morning till night but beat his servants, after having been the best master alive: as for his wife, she was a mere natural. Sometimes John's house was beset with a whole regiment of attorneys' clerks, bailiffs and bailiffs' followers, and other small retainers of the law, who threw stones at his windows, and dirt at himself, as he went along the street. When John complained of want of ready money to carry on his suit, they advised him to pawn his plate and jewels, and that Mrs. Bull should sell her linen and wearing-clothes[1].
- ↑ After this passage, in some of the early editions followed this small chapter, under the title of
How the lawyers agreed to send don Diego Dismallo, the conjurer, to John Bull, to dissuade him from making an end of his lawsuit; and what passed between them.
Bull. HOW does my good friend don Diego?
Don. Never worse. Who can be easy when their friends are playing the fool?
Bull. But then you may be easy, for I am resolved to play the fool no longer: I wish I had hearkened to your advice, and compounded this lawsuit sooner.
Don. It is true; I was then against the ruinous ways of this lawsuit, but looking over my scheme since, I find there is an errour in my calculation. Sol and Jupiter were in a wrong house, but I have now discovered their true places: I find that the stars are unanimously of opinion, that you will be successful in this cause: that Lewis will come to an untimely end, and Strutt will be turned out of doors by his wife and children. Then he went on with a torrent of ecliptics, cycles, epicycles, ascendants, trines, quadrants, conjunctions, bulls, bears, goats, and rams, and abundance of hard words, which, being put together, signified nothing. John all this while stood gaping and staring, like a man in a trance.