THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
they must be to have no relish for these delights, and even to rail against them and to blaspheme; uttering all manner of waspish censures against broad grins, brown bowls, and cherry lips. It is in these sad times when Beelzebub takes us by the neck, dips us under, and asks, "How do you like that?" that we say sour and ill-natured things against everybody, pry into matters which should be covered with leaves like the baskets in Ceres' Pomp, and find fault with everything. Others write books while they are soused in the Bath; works full of unpleasant doctrines and sad moralities to the intent that our Mortal Life is a pitiful Tragic Show, full of tears, and sighing, and sorrow; instead of the true, veracious, and Silurian position, namely that it is the drollest, merriest, wildest, most fantastical comedy; a comedy better than any that the witty clerk Aristophanes invented for the men of Athens, and rigged out with the rarest jokes, trickeries, brawls, intrigues, miz-mazes, counterfeits, gods-from-the-machine, choruses, waggeries, oil-flasks, wine-skins, masks, and music. This is what it really is, tho' when one is in the Devil's Bath it seems quite different; but then it is silly to touch the quill at such a season, and can only waste time, ink, and paper.
And since I had come once more to my right reason, and the blue sky opened no more for me a pall of blackness, as I have said, I bade my friends come and sleep for a few nights under my roof, that we all of us might get some gladness whilst we were able. And on the appointed
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