our arts will never sink upon the pillow again to swallow
your legends in submissive faith."

"Bravo!" said the old man in high wrath: "Have we not Averroes now
instead of Christ, and Aristoteles instead of the Almighty, and this
Pietro of yours, this Iscariot, instead of the Holy Ghost? And verily
the spirit of the earth has built up a high and stately body for him,
and has crowned it with a noble brow, and has set an eye of fire in it
and the sweet mouth of persuasion, and has poured grace and majesty
over his motions, that he may juggle and delude: while I, the unworthy
servant of the Lord, walk about here sickly and weak and without all
comeliness of feature, and have only my own confession, only my faith,
to give assurance that I am a christian. I cannot descend like him
into the depths of dazzling knowledge, nor measure the course of the
stars, nor foretell good and evil fortune; I am reviled and scorned by
the overwise; but I bear it humbly, for the love of him who has laid
all this upon me. Wait however until the end, and see whether his
seven spirits whom he holds under his magical spell, can save him
then; whether his Familiar, that spawn of hell, will then assist him."

"Was his Familiar with him?" askt Alfonso eagerly.

"Did not you observe the monster," answered the monk, "that had trickt
itself out like a clown? the abortion with that hump, those twisted
hands and arms, those crooked legs, those squinting eyes, and that
enormous nose jutting out from its unsightly face."

"I took all that for a mask;" said the youth.

"No, this creature," replied the old man, "need not put on a mask.
Such as he is, he is mask enough, and spectre, and imp of hell, this
Beresynth, as they call him.... Will you pass the night in our
convent, young man, until you have found a lodging?"

"No," rejoined he very positively; "I will be indebted for no
hospitality to a man thus unjust and slanderous toward the noble being
whose name I heard with rapture while yet in my own country, and who
shall walk and shine before me here as my guide and model. It is bad
enough that I have been forced to hear such language from you, from a
man whose condition and age forbid my calling him to account for it.
If he alone is to be esteemed godly, who despises science and
knowledge, he alone a christian, who in a waking slumber dozes away
the days of his life and the powers of his soul, I depart out of the
dull communion. But it is not so; nor