CANTO III.]
HUDIBRAS.
217
Sing catches to the saints at Mascon,[1]
And tell them all they came to ask him?
Appear in divers shapes to Kelly,[2]
And speak i' th' nun of Loudun's belly?[3]
Meet with the Parliament's committee,165
At Woodstock, on a pers'nal treaty?[4]
At Sarum take a cavalier,[5]
I' th' Cause's service, prisoner?
As Withers, in immortal rhyme,
Has register'd to after-time.170
- ↑ Mascon is a town in Burgundy, where an unclean devil, as he was called, played his pranks in the house of Mr Perreaud, a reformed minister, ann. 1612. Sometimes he sang psalms, at others licentious verses, and frequently lampooned the Huguenots. Mr Perreaud published a circumstantial account of him in French, which at the request of Mr Boyle, who had heard the matter attested, was translated into English by Dr Peter de Moulin. The poet calls them saints, because they were of the Genevan creed.
- ↑ See notes to lines 236-7-8. The persons here instanced made great pretensions to sanctity. On this circumstance Ralpho founds his argument for the lawfulness of the practice, that saints may converse with the devil. Casaubon informs us that Dee, who was associated with Kelly, employed himself in prayer and other acts of devotion, before he entered upon his conversation with spirits.
- ↑ Grandier, the curate of Loudun, was ordered to be burned alive, a. d. 1631, by Judges commissioned and influenced by Richelieu; and the prioress, with half the nuns in the convent, were obliged to own themselves bewitched. Grandier was a handsome man, and very eloquent; and his real fault was that he outdid the monks in their own arts. There was, in reality, no ground but the envy and jealousy of the monks, for the charges against him. See Bayle's Dictionary, Art. Grandier; and Dr Hutchinson's Historical Essay on Witchcraft, p. 36.
- ↑ Dr Plot, in his History of Oxfordshire, ch. viii., tells us how the devil, or some evil spirit, disturbed the commissioners at Woodstock, whither they went to value the crown lands directly after the execution of Charles I. A personal treaty had been very much desired by the king, and often pressed and petitioned for by great part of the nation; the poet insinuates that though the Parliament refused to hold a personal treaty with the king, yet they scrupled not to hold one with the devil at Woodstock. Sir Walter Scott has made the tale familiar by his novel. The whole of the attacks upon the commissioners, in the form of ghosts and evil spirits, which finally drove them from the place, were planned and in great part carried into effect by a roguish concealed loyalist, Joseph Collins, or Funny Joe, who was engaged as their Secretary, under the name of Giles Sharp.
- ↑ Withers, who figures in Pope's Dunciad, was a puritanical officer in the Parliament army and a prolific writer of verse. He has a long story, in doggrel, of a soldier of the king's army, who being a prisoner at Salisbury, and drinking a health to the devil upon his knees, was carried away by him through a single pane of glass.
