“Be ye now judges, gentlemen of the Black Guard, if this be not a most intolerable indignity. Am I to answer for the actions of my inferior officers? It amazes me that my successors should ever endure these scandalous reports to be published, especially against a prince that had laid out so much money in repairing the libraries that were burnt.”
“It is very true,” said Suetonius in a doleful tone, “and I have not forgotten to make mention of it to your honour. But what will you say, if I show you, in a warrant under your hand, this execrable and impious blasphemy? It is the command of your Lord and God. And in fine, if I speak nothing but truth, where’s your cause of complaint? I have written the Lives too of the great Julius Cæsar, and the divine Augustus, and the world will not say but I have done them right. But for yourself, and such as you, that are effectually but so many incarnate and crowned plagues, what fault have I committed in setting before your eyes those tyrannies, which heaven and earth cannot but look upon with dread and horror?”
This discourse of Suetonius was interrupted by the babbler, or Boutefeu, that rounded Lucifer in the ear, and told him, “Look ye, sir,” says he, pointing with his finger, “that limping devil there, that looks as if he were surbated with beating the hoof, has been abroad in the world, this twenty year, and is but just now come back again.” “Come hither, sirrah,” cries Lucifer; and so the poor cur went wriggling and glotting up toward his prince. “You are a fine rogue to be sent of an errand, are ye not?” says Lucifer, “to stay twenty year out, and come back again e’en as wise as ye went: what souls have ye brought now? or what news from t’other world?” “Ha! your highness,” quoth the devil, “has too much honour and justice to condemn me unheard. Wherefore be pleased to remember, that at my going out you gave me charge of a certain merchant; it cost me the first ten year of my time to make him a thief, and ten more to keep him from turning honest again, and restoring what he had stolen.” “A fine fetch for a devil this, is it not?” cried Lucifer. “But hell is no more the hell it was when I knew it first, than chalk is cheese; and the devils nowadays are so damnedly insipid and dry, they’re hardly worth the roasting. A senseless puppy to come back to me with a story of Waltham’s calf, that went nine mile to suck a bull. But he’s not master of his trade yet.” And with that Lucifer bade one of his officers take him away and put him to school again; “for I perceive he’s a rascal,” says he, “and he has e’en been roguing at a play-house, when he should have been at church.” In that instant, from behind a little hill, a great many men came running as hard as they could drive after a company of women: the men crying out, “Stop, stop,” and the women crying for help. Lucifer commanded them all to be seized, and asked what was the matter. “Alas, alas!” cried one of the men, quite out of breath, “these carrions have made us fathers, though we never had children.” “Govern your tongue, sirrah,” cried a devil of honour, out of respect to the ladies, “and speak truth: for ’tis utterly impossible you should be fathers without children.” “Pardon me,” said the fellow, “we were married men, and honest men and good house-keepers, and have born offices in the parish, and have children that call us fathers; but ’tis a strange thing, we have been abroad some of us by the seven year together; others, as long bed-rid; and so impotent, that the civilians would have put us _inter frigidos et maleficiatos_: and yet our wives have brought us every year a child, which we were such fools as to keep and bring up, and give ourselves to the devil at last to get them estates; out of a charitable persuasion (forsooth) they might yet be our own, though for a twelve-month together (perhaps) we never so much as examined whether our wives were fish or flesh. But now since the mothers are dead, and the children grown up, we have found the tools that made them. One has the coachman’s nose, another the gentleman-usher’s legs, a third a cousin-german’s eyes. And some, we are to presume, conceived purely by strength of imagination, or else by the ears like weazels.”