Words of the Host to the Monk "'My lord the Monk, don't look so woe-begone, for it's your turn to tell a story, sir. Why, look! We've almost got to Rochester! Forward, my lord, and don't hold up our game. But, on my honour, I don't know your name; Sir John, perhaps? Why have you kept it from us? Or should I say Sir Alban, or Sir Thomas? What monastery have they shut you in? I vow to God you have a pretty skin! There was fine pasturage where you were sent, you're nothing like a ghost or penitent! My! You must surely be some officer, some worthy Sexton, or some Cellarer. For by my father's soul, in my opinion, when you're at home, you're in your own dominion. You are no novice, cloistered in retreat, but in control, and wily as discreet. Moreover when it comes to brawn and bone, you seem to be well-cared-for, you must own. God send confusion on the fellow who first had the thought to make a monk of you! You would have put a hen to pretty use, had you permission, as you have the juice, to exercise your pleasure in procreation! You could have done your part to build the nation. Alas, who put you in so wide a cope? Damnation, take me, but if I were Pope, not only you but many a mighty man going about the world with tonsured pan should have a wife; for look, the world's forlorn! Religion has got hold of all the corn of procreation, laymen are but shrimps. Weak trees make sorry seedlings! That's what skimps our heirs and children, makes them all so slender and feeble that they hardly can engender. And that's what makes our wives so apt to cope religious people; there they have some hope of honest coin to pay the debts of Venus; we laymen hardly have a groat between us!"
| Viewed: |
1 times |
| Added: |
3 years, 9 months ago
18 Feb 2021 17:09 CET
|
|
|
