This was good sense in the Archbishop, who perhaps had been reading Epicurus, before he sat down to his repast. However this may be, it is certain that the philosopher in question says something very like what Becket said to the friar. “Is man,” he asks, “made to disdain the gifts of nature? Is he placed on earth only to gather bitter fruits? For whom then are the flowers that the gods strew at the feet of mortals?... We please Providence when we yield to the divers inclinations which Providence suggests; our duties have reference to His laws; and our innocent desires are born of His inspirations.”
There are few things more common in the Lives of the Saints, than to find them, after spare banquets of their own, working penal miracles at the banquets of others. St. Eloy was gifted with terrible power in this way, and endless are the stories of revellers turned to stone by the might of his magic right arm. Other saints had equal power in turning the tables upon those who slighted them; and I will take this opportunity of narrating one instance, and will set my Muse in slippers, to detail what occurred at
THE BRIDAL AND BANQUET OF FERQUES.
Near the marble quarries of Ferques, adjacent to Landrecthun le Nord, in the Boulonnais, may be seen a circular range of stones, bearing a close resemblance in their shape, though little in their magnitude, to those at Stonehenge; as also to the Devil’s Needles, near Boroughbridge, and to the solitary block on the common at Harrogate. Learned people recognise the stones at Ferques by the appellation of the Mallus, a Druidical name for an altar; but the traditionary folks, wiser in their generation, acknowledge no other title for these remains of antiquity than Neuches, an old provincial word, the corruption, I suppose, of Noces, and signifying a bridal, including the banquet which followed it. According to them, the stones at Ferques stand there as a testimony of divine vengeance, inflicted on a fiddler and other individuals belonging to a wedding party who refused to kneel before the Host, as it was being borne along by a priest to a dying brother. Rabelais says, that a well-disposed and sensible man believes all that he is told; (“Un homme de bien, un homme de bon sens, croit toujours ce qu’on lui dit, et ce qu’il trouve par écrit;”) and argal, as the logical grave-digger in Hamlet has it, this story of a bridal and banquet will be allowed to pass without question.
Though around the bleak district there is not a grove
That can boast of a shade, e’en in summer, for love,
Nor a walk by the side of a murmuring stream,
Where somnambulist lovers may talk as they dream;
Nor a valley retir’d, nor sweet mossy dell,