Grat. Yes, for of course there ought to be some proportion inter sustinens et sustentum; but, by Heavens, I soon changed my mind, for just as I was passing under a great oak tree down fell an acorn and struck me on the nose. Of course I had to admit that Nature was right, after all, for if she had put a pumpkin up there I should have been in a pretty pickle.
D.D. Yes indeed, Grattelard: you would have cut a fine figure drinking out of a bottle with your nose in a sling.
Grat. By the Georgics of Virgil, 'twould be all up with spectacles for my old age.
Tabarin was the first of the series of clowns that enlivened the streets of Paris for two hundred years, or, at any rate, the first to attain celebrity: Bobèche in our own century was the last. He made a great noise in his day, but nothing keeps his memory green except the Bobèche of Offenbach's Barbe-Bleue. Tabarin, however, has a new lease of life in two of the handy little-volumes of the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne.
S.E.T.
A LEGION OF DEVILS.
"Everybody knows," said Beppo, my Roman model, "that the English are mad, signor. For has not the padre told me so? and does he not say that the fires of Purgatory burn within them? Else why do they roll about in a tub of water every morning, if not to cool their vitals? It is an insult to an Italian to wash him: we only wash dead bodies;" and Beppo draws his huge frame up to its full height, while his black eyes flash, and I mentally acknowledge him and his begrimed rags picturesque if filthy.
"Si, si, they are all mad," he continues, "and they keep horses and dogs as mad as themselves; and they ride out, dressed in the very color of the flames of Purgatory, to run screaming and shouting after poor foxes over the Campagna, notwithstanding the Holy Father has rigorously prohibited that sort of insanity, and has placed his gendarmerie purposely to stop it. But who can stop il diavolo e gli suoi angeli? Why, signor, if they want foxes, I myself, Beppo Donati, would catch them any number for a paul or two. But they are all mad, all mad. And the dogs, it is well known how they became possessed; for," lowering his voice and coming nearer me, "I myself saw the arch-fiend himself and his legions enter them bodily. I will tell the signor how it was.
"The signor has been in the Catacombs of the blessed martyrs, but cannot know as much about them as myself, who was custodian for many a year in the dangerous and least frequented ones; and it was there that I received the hurt that caused me to turn model. Many are the hours I have passed in the remote ones lying miles away from the Eternal City, where the only available entrance was a tortuous, chimney-like hole almost filled with rubbish, and so insignificant in appearance that it had remained concealed by a few bushes from the time it was last used by the blessed martyrs themselves till to-day.