Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 1.djvu/486

312 ties to a deserving female, whom he marries to read a theological lecture, and then leave a prey to irremediable regret. He associates with a number of squalid wretches, and exists on the precarious bounty of strangers in the most unprofitable, not to say knavish indolence. In the mean time his broken hearted parents are devoured by an intense anxiety, of which he is totally regardless. I pass the miraculous part of this veritable history; if Prince Hohenlohe's marvels deserve credit, it would be incongruous and inconsistent to refuse it here. Our "pious Æneas," disguised in the accumulated filth of seventeen years, returns to his father's house. Here he breeds a race of vermin; and luxuriously battens upon the garbage, which the servants, aware of his peculiar taste, plentifully, and one might think, properly, communicated. All this while he is an eye-witness, and an ear-witness, of the misery his absence occasions; and, as if to complete the perfection of such a character, he leaves behind him a scroll, of which the only effect must necessarily be to arouse a keener agony, and to quicken a dying despair. And this is the monstrous compound, which a voice from Heaven proclaims holy, and which miracles are called in to sanction! This is to be emphatically, a "!" He, who neglects every relative