Then he begins again his sermon in a louder tone, shouting at each word, quoting examples from Seneca and the classics, a terrible fluency, a trick of his trade, which, diligently applied, must draw money from the patient. He asks for gold, "to make our cloistre," "... 'And yet, God wot, uneth the fundament Parfourmed is, ne of our pavement N' is not a tile yet within our wones; By God, we owen fourty pound for stones. Now help Thomas, for him that harwed helle, For elles mote we oure bokes selle, And if ye lacke oure predication, Than goth this world all to destruction. For who so fro this world wold us bereve, So God me save, Thomas, by your leve, He wold bereve out of this world the sonne.'"[234] In the end, Thomas in a rage promises him a gift, tells him to put his hand in the bed and take it, and sends him away duped, mocked, and covered with filth. We have descended now to popular farce; when amusement must be had at any price, it is sought, as here, in broad jokes, even in filthiness. We can see how these two coarse and vigorous plants have blossomed in the dung of the Middle Ages. Planted by the sly fellows of Champagne and Ile-de-France, watered by the _trouvères_, they were destined fully to expand, speckled and ruddy, in the large hands of Rabelais. Meanwhile Chaucer plucks his nosegay from it. Deceived husbands, mishaps in inns, accidents in bed, cuffs, kicks, and robberies, these suffice to raise a loud laugh. Side by side with noble pictures of chivalry, he gives us a train of Flemish grotesque figures, carpenters, joiners, friars, summoners; blows abound, fists descend on fleshy backs; many nudities are shown; they swindle one another out of their corn, their wives; they pitch one another out of a window; they brawl and quarrel. A bruise, a piece of open filthiness, passes in such society for a sign of wit. The summoner, being rallied by the friar, gives him tit for tat: "'This Frere bosteth that he knoweth helle, And, God it wot, that is but litel wonder, Freres and fendes ben but litel asonder. For parde, ye han often time herd telle How that a Frere ravished was to helle In spirit ones by a visoun, And as an angel lad him up and doun, To shewen him the peines that ther were,... And unto Sathanas he lad him doun. (And now hath Sathanas,' saith he, 'a tayl Broder than of a Carrike is the sayl.) Hold up thy tayl, thou Sathanas, quod he, ....... and let the Frere see Wher is the nest of Freres in this place. And er than half a furlong way of space, Right so as bees out swarmen of an hive, Out of the devils... ther gonnen to drive. A twenty thousand Freres on a route, And thurghout hell they swarmed all aboute, And com agen, as fast as they may gon.'"[235] Such were the coarse buffooneries of the popular imagination. SECTION V.--The Art of Chaucer