As all the buyers that take it or smell it.
If any reward may entreat ye,
I beseech your mastership be good to me,
And ye shall have a box of marmalade,
So fine that you may dig it with a spade.’
After these quaint but pointed examples of it, Swift’s boast with respect to the invention of irony,
‘Which I was born to introduce,
Refin’d it first, and shew’d its use,’
can be allowed to be true only in part.
The controversy between them being undecided, the Apothecary, to clench his pretensions ‘as a liar of the first magnitude,’ by a coup-de-grace, says to the Pedlar, ‘You are an honest man,’ but this home-thrust is somehow ingeniously parried. The Apothecary and Pardoner fall to their narrative vein again; and the latter tells a story of fetching a young woman from the lower world, from which I shall only give one specimen more as an instance of ludicrous and fantastic exaggeration. By the help of a passport from Lucifer, ‘given in the furnace of our palace,’ he obtains a safe conduct from one of the subordinate imps to his master’s presence.