ladies of the palace,--how he sat invisible at the Pope's banquet, and whipped away all the tit-bits from the plates of Pope Adrian and his assessors of the scarlet stockings, so that his Holiness was obliged to believe that some tormented soul from Purgatory was haunting the Vatican, and ordered prayers to be made accordingly,--how he further showed his enmity to the Church by making secret broaches in the wine-casks of the Bishop of Saltzburg's cellar, and being on one occasion surprised by the butler, perched the poor wretch upon a tree, where he sprawled like a limed bird for the whole length of a frosty night,--how he called up the apparition of Alexander the Great and his Queen before the Emperor Charles V., who assured himself of the reality of this vision by touching the wart which history reports to have been upon the hero's neck,--how in like manner he frightened the students of Erfurt by raising the ghost of Polypheme, and bewitched his good friends the students, and himself to boot, by the apparition of the beautiful Helena,--how he bamboozled a boor by promising him a penny for as much hay as he could eat from his waggon, and then swallowing the whole cart-load down, as easily as it had been a spoonful of Sauerkraut,--how he sold a fine horse for a small price to a jockey, who, delighted with the bargain, set off galloping upon this wightest of steeds, till he came to a running stream, in the middle of which, and just where the water was deepest, the animal all at once changed into a bottle of straw, and left the poor rider floundering up to the neck in the flood,--how he caused horns to grow out of a certain freeborn gentleman's temples, when he was sleeping with his head out of the window, in such a manner that, when he awoke, like an ox in a stile, he could neither move backwards nor forwards,--and how, finally, he at last met with the death which his shameful life merited, and was torn in pieces by the Devil with such violence, that the whole house was shaken as by an earthquake.--To narrate all, or one tithe of these wonderful events, would require more pages than the circulating libraries would tolerate, and far exceed the limits of these introductory remarks. I, however, the less regret that I am unable to enter at length upon this theme, as the task has been already performed, partly by Kit Marlow, and partly by Mr. Roscoe,[*i21] in a collection of German tales, which I may presume to be accessible to most of my readers.