d-hot pincers, till

"Rocks and distant dells resounded with his cries."

Some of the saints spat in his face, to his very great annoyance; and
others chopped pieces off his tail, which, however, always grew on
again. This was paying him in his own coin, and amused the populace
mightily; for they all remembered the scurvy tricks he had played them
and their forefathers. It was believed that he endeavoured to trip
people up, by laying his long invisible tail in their way, and giving
it a sudden whisk when their legs were over it;--that he used to get
drunk, and swear like a trooper, and be so mischievous in his cups as
to raise tempests and earthquakes, to destroy the fruits of the earth
and the barns and homesteads of true believers;--that he used to run
invisible spits into people by way of amusing himself in the long
winter evenings, and to proceed to taverns and regale himself with the
best, offering in payment pieces of gold which, on the dawn of the
following morning, invariably turned into slates. Sometimes, disguised
as a large drake, he used to lurk among the bulrushes, and frighten the
weary traveller out of his wits by his awful quack. The reader will
remember the lines of Burns in his address to the "De'il," which so
well express the popular notion on this point--

"Ae dreary, windy, winter night,
The stars shot down wi' sklentin light,
Wi' you, mysel, I got a fright
Ayont the lough;
Ye, like a rash-bush, stood in sight
Wi' waving sough.

"The cudgel in my nieve did shake,
Each bristled hair stood like a stake,
When wi' an eldritch stour, 'quaick! quaick!'
Among the springs
Awa ye squatter'd, like a drake,
On whistling wings."

In all the stories circulated and believed about him, he was
represented as an ugly, petty, mischievous spirit, who rejoiced in
playing off all manner of fantastic tricks upon poor humanity. Milton
seems to have been the first who succeeded in giving any but a
ludicrous description of him. The sublime pride which is the
quintessence of evil, was unconceived before his time. All other
limners made him merely grotesque, but Milton made him awful. In this
the monks showed themselves but miserable romancers; for their object
undoubtedly was to represent the fiend as terrible as possible: but
there was nothing grand about their Satan; on the contrary, he was a
low mean devil, whom it was easy to circumvent and fine fun to play