its priestly wealth. The list of its copes, vestments, jewels, gold and silver cups, candlesticks, &c., occupies thirteen folio pages of the _Monasticon_. The side aisles were filled with chapels to different saints and the Virgin; that is to say, with nooks partitioned off one from another, and enriched with separate altars; and it is calculated, that, taking the whole establishment, there could hardly be fewer than two hundred priests. On certain holidays, this sacred multitude, in their richest copes, together with the lord mayor, aldermen, and city companies, and all the other parish priests of London, who carried a rich silver cross for every church, issued forth from the cathedral door in procession, singing a hymn, and so went through Cheapside and Cornhill to Leadenhall, and back again. The last of these spectacles was for the peace of Guisnes, in 1546; shortly after which Henry the Eighth swept into his treasury the whole glories of Catholic worship--copes, crosses, jewels, church-plate, &c.--himself being the most bloated enormity that had ever misused them.
Among other retainers to the establishment, Henry suppressed a singular little personage, entitled the Boy-Bishop. The Boy-Bishop (_Episcopus Puerorum_) was a chorister annually elected by his fellows to imitate the state and attire of a bishop, which he assumed on St. Nicholas's day, the sixth of December, and retained till that of the Innocents, December the twenty-eighth.
"This was done," says Brayley, "in commemoration of St. Nicholas, who, according to the Romish Church, was so piously fashioned, that even when a babe in his cradle he would fast both on Wednesdays and Fridays, and at those times was 'well pleased' to suck but once a-day. However ridiculous it may now seem, the Boy-Bishop is stated to have possessed episcopal authority during the above term; and the other children were his prebendaries. He was not permitted to celebrate mass, but he had full liberty to preach; and however puerile his discourse might have been, we find they were regarded with so much attention, that the learned Dean Colet, in his statutes for St. Paul's school, expressly ordained that the scholars shall, on 'every _Childermas_ daye, come to Paule's Churche, and hear the Chylde Bishop's sermon, and after be at the hygh masse, and each of them offer a penny to the Chylde Bishop; and with them the maisters and surveyors of the scole.' Probably," continues Mr. Brayley, "these orations, though affectedly childish, were composed by the more aged members of the church. If the Boy-Bishop died within the time of his prelacy, he was interred _in pontificalibus_, with the same ceremonies as the real diocesan; and the tomb of a child-bishop in Salisbury Cathedral may be referred to as an instance of such interment."[26]