Page:The Political History of the Devil - Defoe (1726).djvu/27

 But there is so much to enquire of about the Devil, before we can bring his story down to our modern times, that we must for the present let that drop, and look a little back to the remoter part of his history, and draw his picture that people may know him when they meet him, and see who and what he is, and what he has been doing ever since he got leave to act in the high station he now appears in.

In the mean time, if I might obtain leave to present an humble petition to Satan, it should be, that he would according to modern usage oblige us all with writing the history of his own times; 'twould, as well as one that is gone before it, be a devilish good one; for as to the sincerity of the performance, the authority of the particulars, the justice of the characters, &c. if they were no better vouch'd, no more consistent with themselves, with charity, with truth, and with the honour of an historian, than the last of that kind which came abroad among us, it must be a reproach to the Devil himself to be author of it.

Were Satan to be brought under the least obligation to write truth, and that the matters of fact, which he should write, might be depended upon, he is certainly qualified by his knowledge of things to be a compleat historian; nor could the Bishop himself, who, by the way, has given us already the devil of a history, come up to him: Milton's pandemonium, tho' an excellent dramatick performance, would appear a meer trifling sing-song business, beneath the dignity of Chevy-chase: The Devil could give us a true account of all the civil wars in Heaven; how and by whom, and in what manner he lost the day there, and was oblig'd to quit the field: The fiction of his refusing to acknowledge and submit to the Messiah, upon his being declar'd Generalissimo of