s life. His enemy replies: "Though I knewe
God would never have mercie on mee except I had mercie on thee, yet of
thee no mercie would I have.... I tell thee, I would not have undertooke
so much toyle to gaine heaven, as I have done in pursuing thee for
revenge. Divine revenge, of which, as one of the joies above, there is
no fulnes or satietie. Looke how my feete are blistered with following
thee from place to place. I have riven my throat with overstraining it
to curse thee. I have ground my teeth to powder with grating and
grinding them together for anger, when anie hath nam'd thee. My tongue
with vaine threates is bolne, and waxen too big for my mouth....
Entreate not, a miracle maye not reprive thee."

The scene is prolonged. Esdras continues to beg for his life; he will
become the slave, the chattel of his enemy. An idea comes into the mind
of the latter: Sell thy soul to the devil, and I will pardon thee.
Esdras immediately utters horrible blasphemies.

"My joints trembled and quakt," continues Cutwolfe, "with attending
them, my haire stood upright, and my hart was turned wholly to fire....
The veyne in his left hand that is derived from his heart with no faint
blow he pierst, and with the bloud that flowd from it, writ a ful
obligation of his soule to the divell: yea more earnestly he praied unto
God never to forgive his soule than manie Christians doo to save theyr
soules. These fearfull ceremonies brought to an end, I bad him ope his
mouth and gape wide. He did so: as what wil not slaves doo for feare?
Therwith made I no more adoo, but shot him ful into the throat with my
pistol: no more spake he after; so did I shoote him that hee might never
speak after, or repent him. His body being dead lookd as black as a
toad."[280]

This conversation and the sight of Cutwolfe's horrible punishment,
recall Jack Wilton to himself. He regrets his irregular life, but not to
the point of refunding the money stolen from the Countess Juliana; rich
as Gil Bias, he can now, like him, take rank among peaceable and settled
folk; he marries his Venetian lady, and returns to the king of England's
army, occupied in giving a grand reception to Francis I. at the Field of
the Cloth of Gold. There ends the most complete career furnished in
England, before Defoe, by a character of fiction.

The primary if not only result of the publication of "Jack Wilton" was,
so far as the author himself was concerned, to place him in new
difficulti