the prize is adjudged to him who says that he had found a patient woman." * The common superstitions (here recorded) in civil and religious matters are almost incredible; and the chopped logic, which was the fashion of the time, and which comes in aid of the author's shrewd and pleasant sallies to expose them, is highly entertaining. Thus the Pardoner, scorning the Palmer's long pilgrimages and circuitous road to heaven, flouts him to his face, and vaunts his own superior pretensions : "Pard. By the first part of this last tale, But in one part you are beyond me, And all that have wandered so far, That no man can be their controller, And where you esteem your labour so much I say yet again, my pardons are such, That if there were a thousand souls on a heap, Which is far a-this side heaven, by God: These pardons bring them to heaven plain: The soul is in heaven with the Holy Ghost." The Poticary does not approve of this arrogance of the Friar, and undertakes, in mood and figure, to prove them both "false knaves." It is he, he says, who sends most souls to heaven, and who ought, therefore, to have the credit of it. "No soul, ye know, entereth heaven-gate, * Or, never known one otherwise than patient. Without help of the Poticary? Nay, all that cometh to our handling, Have thank of all their coming thither?" The Pardoner here interrupts him captiously "If ye kill'd a thousand in an hour's space, But the Poticary, not so baffled, retorts— "If a thousand pardons about your necks were tied; But when ye feel your conscience ready, I can send you to heaven very quickly.' The Pedlar finds out the weak side of his new companions, and tells them very bluntly, on their referring their dispute to him, a piece of his mind. "Now have I found one mastery, That ye can do indifferently; At this game of imposture, the cunning dealer in pins and laces undertakes to judge their merits; and they accordingly set to work like regular graduates. The Pardoner takes the lead, with an account of the virtues of his relics; and here we may find a plentiful mixture of popish superstition and indecency. The bigotry of any age is by no means a test of its piety, or even sincerity. Men seemed to make themselves amends for the enormity of their faith by levity of feeling, as well as by laxity of principle; and in the indifference' or ridicule with which they treated the wilful absurdities and extravagances to which they hood-winked their understandings, almost resembled children playing at blindman's-buff, who grope their way in the dark, and make blunders on purpose to laugh at their own idleness and folly. The sort of mummery at which popish bigotry used to play at the time when this old comedy was written, was not quite so harmless as blindman's-buff: what was sport to her, was death to others. She laughed at her own mockeries of common sense and true religion, and murdered while she laughed. The tragic farce was no longer to be borne, and it was partly put an end to. At present, though her eyes are blind-folded, her hands are tied fast behind her, like the false Duessa's. The sturdy genius of modern philosophy has got her in much the same situation that Count Fathom has the old woman that he lashes before him from the robbers' cave in the forest. In the following dialogue of this lively satire, the most sacred mysteries of the Catholic faith are mixed up with its idlest legends by old Heywood, who was a martyr to his religious zeal, without the slightest sense of impropriety. The Pardoner cries out in one place (like a lusty Friar John, or a trusty Friar Onion)— "Lo, here be pardons, half a dozen, As in this world no man can find. Kneel down all three, and when ye leave kissing, Friends, here shall ye see, even anon, Of All-Hallows the blessed jaw-bone. Mark well this, this relic here is a whipper; My friends unfeigned, here's a slipper Of one of the seven sleepers, be sure.— Here is an eye-tooth of the great Turk: Whose eyes be once set on this piece of work, But not all till he be blind outright. Kiss it hardly, with good devotion. Pot. This kiss shall bring us much promotion: For, by All-Hallows, yet methinketh That All-Hallows' breath stinketh. Palm. Ye judge All-Hallows' breath unknown: If any breath stink, it is your own. Pot. I know mine own breath from All-Hallows, Or else it were time to kiss the gallows. Pard. Nay, sirs, here may ye see The great toe of the Trinity: And once may roll it in his mouth, He shall never be vex'd with the tooth-ache. Pot. I pray you turn that relic about; Or else, because it is three toes in one, God made it as much as three toes alone. Pard. Well, let that pass, and look upon this: Here is a relic that doth not miss To help the least as well as the most: This is a buttock-bone of Pentecost. Here is a box full of humble-bees, As for any relic he kiss'd this night. Good friends, I have yet here in this glass, To stand on your head as on your feet." The same sort of significant irony runs through the Apothe cary's knavish enumeration of miraculous cures in his possession: "For this medicine helpeth one and other, And bringeth them in case that they need no other. Here is a syrapus de Byzansis, A Little thing is enough of this; Here is a medicine no more like the same, Which commonly is called thus by name. But worketh universally; For it doth me as much good when I sell it, I beseech your mastership be good to me, So fine that you may dig it with a spade." After these quaint but pointed examples of it, Swift's boast with respect to the invention of irony, "Which I was born to introduce, Refin'd it first, and shew'd its use, can be allowed to be true only in part. The controversy between them being undecided, the Apothecary, to clench his pretensions "as a liar of the first magnitude,” by a coup-de-grace, says to the Pedlar, "You are an honest man ;" but this home-thrust is somehow ingeniously parried. The Apothecary and Pardoner fall to their narrative vein again; and the latter tells a story of fetching a young woman from the lower world, from which I shall only give one specimen more as an instance of ludicrous and fantastic exaggeration. By the help of a passport from Lucifer, "given in the furnace of our palace," he obtains a safe conduct from one of the subordinate imps to his master's presence: "This devil and I walked arm in arm Their horns well gilt, their claws full clean, That Lucifer laughed merrily. |