when they did eat without disdaining the cocklicranes,
till their belly was like to crack with it again.
As for my own part, such is my Christian charity towards
my neighbours, that I could wish from my heart everyone
had as good a voice; it would make us play the better
at the tennis and the balloon. And truly, my
lord, to express the real truth without dissimulation,
I cannot but say that those petty subtle devices which
are found out in the etymologizing of pattens would
descend more easily into the river of Seine, to serve
for ever at the millers’ bridge upon the said
water, as it was heretofore decreed by the king of
the Canarians, according to the sentence or judgment
given thereupon, which is to be seen in the registry
and records within the clerk’s office of this
house.
And, therefore, my lord, I do most humbly require,
that by your lordship there may be said and declared
upon the case what is reasonable, with costs, damages,
and interests. Then said Pantagruel, My friend,
is this all you have to say? Kissbreech answered,
Yes, my lord, for I have told all the tu autem, and
have not varied at all upon mine honour in so much
as one single word. You then, said Pantagruel,
my Lord of Suckfist, say what you will, and be brief,
without omitting, nevertheless, anything that may
serve to the purpose.
How the Lord of Suckfist pleaded before Pantagruel.
Then began the Lord Suckfist in manner as followeth.
My lord, and you my masters, if the iniquity of men
were as easily seen in categorical judgment as we
can discern flies in a milkpot, the world’s four
oxen had not been so eaten up with rats, nor had so
many ears upon the earth been nibbled away so scurvily.
For although all that my adversary hath spoken be
of a very soft and downy truth, in so much as concerns
the letter and history of the factum, yet nevertheless
the crafty slights, cunning subtleties, sly cozenages,
and little troubling entanglements are hid under the
rosepot, the common cloak and cover of all fraudulent
deceits.
Should I endure that, when I am eating my pottage
equal with the best, and that without either thinking
or speaking any manner of ill, they rudely come to
vex, trouble, and perplex my brains with that antique
proverb which saith,
Who in his pottage-eating drinks will
not,
When he is dead and buried, see one jot.
And, good lady, how many great captains have we seen
in the day of battle, when in open field the sacrament
was distributed in luncheons of the sanctified bread
of the confraternity, the more honestly to nod their
heads, play on the lute, and crack with their tails,
to make pretty little platform leaps in keeping level
by the ground? But now the world is unshackled
from the corners of the packs of Leicester. One
flies out lewdly and becomes debauched; another, likewise,
five, four, and two, and that at such random that,
