THE BLACK BOOK.

The Blacke Booke. London Printed by T. C. for Jeffrey Chorlton. 1604. 4to.

THE EPISTLE TO THE READER;

OR,
THE TRUE CHARACTER OF THIS BOOK.

To all those that are truly virtuous, and can touch pitch and yet never defile themselves; read the mischievous lives and pernicious practices of villains, and yet be never the worse at the end of the book, but rather confirmed the more in their honest estates and the uprightness of their virtues;—to such I dedicate myself, the wholesome intent of my labours, the modesty of my phrases, that even blush when they discover vices and unmask the world’s shadowed villanies: and I account him as a traitor to virtue, who, diving into the deep of this cunning age, and finding there such monsters of nature, such speckled lumps of poison as panders, harlots, and ruffians do figure, if he rise up silent again, and neither discover or publish them to the civil rank of sober and continent livers, who thereby may shun those two devouring gulfs, to wit, of deceit and luxury,[573] which swallow up more mortals than Scylla and Charybdis, those two cormorants and Woolners[574] of the sea, one tearing, the other devouring. Wherefore I freely persuade myself, no virtuous spirit or judicial worthy but will approve my politic moral, where, under the shadow of the devil’s legacies, or his bequeathing to villains, I strip their villanies naked, and bare the infectious bulks[575] of craft, cozenage, and panderism, the three bloodhounds of a commonwealth. And thus far I presume that none will or can except at this—which I call the Black Book, because it doubly damns the devil—but some tainted harlot, noseless bawd, obscene ruffian, and such of the same black nature and filthy condition, that poison the towardly spring of gentility, and corrupt with the mud of mischiefs the pure and clear streams of a kingdom. And to spurgall such, who reads me shall know I dare; for I fear neither the ratsbane of a harlot nor the poniard of a villain.

T. M.

A MORAL.

Lucifer ascending, as Prologue to his own Play.
Now is hell landed here upon the earth,
When Lucifer, in limbs of burning gold,
Ascends this dusty theatre of the world,
To join his powers; and, were it number’d well,
There are more devils on earth than are in hell.
Hence springs my damnèd joy; my tortur’d spleen
Melts into mirthful humour at this fate,
That heaven is hung so high, drawn up so far,
And made so fast, nail’d up with many a star;
And hell the very shop-board of the earth,
Where, when I cut out souls, I throw the shreds
And the white linings of a new-soil’d spirit,
Pawn’d to luxurious[576] and adulterous merit.
Yea, that’s the sin, and now it takes her turn,
For which the world shall like a strumpet burn;
And for an instance to fire false embraces,
I make the world burn now in secret places:
I haunt invisible corners as a spy,
And in adulterous circles there rise I;
There am I conjur’d up through hot desire,
And where hell rises, there must needs be fire.
And now that I have vaulted up so high
Above the stage-rails of this earthen globe,
I must turn actor and join companies,
To share my comic sleek-ey’d villanies;
For I must weave a thousand ills in one,
To please my black and burnt affection.
Why, every term-time I come up to throw[577]
Dissension betwixt ploughmen that should sow
The field’s vast womb, and make the harvest grow:
So comes it oft to pass dear years befal,
When ploughmen leave the field to till the hall;
Thus famine and bleak dearth do greet the land,
When the plough’s held between a lawyer’s hand.
I fat with joy to see how the poor swains
Do box their country thighs, carrying their packets
Of writings, yet can neither read nor write:
They’re like to candles, if they had no light;
For they are dark within in sense and judgment
As is the Hole[578] at Newgate; and their thoughts
Are, like the men that lie there, without spirit.
This strikes my black soul into ravishing music,
To see swains plod and shake their ignorant skulls;
For they are nought but skull, their brain but burr,
Wanting wit’s marrow and the sap of judgment;
And how they grate with their hard naily soles
The stones in Fleet-street, and strike fire in Paul’s;
Nay, with their heavy trot and iron stalk,
They have worn off the brass in the Mid-walk.[579]
But let these pass for bubbles, and so die,
For I rise now to breathe my legacy,
And make my last will, which, I know, shall stand
As long as bawd or villain strides the land.
For which I’ll turn my shape quite out of verse,
Mov’d with the Supplication[580] of poor Pierce,
That writ so rarely villanous from hence
For spending-money to my excellence;
Gave me my titles freely;[581] for which giving,
I rise now to take order for his living.
The black Knight of the Post[582] shortly returns
From hell, where many a tobacconist burns,
With news to smoky gallants, riotous heirs,
Strumpets that follow theatres and fairs,
Gilded-nos’d usurers, base-metall’d panders,
To copper-captains and Pict-hatch[583] commanders,
To all infectious catchpolls through the town,
The very speckled vermin of a crown:
To these and those and every damnèd one
I’ll bequeath legacies to thrive upon;
Amongst the which I’ll give for his redress
A standing pension to Pierce Pennyless.
THE BLACK BOOK.

No sooner was Pierce Pennyless breathed forth, but I, the light-burning sergeant, Lucifer, quenched my fiery shape, and whipt into a constable’s night-gown, the cunningest habit that could be, to search tipsy taverns, roosting inns, and frothy alehouses; when calling together my worshipful bench of bill-men,[584] I proceeded toward Pict-hatch, intending to begin there first, which (as I may fitly name it) is the very skirts of all brothel-houses. The watchmen, poor night-crows, followed, and thought still they had had the constable by the hand, when they had the devil by the gown-sleeve. At last, I looking up to the casements of every suspected mansion, and spying a light twinkling between hope and desperation, guessed it to be some sleepy snuff, ever and anon winking and nodding in the socket of a candlestick, as if the flame had been a-departing from the greasy body of Simon Snuff the stinkard. Whereupon I, the black constable, commanded my white guard not only to assist my office with their brown bills, but to raise up the house extempory: with that, the dreadful watchmen, having authority standing by them, thundered at the door, whilst the candle lightened in the chamber; and so between thundering and lightening, the bawd risse,[585] first putting the snuff to an untimely death, a cruel and a lamentable murder, and then, with her fat-sagg chin[586] hanging down like a cow’s udder, lay reeking out at the window, demanding the reason why they did summon a parley. I told her in plain terms that I had a warrant to search from the sheriff of Limbo.[587] How? from the sheriff of Lime-street? replied mistress wimble-chin (for so she understood the word Limbo, as if Limbo had been Latin for Lime-street); why then all the doors of my house shall fly open and receive you, master constable. With that, as being the watchword, two or three vaulted out of their beds at once, one swearing, stocks and stones, he could not find his stockings, other that they could not hit upon their false bodies, when to speak troth and shame myself, they were then as close to their flesh as they could, and never put them off since they were twelve year old. At last they shuffled up, and were shut out at the back part, as I came in at the north part. Up the stairs I went to examine the feather-beds, and carry the sheets before the justice, for there was none else then to carry; only the floor was strewed with busk-points,[588] silk garters, and shoe-strings, scattered here and there for haste to make away from me, and the farther such run, the nearer they come to me. Then another door opening rearward, there came puffing out of the next room a villanous lieutenant without a band, as if he had been new cut down, like one at Wapping, with his cruel garters[589] about his neck, which fitly resembled two of Derrick’s necklaces.[590] He had a head of hair like one of my devils in Doctor Faustus,[591] when the old theatre cracked and frighted the audience: his brow was made of coarse bran, as if all the flour had been bolted out to make honester men, so ruggedly moulded with chaps and crevices, that I wonder how it held together, had it not been pasted with villany: his eyebrows jetted out like the round casement of an alderman’s dining-room, which made his eyes look as if they had been both dammed in his head; for if so be two souls had been so far sunk into hell-pits, they would never have walked abroad again: his nostrils were cousin-germans to coral, though of a softer condition and of a more relenting humour: his crow-black muchatoes[592] were almost half an ell from one end to the other, as though they would whisper him in the ear about a cheat or a murder; and his whole face in general was more detestable ugly than the visage of my grim porter Cerberus, which shewed that all his body besides was made of filthy dust and sea-coal ashes: a down countenance he had, as if he would have looked thirty mile into hell, and seen Sisyphus rolling, and Ixion spinning and reeling. Thus in a pair of hoary slippers, his stockings dangling about his wrists, and his red buttons like foxes out of their holes, he began, like the true champion of a vaulting-house,[593] first to fray me with the bugbears of his rough-cast beard, and then to sound base in mine ears like the bear-garden drum; and this was the humour he put on, and the very apparel of his phrases: Why, master constable, dare you balk us in our own mansion, ha? What! is not our house our Cole-harbour,[594] our castle of come-down and lie-down? Must my honest wedded punk here, my glory-fat Audrey,[595] be taken napping, and raised up by the thunder of bill-men?[596] Are we disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies? Is there not law too for stealing away a man’s slumbers, as well as for sheets off from hedges? Come you to search an honest bawdy-house, this seven and twenty years in fame and shame? Go to, then, you shall search, nay, my very boots too; are you well now? the least hole in my house[597] too; are you pleased now? Can we not take our ease in our inn,[598] but we must come out so quickly? Naud,[599] go to bed, sweet Naud; thou wilt cool thy grease anon, and make thy fat cake. This said, by the virtue and vice of my office I commanded my bill-men down stairs; when in a twinkling discovering myself a little, as much as might serve to relish me, and shew what stuff I was made of, I came and kissed the bawd, hugged her excellent villanies and cunning rare conveyances;[600] then turning myself, I threw mine arms, like a scarf or bandileer,[601] cross the lieutenant’s melancholy bosom, embraced his resolute phrases and his dissolute humours, highly commending the damnable trade and detestable course of their living, so excellent-filthy and so admirable-villanous. Whereupon this lieutenant of Pict-hatch[602] fell into deeper league and farther acquaintance with the blackness of my bosom, sometimes calling me master Lucifer the head-borough, sometimes master Devillin the little black constable. Then telling me he heard from Limbo[603] the second of the last month, and that he had the letter to shew, where they were all very merry; marry, as he told me, there were some of his friends in Phlegethon troubled with the heart-burning; yea, and with the soul-burning too, thought I, though thou little dreamest of the torment: then complaining to me of their bad takings all the last plaguy summer,[604] that there was no stirrings, and therefore undone for want of doings: whereupon, after many such inductions to bring the scene of his poverty upon the stage, he desired, in cool terms, to borrow some forty pence of me. I, stuft with anger at that base and lazy petition, knowing that a right true villain and an absolute practised pander could not want silver damnation, but, living upon the revenues of his wits, might purchase the devil and all, half-conquered with rage, thus I replied to his baseness: Why, for shame! a bawd and poor? why, then, let usurers go a-begging, or, like an old Greek, stand in Paul’s with a porringer; let brokers become whole honest then, and remove to heaven out of Houndsditch; lawyers turn feeless, and take ten of a poor widow’s tears for ten shillings; merchants never forswear themselves, whose great perjured oaths a’ land turn to great winds and cast away their ships at sea, which false perfidious tempest splits their ships abroad and their souls at home, making the one take salt water and the other salt fire; let mercers then have conscionable thumbs when they measure out that smooth glittering devil, satin, and that old reveller, velvet, in the days of Monsieur,[605] both which have devoured many an honest field of wheat and barley, that hath been metamorphosed and changed into white money. Pooh, these are but little wonders, and may be easily possible in the working. A usurer to cry bread and meat is not a thing impossible; for indeed your greatest usurer is your greatest beggar, wanting as well that which he hath as that which he hath not; then who can be a greater beggar? He will not have his house smell like a cook’s shop, and therefore takes an order no meat shall be dressed in it: and because there was an house upon Fish-street-hill burnt to the ground once, he can abide by no means to have a fire in his chimney ever since. To the confirming of which I will insert here a pretty conceit[606] of a nimble-witted gentlewoman, that was worthy to be ladified for the jest; who, entering into a usurer’s house in London to take up money upon unmerciful interest for the space of a twelvemonth, was conducted through two or three hungry rooms into a fair dining-room by a lenten-faced fellow, the usurer’s man, whose nose shewed as if it had been made of hollow pasteboard, and his cheeks like two thin pancakes clapt together; a pitiful knave he was, and looked for all the world as if meal had been at twenty shillings a bushel. The gentlewoman being placed in this fair room to await the usurer’s leisure, who was casting up ditches of gold in his counting-house, and being almost frozen with standing—for it was before Candlemas’ frost-bitten term—ever and anon turning about to the chimney, where she saw a pair of corpulent, gigantical andirons, that stood like two burgomasters, at both corners, a hearth briskly dressed up, and a great cluster of charcoal piled up together like black puddings, which lay for a dead fire, and in the dining-room too: the gentlewoman, wondering it was so long a-kindling, at last she caught the miserable conceit of it, and calling her man to her, bade him seek out for a piece of chalk, or some peeling of a white wall, whilst in the meantime she conceited the device; when, taking up the six former[607] coals, one after another, she chalked upon each of them a satirical letter; which six were these,

T. D. C. R. U. S.;

explained thus,

These dead coals
Resemble usurers’ souls.

Then placing them in the same order again, turning the chalked sides inward to try conclusions,[608] which, as it happened, made up the jest the better: by that time the usurer had done amongst his golden heaps, and entertaining the gentlewoman with a cough a quarter of an hour long, at last, after a rotten hawk and a hem, he began to spit and speak to her. To conclude; she was furnished of the money for a twelvemonth, but upon large security and most tragical usury. When, keeping her day the twelvemonth after, coming to repay both the money and the breed of it—for interest may well be called the usurer’s bastard—she found the hearth dressed up in the same order, with a dead fire of charcoal again, and yet the Thames was half-frozen at that time with the bitterness of the season: when turning the foremost rank of coals, determining again, as it seemed, to draw some pretty knavery upon them too, she spied all those six letters which she chalked upon them the twelvemonth before, and never a one stirred or displaced; the strange sight of which made her break into these words:—Is it possible, quoth she, a usurer should burn so little here, and so much in hell? or is it the cold property of these coals to be above a twelvemonth a-kindling? So much to shew the frozen charity of a usurer’s chimney.

And then a broker to be an honest soul, that is, to take but sixpence a-month, and threepence for the bill-making; a devil of a very good conscience! Possible too to have a lawyer bribeless and without fee, if his clientess, or female client, please his eye well: a merchant to wear a suit of perjury but once a quarter or so,—mistake me not, I mean not four times an hour; that shift were too short, he could not put it on so soon, I think: and, lastly, not impossible for a mercer to have a thumb in folio, like one of the biggest of the guard, and so give good and very bountiful measure. But, which is most impossible, to be a right bawd and poor—it strikes my spleen into dulness, and turns all my blood into cool lead. Wherefore was vice ordained but to be rich, shining, and wealthy, seeing virtue, her opponent, is poor, ragged, and needy? Those that are poor are timorous-honest and foolish-harmless; as your carolling shepherds, whistling ploughmen, and such of the same innocent rank, that never relish the black juice of villany, never taste the red food of murder, or the damnable suckets of luxury:[609] whereas a pander is the very oil of villains and the syrup of rogues; of excellent rogues, I mean, such as have purchased five hundreds a-year by the talent of their villany. How many such gallants do I know, that live only upon the revenue of their wits! some whose brains are above an hundred mile about; and those are your geometrical thieves, which may fitly be called so, because they measure the highways with false gallops, and therefore are heirs of more acres than five-and-fifty elder brothers: sometimes they are clerks of Newmarket Heath, sometimes the sheriffs of Salisbury Plain; and another time they commit brothelry, when they make many a man stand at Hockley-in-the-Hole. These are your great head landlords indeed, which call the word robbing the gathering in of their rents, and name all passengers their tenants-at-will.

Another set of delicate knaves there are, that dive into deeds and writings of lands left to young gullfinches, poisoning the true sense and intent of them with the merciless antimony of the Common Law, [610] and so by some crafty clau[s]e or two shove the true foolish owners quite beside the saddle of their patrimonies, and then they hang only by the stirrups, that is, by the cold alms and frozen charity of the gentlemen-defeaters, who—if they take after me, their great grandfather—will rather stamp them down in the deep mire of poverty than bolster up their heads with a poor wisp of charity. Such as these corrupt the true meanings of last wills and testaments, and turn legacies the wrong way, wresting them quite awry, like Grantham steeple.[611]

The third rank, quainter than the former, presents us with the race of lusty vaulting gallants, that, instead of a French horse, practise upon their mistresses all the nimble tricks of vaulting, and are worthy to be made dukes for doing the somerset so lively. This nest of gallants, for the natural parts that are in them, are maintained by their drawn-work dames and their embroidered mistresses, and can dispend their two thousand a-year out of other men’s coffers; keep at every heel a man, beside a French lacquey (a great boy with a beard), and an English page, which fills up the place of an ingle:[612] they have their city-horse, which I may well term their stone-horse, or their horse upon the stones; for indeed the city being the lusty dame and mistress of the land, lays all her foundation upon good stone-work, and somebody pays well for’t where’er it lights, and might with less cost keep London Bridge in reparations every fall than mistress Bridget his wife; for women and bridges always lack mending, and what the advantage of one tide performs comes another tide presently and washes away. Those are your gentlemen gallants that seeth uppermost, and never lin[613] gallopping till they run over into the fire; so gloriously accoutred that they ravish the eyes of all wantons, and take them prisoners in their shops with a brisk suit of apparel; they strangle and choke more velvet in a deep-gathered hose[614] than would serve to line through my lord What-call-ye-him’s coach.

What need I infer[615] more of their prodigal glisterings and their spangled damnations, when these are arguments sufficient to shew the wealth of sin, and how rich the sons and heirs of Tartary[616] are? And are these so glorious, so flourishing, so brimful of golden Lucifers or light angels[617] and thou a pander and poor? a bawd and empty, apparelled in villanous packthread, in a wicked suit of coarse hop-bags, the wings[618] and skirts faced with the ruins of dishclouts? Fie, I shame to see thee dressed up so abominable scurvy! Complainest thou of bad doings, when there are harlots of all trades; and knaves of all languages? Knowest thou not that sin may be committed either in French, Dutch, Italian, or Spanish, and all after the English fashion? But thou excusest the negligence of thy practice by the last summer’s pestilence: alas, poor shark-gull[619] that put-off is idle! for sergeant Carbuncle, one of the plague’s chief officers, dares not venture within three yards of an harlot, because monsieur Drybone, the Frenchman, is a leiger[620] before him. At which speech the slave burst into a melancholy laugh, which shewed for all the world like a sad tragedy with a clown in’t; and thus began to reply:—I know not whether it be [a] cross or a curse, noble Philip of Phlegethon, or whether both, that I am forced to pink four ells of bag to make me a summer-suit; but I protest, what with this long vacation, and the fidging of gallants to Norfolk and up and down countries, Pierce was never so pennyless as poor lieutenant Prigbeard.

With those words he put me in mind of him for whom I chiefly changed myself into an officious constable, poor Pierce Pennyless: when presently I demanded of this lieutenant the place of his abode, and when he last heard of him (though I knew well enough both where to hear of him and find him); to which he made answer: Who, Pierce? honest Pennyless? he that writ the madcap’s Supplication? why, my very next neighbour, lying within three lean houses of me, at old mistress Silverpin’s, the only door-keeper[621] in Europe: why, we meet one another every term-time, and shake hands when the Exchequer opens; but when we open our hands, the devil of penny we can see.

With that I cheered up the drooping slave with the aqua-vitæ[622] of villany, and put him in excellent comfort of my damnable legacy; saying I would stuff him with so many wealthy instructions that he should excel even Pandarus himself, and go nine mile beyond him in pandarism, and from thenceforward he should never know a true rascal go under his red velvet slops,[623] and a gallant bawd indeed below her loose-bodied[624] satin.

This said, the slave hugged himself, and bussed the bawd for joy: when presently I left them in the midst of their wicked smack, and descended to my bill-men[625] that waited in the pernicious alley for me, their master constable. And marching forward to the third garden-house, there we knocked up the ghost of mistress Silverpin, who suddenly risse[626] out of two white sheets, and acted out of her tiring-house[627] window: but having understood who we were, and the authority of our office, she presently, even in her ghost’s apparel, unfolded the doors and gave me my free entrance; when in policy I charged the rest to stay and watch the house below, whilst I stumbled up two pair of stairs in the dark, but at last caught in mine eyes the sullen blaze of a melancholy lamp that burnt very tragically upon the narrow desk of a half bedstead, which descried[628] all the pitiful ruins throughout the whole chamber. The bare privities of the stone-walls were hid with two pieces of painted cloth,[629] but so ragged and tottered,[630] that one might have seen all nevertheless, hanging for all the world like the two men in chains between Mile-end and Hackney. The testern, or the shadow over the bed, was made of four ells of cobwebs, and a number of small spinner’s-ropes hung down for curtains: the spindle-shank spiders, which shew like great lechers with little legs, went stalking over his head as if they had been conning of Tamburlaine.[631] To conclude, there was many such sights to be seen, and all under a penny, beside the lamentable prospect of his hose[632] and doublet, which, being of old Kendal-green, fitly resembled a pitched field, upon which trampled many a lusty corporal. In this unfortunate tiring-house lay poor Pierce upon a pillow stuffed with horse-meat; the sheets smudged so dirtily, as if they had been stolen by night out of Saint Pulcher’s[633] churchyard when the sexton had left a grave open, and so laid the dead bodies wool-ward:[634] the coverlet was made of pieces a’ black cloth clapt together, such as was snatched off the rails in King’s-street at the queen’s funeral. Upon this miserable bed’s-head lay the old copy of his Supplication, in foul-written hand, which my black Knight of the Post conveyed to hell; which no sooner I entertained in my hand, but with the rattling and blabbing of the papers poor Pierce began to stretch and grate his nose against the hard pillow; when after a rouse or two, he muttered these reeling words between drunk and sober, that is, between sleeping and waking:—I should laugh, i’faith, if for all this I should prove a usurer before I die, and have never a penny now to set up withal. I would build a nunnery in Pict-hatch[635] here, and turn the walk in Paul’s[636] into a bowling alley: I would have the Thames leaded over, that they might play at cony-holes with the arches under London Bridge. Well (and with that he waked), the devil is mad knave still.

How now, Pierce? quoth I, dost thou call me knave to my face? Whereat the poor slave started up with his hair a-tiptoe; to whom by easy degrees I gently discovered myself; who, trembling like the treble of a lute under the heavy finger of a farmer’s daughter, craved pardon of my damnable excellence, and gave me my titles as freely as if he had known where all my lordships lay, and how many acres there were in Tartary.[637] But at the length, having recovered to be bold again, he unfolded all his bosom to me; told me that the Knight of Perjury had lately brought him a singed letter sent from a damned friend of his, which was thus directed as followeth,

From Styx to Wood’s-close,
or
The Walk of Pict-hatch.

After I saw poor Pennyless grow so well acquainted with me, and so familiar with the villany of my humour, I unlocked my determinations, and laid open my intents; in particular[638] the cause of my uprising, being moved both with his penetrable petition and his insufferable poverty, and therefore changed my shape into a little wapper-eyed[639] constable, to wink and blink at small faults, and through the policy of searching, to find him out the better in his cleanly tabernacle; and therefore gave him encouragement now to be frolic, for the time was at hand, like a pickpurse, that Pierce should be called no more Pennyless, like the Mayor’s bench at Oxford,[640] but rather Pierce Pennyfist, because his palm shall be pawed with pence. This said, I bade him be resolved and get up to breakfast, whilst I went to gather my noise[641] of villains together, and made his lodging my convocation-house. With that, in a resulting humour, he called his hose[642] and doublet to him (which could almost go alone, borne like a hearse upon the legs of vermin), whilst I thumped down stairs with my cow-heel, embraced mistress Silverpin, and betook me to my bill-men;[643] when, in a twinkling, before them all, I leapt out of master constable’s night-gown into an usurer’s fusty furred jacket; whereat the watchmen staggered, and all their bills fell down in a swoon; when I walked close by them, laughing and coughing like a rotten-lunged usurer, to see what Italian faces they all made when they missed their constable, and saw the black gown of his office lie full in a puddle.

Well, away I scudded in the musty moth-eaten habit; and being upon Exchange-time, I crowded myself amongst merchants, poisoned all the Burse[644] in a minute, and turned their faiths and troths into curds and whey, making them swear that things now which they forswore when the quarters struck again; for I was present at the clapping up of every bargain, which did ne’er hold, no longer than they held hands together. There I heard news out of all countries, in all languages; how many villains[645] were in Spain, how many luxurs[646] in Italy, how many perjurds in France, and how many reel-pots in Germany. At last I met, at half-turn, one whom I had spent mine eyes so long for, an hoary money-master, that had been off and on some six-and-fifty years damned in his counting-house, for his only recreation was but to hop about the Burse before twelve, to hear what news from the Bank, and how many merchants were banqrout[647] the last change of the moon. This rammish penny-father[648] I rounded[649] in the left ear, winded in my intent, the place and hour; which no sooner he sucked in, but smiled upon me in French, and replied,—

O mounsieur Diabla,
I’ll be chief guest at your tabla!

With that we shook hands, and, as we parted, I bade him bring master Cog-bill the scrivener along with him; and so I vanished out of that dressing.

And passing through Birchin-lane, amidst a camp-royal of hose and doublets (master Snip’s backside being turned where his face stood), I took excellent occasion to slip into a captain’s suit, a valiant buff doublet, stuffed with points[650] like a leg of mutton with parsley, and a pair of velvet slops[651] scored thick with lace, which ran round about the hose like ringworms, able to make a man scratch where it itched not. And thus accoutred, taking up my weapons a’ trust in the same order at the next cutler’s I came to, I marched to master Bezle’s ordinary, where I found a whole dozen of my damned crew, sweating as much at dice as many poor labourers do with the casting of ditches; when presently I set in a stake amongst them: round it went; but the crafty dice having peeped upon me once, knew who I was well enough, and would never have their little black eyes off a’ me all the while after. At last came my turn about, the dice quaking in my fist before I threw them; but when I yerked them forth, away they ran like Irish lacqueys[652] as far as their bones would suffer them, I sweeping up all the stakes that lay upon the table; whereat some stamped, others swore, the rest cursed, and all in general fretted to the gall that a new-comer, as they termed me, should gather in so many fifteens at the first vomit. Well, thus it passed on, the dice running as false as the drabs in Whitefriars; and when any one thought himself surest, in came I with a lurching cast, and made them all swear round again; but such gunpowder oaths they were, that I wonder how the ceiling held together without spitting mortar upon them. Zounds, captain, swore one to me, I think the devil be thy good lord and master. True, thought I, and thou his gentleman-usher. In conclusion, it fatted me better than twenty eighteenpence ordinaries,[653] to hear them rage, curse, and swear, like so many emperors of darkness. And all these twelve were of twelve several companies. There was your gallant extraordinary thief that keeps his college of good-fellows,[654] and will not fear to rob a lord in his coach for all his ten trencher-bearers on horseback; your deep-conceited cutpurse, who by the dexterity of his knife will draw out the money, and make a flame-coloured purse shew like the bottomless pit, but with never a soul in’t; your cheating bowler, that will bank false of purpose, and lose a game of twelvepence to purchase his partner twelve shillings in bets, and so share it after the play; your cheveril-gutted catchpoll, who like a horse-leech sucks gentlemen; and, in all, your twelve tribes of villany; who no sooner understood the quaint form of such an uncustomed legacy, but they all pawned their vicious golls[655] to meet there at the hour prefixed; and to confirm their resolution the more, each slipped down his stocking, baring his right knee, and so began to drink a health half as deep as mother Hubburd’s cellar,—she that was called in[656] for selling her working bottle-ale to bookbinders, and spurting the froth upon courtiers’ noses. To conclude, I was their only captain (for so they pleased to title me); and so they all risse,[657] poculis manibusque applauding my news; then the hour being more than once and once reiterated, we were all at our hands again, and so departed.[658]

I could tell now that I was in many a second house in the city and suburbs afterward, where my entertainment was not barren, nor my welcome cheap or ordinary; and then how I walked in Paul’s[659] to see fashions, to dive into villanous meetings, pernicious plots, black humours, and a million of mischiefs, which are bred in that cathedral womb and born within less than forty weeks after. But some may object and say, What, doth the devil walk in Paul’s then? Why not, sir, as well as a sergeant, or a ruffian, or a murderer? May not the devil, I pray you, walk in Paul’s, as well as the horse[660] go a’ top of Paul’s? for I am sure I was not far from his keeper. Pooh, I doubt, where there is no doubt; for there is no true critic indeed that will carp at the devil.

Now the hour posted onward to accomplish the effects of my desire, to gorge every vice full of poison, that the soul might burst at the last, and vomit out herself upon blue cakes of brimstone. When returning home for the purpose, in my captain’s apparel of buff and velvet, I struck mine hostess into admiration at my proper[661] appearance, for my polt-foot[662] was helped out with bumbast; a property which many worldlings use whose toes are dead and rotten, and therefore so stuff out their shoes like the corners of woolpacks.

Well, into my tiring-house[663] I went, where I had scarce shifted myself into the apparel of my last will and testament, which was the habit of a covetous barn-cracking farmer, but all my striplings of perdition, my nephews of damnation, my kindred and alliance of villany and sharking, were ready before the hour to receive my bottomless blessing. When entering into a country night-gown, with a cap of sickness about my brows, I was led in between Pierce Pennyless and his hostess, like a feeble farmer ready to depart England and sail to the kingdom of Tartary;[664] who setting me down in a wicked chair, all my pernicious kinsfolks round about me, and the scrivener between my legs (for he loves always to sit in the devil’s cot-house), thus with a whey-countenance, short stops, and earthen dampish voice, the true counterfeits of a dying cullion,[665] I proceeded to the black order of my legacies.