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. Show 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 numerical characters) 7,000 coaches⸺15,000 single-horse chairs—20,000 wagons, 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 sunrise 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 Peripetia of a Drama , but rejoiceth moreover in all the essential and integrant parts of it⸺it has its Protasis , Epitasis , Catastasis , its Catastrophe or Peripetia 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.