In all my ten tales, in all my ten decads, 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 sentinel, 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 Personæ Dramatis are just touched in, and the subject slightly begun.
The Epitasis , wherein the action is more fully entered upon and heightened, till it arrives at its state or height called the Catastasis , and which usually takes up the 2nd and 3rd act, is included within that busy period of my tale, betwixt the first night’s uproar about the nose, to the conclusion of the trumpeter’s wife’s lectures upon it in the middle of the grand parade: and from the first embarking of the learned in the dispute—to the doctors finally sailing away, and leaving the Strasburgers upon the beach in distress, is the Catastasis or the ripening of the incidents and passions for their bursting forth in the fifth act.
This commences with the setting out of the Strasburgers in the Frankfort road, and terminates in unwinding the labyrinth and bringing the hero out of a state of agitation (as Aristotle calls it) to a state of rest and quietness.
This, says Hafen Slawkenbergius , constitutes the Catastrophe or Peripetia of my tale—and that is the part of it I am going to relate.
We left the stranger behind the curtain asleep⸺he enters now upon the stage.
—What dost thou prick up thy ears at?—’tis nothing but a man upon a horse⸺was the last word the stranger uttered to his mule. It was not proper then to tell the reader, that the mule took his master’s word for it; and without any more ifs or ands , let the traveller and his horse pass by.