Page:Crotchet Castle - Peacock (1831).djvu/29

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THE VILLA.
17

rupted in the dead of night by the Devil; when a couple of epigrams passed between them; and the Devil, of course, proved the smaller wit of the two.[1]

  1. The devil began: (he had caught the bishop musing on politics.)
    Oh Gilberte Folliot!
    Dum revolvis tot et tot,
    Deus tuus est Astarot.

    Oh Gilbert Folliott!
    While thus you muse and plot,
    Your god is Astarot.

    The bishop answered:
    Tace, dæmon: qui est deus
    Sabbaot, est ille meus.

    Peace, fiend; the power I own
    Is Sabbaoth's Lord alone.

    It must be confessed, the devil was easily posed in the twelfth century. He was a sturdier disputant in the sixteenth.
    Did not the devil appear to Martin
    Luther in Germany for certain?

    when "the heroic student," as Mr. Coleridge calls him,