every one in
disorder--the city gates set open.--

Unfortunate Strasbergers! was there in the store-house of nature--was
there in the lumber-rooms of learning--was there in the great arsenal
of chance, one single engine left undrawn forth to torture your
curiosities, and stretch your desires, which was not pointed by the
hand of Fate to play upon your hearts?--I dip not my pen into my ink to
excuse the surrender of yourselves--'tis to write your panegyrick. Shew
me a city so macerated with expectation--who neither eat, or drank,
or slept, or prayed, or hearkened to the calls either of religion or
nature, for seven-and-twenty days together, who could have held out one
day longer.

On the twenty-eighth the courteous stranger had promised to return to
Strasburg.

Seven thousand coaches (Slawkenbergius must certainly have made some
mistake in his numeral characters) 7000 coaches--15000 single-horse
chairs--20000 waggons, crowded as full as they could all hold with
senators, counsellors, syndicks--beguines, widows, wives, virgins,
canons, concubines, all in their coaches--The abbess of Quedlingberg,
with the prioress, the deaness and sub-chantress, leading the procession
in one coach, and the dean of Strasburg, with the four great dignitaries
of his chapter, on her left-hand--the rest following higglety-pigglety
as they could; some on horseback--some on foot--some led--some
driven--some down the Rhine--some this way--some that--all set out at
sun-rise to meet the courteous stranger on the road.

Haste we now towards the catastrophe of my tale--I say Catastrophe
(cries Slawkenbergius) inasmuch as a tale, with parts rightly disposed,
not only rejoiceth (gaudet) in the Catastrophe and Peripeitia of a
Drama, but rejoiceth moreover in all the essential and integrant parts
of it--it has its Protasis, Epitasis, Catastasis, its Catastrophe or
Peripeitia growing one out of the other in it, in the order Aristotle
first planted them--without which a tale had better never be told at
all, says Slawkenbergius, but be kept to a man's self.

In all my ten tales, in all my ten decades, have I Slawkenbergius tied
down every tale of them as tightly to this rule, as I have done this of
the stranger and his nose.

--From his first parley with the centinel, to his leaving the city of
Strasburg, after pulling off his crimson-sattin pair of breeches, is
the Protasis or first entrance--where the characters of the Personae
Dramatis are just t