for gold and titles. In hell there is very little respect paid to these gloomy islanders, who would suck the marrow from all the carcasses in the universe, if they thought to find gold in the bones. They boast of their morality, and despise all other nations; yet if you were to place what you call virtue in one scale, and vice, with twopence, in the other, they would forget their morality, and pocket the money. They talk of their honour and integrity, but never enter into a treaty but with a firm resolution of breaking it as soon as a farthing is to be gained by so doing. After death, they inhabit the most pestilential marsh of the kingdom of darkness, and their souls are scourged without mercy. None of the other damned will have any communication with them. If the inhabitants of the Continent could do without sugar and coffee, the sons of proud England would soon return to the state in which they were when Julius Cæsar, Canute of Denmark, or William the Conqueror, did them the honour to invade their island.”
Faustus. For a devil, thou knowest history passably well.
Hereupon he led him to Milan, where they saw the Duke Galeas Sforza murdered on St. Stephen’s day in the cathedral; Faustus having previously heard the assassins loudly beseeching St. Stephen and St. Ambrose to inspire them with the courage necessary for so noble a deed.
In Florence, the seat of the Muses, they saw the nephew of the great Cosmo, the father of his country, murdered in the church of Santa Reparata, at the altar, just at the moment when the priest raised the host in his hands; for the Archbishop of Florence, Salviati, had informed the murderers that this was to be the signal. He had been bribed to assist in this enterprise by the Pope, who was determined to annihilate the Medicis, in order to rule sole sovereign in Italy.
In the north of Europe they saw wild barbarians and drunken ruffians murdering and pillaging like the more civilised Europeans. In Spain they found upon the throne deceit and hypocrisy wearing the mask of religion. They
saw, at an auto-da-fé, men and women immolated in the flames to the mild Deity of the Christians; and they heard the grand inquisitor, Torquemada, boast to Ferdinand and Isabella that, since the establishment of the holy tribunal, it had tried eighty thousand suspected persons, and had burnt six thousand convicted heretics. When Faustus first saw the ladies and cavaliers assembled in the grand square, dressed in their richest habits, he imagined that he had come just in time for some joyous festival; but when he heard the condemned wretches howling and lamenting in the midst of a mob of monks who were at their devotions, he was convinced that religion, when misused, makes man the most execrable monster on the earth. He, however, began to imagine that all these horrors were the necessary consequences of man’s nature, who is an animal that must either tear his fellow-creatures to pieces, or be torn to pieces by them.
The Devil, perceiving that Faustus was amazed and confounded by these scenes, said to him:
“Thou seest how the courts of Europe resemble
each other in wickedness and crime. Let us now go to Rome, and see whether the ecclesiastical government goes on better.”
The malicious Leviathan flattered himself that Alexander the Sixth, who wore at that time the triple crown, and held in his hands the keys of heaven and of hell, would give the finishing blow to the harassed spirit of Faustus, and would enable him to return below with his victim. For a long time he had been weary of staying on the earth; for although he had in the course of many thousand years so often traversed it, he still saw merely the same beings and the same actions. From this we may learn that there is something so annoying in uniformity, that even the wild horrors of Satan’s hall are to be preferred to it.