Thereupon, incontinently, without any further lingering, to the way they all three went, and quickly thereafter—for they made good speed—arriving at the poetical habitation, they found the jolly old man, albeit in the agony of his departure from this world, looking cheerfully, with an open countenance, splendid aspect, and behaviour full of alacrity. After that Panurge had very civilly saluted him, he in a free gift did present him with a gold ring, which he even then put upon the medical finger of his left hand, in the collet or bezel whereof was enchased an Oriental sapphire, very fair and large. Then, in imitation of Socrates, did he make an oblation unto him of a fair white cock, which was no sooner set upon the tester of his bed, than that, with a high raised head and crest, lustily shaking his feather-coat, he crowed stentoriphonically loud. This done, Panurge very courteously required of him that he would vouchsafe to favour him with the grant and report of his sense and judgment touching the future destiny of his intended marriage. For answer hereto, when the honest old man had forthwith commanded pen, paper, and ink to be brought unto him, and that he was at the same call conveniently served with all the three, he wrote these following verses:
Take, or not take her,
Off, or on:
Handy-dandy is your lot.
When her name you write, you blot.
'Tis undone, when all is done,
Ended e'er it was begun:
Hardly gallop, if you trot,
Set not forward when you run,
Nor be single, though alone,
Take, or not take her.
Before you eat, begin to fast;
For what shall be was never past.
Say, unsay, gainsay, save your breath:
Then wish at once her life and death.
Take, or not take her.
These lines he gave out of his own hands unto them, saying unto them, Go, my lads, in peace! the great God of the highest heavens be your guardian and preserver! and do not offer any more to trouble or disquiet me with this or any other business whatsoever. I have this same very day, which is the last both of May and of me, with a greal deal of labour, toil, and difficulty, chased out of my house a rabble of filthy, unclean, and plaguily pestilentious rake-hells, black beasts, dusk, dun, white, ash-coloured, speckled, and a foul vermin of other hues, whose obtrusive importunity would not permit me to die at my own ease; for by fraudulent and deceitful pricklings, ravenous, harpy-like graspings, waspish stingings, and such-like unwelcome approaches, forged in the shop of I know not what kind of insatiabilities, they went about to withdraw and call me out of those sweet thoughts wherein I was already beginning to repose myself and acquiesce in the contemplation and vision, yea, almost in the very touch and taste of the happiness and felicity which the good God hath prepared for his faithful saints and elect in the other life and state of immortality. Turn out of their courses and eschew them, step forth of their ways and do not resemble them; meanwhile, let me be no more troubled by you, but leave me now in silence, I beseech you.
Chapter 3.XXII.—How Panurge patrocinates and defendeth the Order of the Begging Friars.
Panurge, at his issuing forth of Raminagrobis's chamber, said, as if he had been horribly affrighted, By the virtue of God, I believe that he is an heretic; the devil take me, if I do not! he doth so villainously rail at the Mendicant Friars and Jacobins, who are the two hemispheres of the Christian world; by whose gyronomonic circumbilvaginations, as by two celivagous filopendulums, all the autonomatic metagrobolism of the Romish Church, when tottering and emblustricated with the gibble-gabble gibberish of this odious error and heresy, is homocentrically poised. But what harm, in the devil's name, have these poor devils the Capuchins and Minims done unto him? Are not these beggarly devils sufficiently wretched already? Who can imagine that these poor snakes, the very extracts of ichthyophagy, are not thoroughly enough besmoked and besmeared with misery, distress, and calamity? Dost thou think, Friar John, by thy faith, that he is in the state of salvation? He goeth, before God, as surely damned to thirty thousand basketsful of devils as a pruning-bill to the lopping of a vine-branch. To revile with opprobrious speeches the good and courageous props and pillars of the Church,—is that to be called a poetical fury? I cannot rest satisfied with him; he sinneth grossly, and blasphemeth against the true religion. I am very much offended at his scandalizing words and contumelious obloquy. I do not care a straw, quoth Friar John, for what he hath said; for although everybody should twit and jerk them, it were but a just retaliation, seeing all persons are served by them with the like sauce: therefore do I pretend no interest therein. Let us see, nevertheless, what he hath written. Panurge very attentively read the paper which the old man had penned; then said to his two fellow-travellers, The poor drinker doteth. Howsoever, I excuse him, for that I believe he is now drawing near to the end and final closure of his life. Let us go make his epitaph. By the answer which he hath given us, I am not, I protest, one jot wiser than I was. Hearken here, Epistemon, my little bully, dost not thou hold him to be very resolute in his responsory verdicts? He is a witty, quick, and subtle sophister. I will lay an even wager that he is a miscreant apostate. By the belly of a stalled ox, how careful he is not to be mistaken in his words. He answered but by disjunctives, therefore can it not be true which he saith; for the verity of such-like propositions is inherent only in one of its two members. O the cozening prattler that he is! I wonder if Santiago of Bressure be one of these cogging shirks. Such was of old, quoth Epistemon, the custom of the grand vaticinator and prophet Tiresias, who used always, by way of a preface, to say openly and plainly at the beginning of his divinations and predictions that what he was to tell would either come to pass or not. And such is truly the style of all prudently presaging prognosticators. He was nevertheless, quoth Panurge, so unfortunately misadventurous in the lot of his own destiny, that Juno thrust out both his eyes.
Yes, answered Epistemon, and that merely out of a spite and spleen for having pronounced his award more veritable than she, upon the question which was merrily proposed by Jupiter. But, quoth Panurge, what archdevil is it that hath possessed this Master Raminagrobis, that so unreasonably, and without any occasion, he should have so snappishly and bitterly inveighed against these poor honest fathers, Jacobins, Minors, and Minims? It vexeth me grievously, I assure you; nor am I able to conceal my indignation. He hath transgressed most enormously; his soul goeth infallibly to thirty thousand panniersful of devils. I understand you not, quoth Epistemon, and it disliketh me very much that you should so absurdly and perversely interpret that of the Friar Mendicants which by the harmless poet was spoken of black beasts, dun, and other sorts of other coloured animals. He is not in my opinion guilty of such a sophistical and fantastic allegory as by that phrase of his to have meant the Begging Brothers. He in downright terms speaketh absolutely and properly of fleas, punies, hand worms, flies, gnats, and other such-like scurvy vermin, whereof some are black, some dun, some ash-coloured, some tawny, and some brown and dusky, all noisome, molesting, tyrannous, cumbersome, and unpleasant creatures, not only to sick and diseased folks, but to those also who are of a sound, vigorous, and healthful temperament and constitution. It is not unlikely that he may have the ascarids, and the lumbrics, and worms within the entrails of his body. Possibly doth he suffer, as it is frequent and usual amongst the Egyptians, together with all those who inhabit the Erythraean confines, and dwell along the shores and coasts of the Red Sea, some sour prickings and smart stingings in his arms and legs of those little speckled dragons which the Arabians call meden. You are to blame for offering to expound his words otherwise, and wrong the ingenuous poet, and outrageously abuse and miscall the said fraters, by an imputation of baseness undeservedly laid to their charge. We still should, in such like discourses of fatiloquent soothsayers, interpret all things to the best. Will you teach me, quoth Panurge, how to discern flies among milk, or show your father the way how to beget children? He is, by the virtue of God, an arrant heretic, a resolute, formal heretic; I say, a rooted, combustible heretic, one as fit to burn as the little wooden clock at Rochelle. His soul goeth to thirty thousand cartsful of devils. Would you know whither? Cocks-body, my friend, straight under Proserpina's close-stool, to the very middle of the self-same infernal pan within which she, by an excrementitious evacuation, voideth the faecal stuff of her stinking clysters, and that just upon the left side of the great cauldron of three fathom height, hard by the claws and talons of Lucifer, in the very darkest of the passage which leadeth towards the black chamber of Demogorgon. O the villain!