that may
serve to the purpose.

Chapter 2.XII.

How the Lord of Suckfist pleaded before Pantagruel.

Then began the Lord Suckfist in manner as followeth. My lord, and you my
masters, if the iniquity of men were as easily seen in categorical judgment
as we can discern flies in a milkpot, the world's four oxen had not been so
eaten up with rats, nor had so many ears upon the earth been nibbled away
so scurvily. For although all that my adversary hath spoken be of a very
soft and downy truth, in so much as concerns the letter and history of the
factum, yet nevertheless the crafty slights, cunning subtleties, sly
cozenages, and little troubling entanglements are hid under the rosepot,
the common cloak and cover of all fraudulent deceits.

Should I endure that, when I am eating my pottage equal with the best, and
that without either thinking or speaking any manner of ill, they rudely
come to vex, trouble, and perplex my brains with that antique proverb which
saith,

Who in his pottage-eating drinks will not,
When he is dead and buried, see one jot.

And, good lady, how many great captains have we seen in the day of battle,
when in open field the sacrament was distributed in luncheons of the
sanctified bread of the confraternity, the more honestly to nod their
heads, play on the lute, and crack with their tails, to make pretty little
platform leaps in keeping level by the ground? But now the world is
unshackled from the corners of the packs of Leicester. One flies out
lewdly and becomes debauched; another, likewise, five, four, and two, and
that at such random that, if the court take not some course therein, it
will make as bad a season in matter of gleaning this year as ever it made,
or it will make goblets. If any poor creature go to the stoves to
illuminate his muzzle with a cowsherd or to buy winter-boots, and that the
sergeants passing by, or those of the watch, happen to receive the
decoction of a clyster or the fecal matter of a close-stool upon their
rustling-wrangling-clutter-keeping masterships, should any because of that
make bold to clip the shillings and testers and fry the wooden dishes?
Sometimes, when we think one thing, God does another; and when the sun is
wholly set all beasts are in the shade. Let me never be believed again, if
I do not gallantly prove it by several people who have seen the light of
the day.

In the year thirty and six, buying a Dutch curtail, which was a middle-size