“But, madam, under favour, what may all these people be that keep your ladyship company? and since you are Death (as you say) how comes it, that the babblers, and make-bates, are nearer your person, and more in your good graces than the physicians?” “Why,” says she, “there are more people talked to death and dispatched by babblers, than by all the pestilential diseases in the world. And then your make-bates, and meddlers kill more than your physicians, though (to give the gentlemen of the faculty their due) they labour night and day for the enlargement of our empire. For you must understand, that though distempered humours make a man sick, ’tis the physician kills him; and looks to be well paid for’t too: (and ’tis fit that every man should live by his trade) so that when a man is asked, what such or such a one died of, he is not presently to make answer, that he died of a fever, pleurisy, the plague, purples, or the like; but that he died of the doctor. In one point, however, I must needs acquit the physician; ye know that the style of right honourable, and right worshipful, which was heretofore appropriate only to persons of eminent degree and quality, is now in our days used by all sorts of little people; nay the very barefoot friars, that live under vows of humility and mortification, are stung with this itch of title and vainglory. And your ordinary tradesmen, as vintners, tailors, masons, and the like, must be all dressed up forsooth in the right worshipful: whereas your physician does not so much court honour of appellation (though, if it should rain dignities, he might be persuaded happily to venture the wetting) but sits down contentedly with the honour of disposing of your lives and moneys, without troubling himself about any other sort of reputation.”
The entertainment of these lectures, and discourses made the way seem short and pleasant, and we were just now entering into a place, betwixt light and dark, and of horror enough, if Death and I had not by this time been very well acquainted. Upon one side of the passage, I saw three moving figures, armed, and of human shape, and so alike, that I could not say which was which. Just opposite, on the other side, a hideous monster, and these three to one, and one to three, in a fierce, and obstinate combat. Here Death made a stop, and facing about, asked me if I knew these people. “Alas! no,” quoth I, “Heaven be praised, I do not, and I shall put it in my litany that I never may.” “Now to see thy ignorance,” cried Death; “these are thy old acquaintance, and thou hast hardly kept any other company since thou wert born. Those three are the world, the flesh, and the devil, the capital enemies of thy soul; and they are so like one another, as well in quality, as appearance, that effectually, whoever has one, has all. The proud and ambitious man thinks he has got the world, but it proves the devil. The lecher, and the epicure, persuade themselves that they have gotten the flesh, and that’s the devil too; and in fine, thus it fares with all other kinds of extravagants.” “But what’s he there,” said I, “that appears in so many several shapes? and fights against the other three?” “That,” quoth Death, “is the devil of money, who maintains that he himself alone is equivalent to them three, and that wherever he comes, there’s no need of them. Against the world, he argues from their own confession and experience: for it passes for an oracle, that there’s no world but money; he that’s out of money’s out of the world. Take away a man’s money, and take away his life. Money answers all things. Against the second enemy, he pleads that money is the flesh too: witness the girls and the ganymedes it procures, and maintains. And against the third, he urges that there’s nothing to be done without this devil of money. Love does much but money does all; and money will make the pot boil, though the devil piss in the fire.” “So that for ought I see,” quoth I, “the devil of money has the better end of the staff.”
