carefully between the contents of his sack: 'These are they who wickedly
corrupt the holy psalms: the dangler, the gasper, the leaper, the
galloper, the dragger, the mumbler, the fore-skipper, the fore-runner
and the over-leaper: Tittivillus collecteth the fragments of these men's
words.'[10] Indeed, a holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed the poor
little devil himself and heard about his alarming industry; this is the
story as it is told in _The Myroure of Oure Ladye_, written for the
delectation of the nuns of Syon in the fifteenth century: 'We read of a
holy Abbot of the order of Citeaux that while he stood in the choir at
matins he saw a fiend that had a long and great poke hanging about his
neck and went about the choir from one to another and waited busily
after all letters and syllables and words and failings that any made;
and them he gathered diligently and put them in his poke. And when he
came before the Abbot, waiting if aught had escaped him that he might
have gotten and put in his bag, the Abbot was astonied and afeard of the
foulness and misshape of him and said unto him: What art thou? And he
answered and said, I am a poor devil and my name is Tittivillus and I do
mine office that is committed unto me. And what is thine office? said
the Abbot. He answered: I must each day, he said, bring my master a
thousand pokes full of failings and of negligences and syllables and
words, that are done in your order in reading and singing and else I
must be sore beaten.'[11] But there is no reason to suppose that he
often got his beating, though one may be sure that Madame Eglentyne,
busily chanting through her nose, never gave him the slightest help. In
his spare moments, when he was not engaged in picking up those
unconsidered trifles which the monks let fall from the psalms,
Tittivillus used to fill up odd corners of his sack with the idle talk
of people who gossiped in church; and he also sat up aloft and collected
all the high notes of vain tenors, who sang to their own glory, instead
of to the glory of God, and pitched the chants three notes higher than