A Sham ' Ex Monk'

New Zealand Tablet, 27 August 1908, Page 23

A Sham ' Ex Monk'

Taylor, the water poet, ,wrote 'way back in the seventeenth century—but ' wrote -sarcastic *i — ' -- - " 1 I want the knowledge of the thriving art, A holy outside ,and a-hollow heart. 1 No Chadband or Stiggins ever more thoroughly acquired the knowledge of that thriving"" art than the gaol-bird Nobbs (alias Widdows), who, despite his unsavory : history, is- still = permitted to serve as a minister ~of the Lord to a small congregation it Hackney (London) and to draw fraudulent small coins from their purses by pretending -±o have been a Catholic monk and to ' expose ' the ' abominations of Rome ' at so much per ' expose.' Ex-convict Nobbs. has served several long terms of penal servitude for crimes which could not even be- hinted at in the columns- of a journal intended for- general perusal.- Like John Gspin, Nobbs (or Windows) is Ja citizen of famous London town \;;rbut unlike that rider bold, ' . 'He has •no credit in his own _ . , • Or any other town.' - --. - r . ' He has lately been figuring once more in a police court, where he was fined jQx and costs for assault. London Trut\i—that scourge of impostors-v-comments as follows on the case in itsissue of July j :—' No doubt the ex-monk will have his explanation of the occurrence ready for the deluded congregation of his chapel at Hackney. It will probably be—as in the case of the more serious convictions that, he has previously incurred for abominable offences—that he was . the victim of. a Popish .plot, and that the prosecutor—a potman in a public-house —was a spy put up by the Roman Church to get his head broken and commit perjury.'