- end_line
- 11055
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:09.931Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 11007
- text
- BABBALANJA—Very funny, your Highness:—amazing jolly! And from my
nethermost soul, would to Oro, thou could’st but feel one touch of that
jolly woe! It would appall thee, my Right Worshipful lord Abrazza!
ABRAZZA (_to Media_)—My dear lord, his teeth are marvelously white and
sharp: some she-shark must have been his dam:—does he often grin thus?
It was infernal!
MEDIA—Ah! that’s Azzageddi. But, prithee, Babbalanja, proceed.
BABBALANJA—Your Highness, even in his calmer critic moods, Lombardo was
far from fancying his work. He confesses, that it ever seemed to him
but a poor scrawled copy of something within, which, do what he would,
he could not completely transfer. “My canvas was small,” said he;
“crowded out were hosts of things that came last. But Fate is in it.”
And Fate it was, too, your Highness, which forced Lombardo, ere his
work was well done, to take it off his easel, and send it to be
multiplied. “Oh, that I was not thus spurred!” cried he; “but like many
another, in its very childhood, this poor child of mine must go out
into Mardi, and get bread for its sire.”
ABRAZZA (_with a sigh_)—Alas, the poor devil! But methinks ’twas
wondrous arrogant in him to talk to all Mardi at that lofty rate.—Did
he think himself a god?
BABBALANJA—He himself best knew what he thought; but, like all others,
he was created by Oro to some special end; doubtless, partly answered
in his Koztanza.
MEDIA—And now that Lombardo is long dead and gone—and his work, hooted
during life, lives after him—what think the present company of it?
Speak, my lord Abrazza! Babbalanja! Mohi! Yoomy!
ABRAZZA (_tapping his sandal with his scepter__)—I never read it.
BABBALANJA (_looking upward_)—It was written with a divine intent.
Mohi (_stroking his beard_)—I never hugged it in a corner, and ignored
it before Mardi.
Yoomy (_musing_)—It has bettered my heart.
MEDIA (_rising_)—And I have read it through nine times.
BABBALANJA (_starting up_)—Ah, Lombardo! this must make thy ghost glad!
- title
- Chunk 9