world through Browning’s poem “Pied Piper of Hamelin” (1843) and Miss Peabody’s play _The Piper_ (1909), the rats are the human souls, which Death charms with his music into following him. In the Middle Ages the soul was often represented as leaving the body in the form of a mouse. The soul of a good man comes out of his mouth as a white mouse, while at the death of a sinner the soul escapes as a black mouse, which the devil catches and brings to hell. Mephistopheles, it will be recalled, calls himself “the lord of rats and mice” (_Faust_, 1, 1516). Devil-Death has inherited this wind instrument from the goat-footed Pan. “The Devil is more busy in the convents,” we are told by J. K. Huysmans in his novel _En route_ (1895), “than in the cities, as he has a harder job on hand.” BELPHAGOR BY NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI This story of the devil Belphagor, who was sent by his infernal chief Pluto up to earth, where he married an earthly wife, but finally left her in disgust to go back to hell, is also of mediaeval origin. It was first printed by Giovanni Brevio in 1545, and appeared for the second time with the name of Machiavelli in 1549, twenty-two years after the death of the diabolical statesman. The two authors did not borrow from each other, but had a common source in a mediaeval Latin manuscript, which seems to have first fallen into the hands of Italians, but was later brought to France where it has been lost. The tale of the marriage of the devil appeared in several other Italian versions during the sixteenth century. Among the Italian novelists, who retold it for the benefit of their married friends, may be mentioned Giovan-Francesco Straparola, Francesco Sansovino, and Gabriel Chappuys. In England this story was no less popular. Barnabe Riche inserted it in his collection of narratives in 1581, and we meet it again later in the following plays: _Grim, the Collier of Croydon_, ascribed to Ulpian Fulwell (1599); _The Devil and his Dame_ by P. M. Houghton (1600); _Machiavel and the Devil_ by Daborne and Henslowe (1613); _The Devil is an Ass_ by Ben Jonson (1616); and _Belphagor, or the Marriage of the Devil_ (1690). In France the story was treated in verse by La Fontaine (1694), and in Germany it served the Nuremberg poet Hans Sachs as the subject for a farce (1557). The _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ is authority for the statement that Machiavelli’s own married life had nothing to do with the plot of his story.