O, sir, Domine, bellagivaminor nobis; verily, est
bonum vobis. They are useful to everybody.
If they fit your mare well, so do they do our faculty;
quae comparata est jumentis insipientibus, et similis
facta est eis, Psalmo nescio quo. Yet did I
quote it in my note-book, et est unum bonum Achilles,
a good defending argument. Hem, hem, hem, haikhash!
For I prove unto you, that you should give me them.
Ego sic argumentor. Omnis bella bellabilis in
bellerio bellando, bellans, bellativo, bellare facit,
bellabiliter bellantes. Parisius habet bellas.
Ergo gluc, Ha, ha, ha. This is spoken to some
purpose. It is in tertio primae, in Darii, or
elsewhere. By my soul, I have seen the time that
I could play the devil in arguing, but now I am much
failed, and henceforward want nothing but a cup of
good wine, a good bed, my back to the fire, my belly
to the table, and a good deep dish. Hei, Domine,
I beseech you, in nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus
sancti, Amen, to restore unto us our bells: and
God keep you from evil, and our Lady from health,
qui vivit et regnat per omnia secula seculorum, Amen.
Hem, hashchehhawksash, qzrchremhemhash.
Verum enim vero, quandoquidem, dubio procul.
Edepol, quoniam, ita certe, medius fidius; a town
without bells is like a blind man without a staff,
an ass without a crupper, and a cow without cymbals.
Therefore be assured, until you have restored them
unto us, we will never leave crying after you, like
a blind man that hath lost his staff, braying like
an ass without a crupper, and making a noise like
a cow without cymbals. A certain latinisator,
dwelling near the hospital, said since, producing the
authority of one Taponnus,—I lie, it was
one Pontanus the secular poet, —who wished
those bells had been made of feathers, and the clapper
of a foxtail, to the end they might have begot a chronicle
in the bowels of his brain, when he was about the
composing of his carminiformal lines. But nac
petetin petetac, tic, torche lorgne, or rot kipipur
kipipot put pantse malf, he was declared an heretic.
We make them as of wax. And no more saith the
deponent. Valete et plaudite. Calepinus
recensui.
Chapter 1.XX.
How the Sophister carried away his cloth, and how
he had a suit in law against the other masters.
The sophister had no sooner ended, but Ponocrates
and Eudemon burst out in a laughing so heartily, that
they had almost split with it, and given up the ghost,
in rendering their souls to God: even just as
Crassus did, seeing a lubberly ass eat thistles; and
as Philemon, who, for seeing an ass eat those figs
which were provided for his own dinner, died with force
of laughing. Together with them Master Janotus
fell a-laughing too as fast as he could, in which
mood of laughing they continued so long, that their
eyes did water by the vehement concussion of the substance
of the brain, by which these lachrymal humidities,
being pressed out, glided through the optic nerves,
and so to the full represented Democritus Heraclitizing
and Heraclitus Democritizing.
