BookRix

Children and old women have been accustomed to hear so many frightful
things of the cloven-footed potentate, and have formed such diabolical
ideas of his satanic majesty, exhibiting him in so many horrible and
monstrous shapes, that really it were enough to frighten Beelzebub
himself, were he by any accident to meet his prototype in the dark,
dressed up in the several figures in which imagination has embodied him.
And as regards men themselves, it might be presumed that the devil could
not by any means terrify them half so much, were they actually to meet
and converse with him face to face: so true it is that his satanic
majesty is not near so black as he is painted.