In Switzerland from 1516 to 1525 - James Aitken Wylie

evealed confessions, were adroit at the framing of
testaments, and made false entries in their own
favor. They were the governors of the hospital, and
their management had resulted in a great
impoverishment of its revenues.
Unhappily, Lausanne was not an exceptional
case. It exhibits the picture of what Geneva and
Neufchatel and other towns of the Swiss
Confederacy in those days were, although, we are
glad to be able to say, not in so aggravated a
degree. Geneva, to which, when touched by the
Reformed light, there was to open a future so
different, lay plunged at this moment in disorders,
under its bishop, Pierre de la Baume, and stood
next to Lausanne in the notoriety it had achieved
by the degeneracy of its manners. But it is needless
to particularize. All round that noble lake which,
with its smiling banks and its magnificent
mountain boundaries–here the Jura, there the White
Alps–forms so grand a feature of Switzerland, were
villages and towns, from which went out a cry not
unlike that which ascended from the Cities of the
Plain in early days.
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