THE PROLOGUE.
Your silence and attention, worthy friends,
That your free spirits may with more pleasing sense
Relish the life of this our active scene:
To which intent, to calm this murmuring breath,
We ring this round with our invoking spells;
If that your list'ning ears be yet prepar'd
To entertain the subject of our play,
Lend us your patience.
'Tis Peter Fabel,[235] a renowned scholar,
Whose fame hath still been hitherto forgot
By all the writers of this latter age.
In Middlesex his birth and his abode:
Not full seven miles from this great famous city;
That, for his fame in sleights and magic won,
Was call'd the merry fiend of Edmonton.
If any here make doubt of such a name,
In Edmonton yet fresh unto this day,
Fix'd in the wall of that old ancient church,
His monument remaineth to be seen:
His memory yet in the mouths of men,[236]
That whil'st he liv'd he could deceive the devil.
Imagine now, that whilst he is retir'd
From Cambridge back unto his native home,
Suppose the silent sable-visag'd night
Casts her black curtain over all the world;
And whilst he sleeps within his silent bed,
Toil'd with the studies of the passed day,
The very time and hour wherein that spirit,
That many years attended his command,
And oftentimes 'twixt Cambridge and that town
Had in a minute borne him through the air,
By composition 'twixt the fiend and him,
Comes now to claim the scholar for his due. [Draws the curtain.
Behold him here laid on his restless couch!
His fatal chime prepared at his head,
His chamber guarded with these sable sleights,
And by him stands that necromantic chair,
In which he makes his direful invocations,
And binds the fiends that shall obey his will.
Sit with a pleased eye, until you know
The comic end of our sad tragic show.
The chime goes, in which time Fabel is oft seen to stare about him, and hold up his hands.
Fab. What means the tolling of this fatal chime?
O, what a trembling horror strikes my heart!
My stiffen'd hair stands upright on my head,
As do the bristles of a porcupine.[237]
Enter Coreb, a spirit.
Cor. Fabel, awake! for[238] I will bear thee hence
Headlong to hell.
Fab. Ha, ha! why dost thou wake me?
Coreb, is it thou?
Cor. Tis I.
Fab. I know thee well; I hear the watchful dogs
With hollow howling tell of thy approach:
The lights burn dim, affrighted with thy presence;
And this distemper'd and tempestuous night
Tells me the air is troubled with some devil.