Be journeying on in this inclement air. Wrap thy old cloak about thy back; Nor leave the broad and plain and beaten road, Although no flowers smile on the trodden dust, For the violet paths of pleasure. This Charles the First Rose like the equinoctial sun, By vapours, through whose threatening ominous veil There's old Sir Henry Vane, the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Essex, and Lord Keeper Coventry, And others who make base their English breed By vile participation of their honours With papists, atheists, tyrants, and apostates. When lawyers mask 'tis time for honest men To strip the vizor from their purposes. Darting his altered influence he has A seasonable time for maskers this! gained This height of noon-from which he must decline Amid the darkness of conflicting storms, When Englishmen and Protestants should sit dust on their dishonoured heads, To dank extinction and to latest To avert the wrath of him whose scourge is felt night There goes the apostate Strafford; he For the great sins which have drawn whose titles down from Heaven whispered aphorisms and foreign overthrow. From Machiavel and Bacon: and, if The remnant of the martyred saints in Judas Had been as brazen and as bold as he First Citizen. That is the Archbishop. Pope: London will be soon his Rome: he walks As if he trod upon the heads of men : He looks elate, drunken with blood and gold; Rochefort Have been abandoned by their faithless allies To that idolatrous and adulterous torturer Lewis of France,-the Palatinate is lost Enter LEIGHTON (who has been branded in the face) and BASTWICK. Canst thou be-art thou- ? Leighton. I was Leighton: what Beside him moves the Babylonian Iam thou seest. And yet turn thine eyes, Of dancing round a pole dressed up with May yet be healed. The king is just Third Citizen. You seem to know Like the base patchwork of a leper's rags. the vulnerable place Of these same crocodiles. Second Citizen. Egyptian bondage, sir. Nile I learnt it in You torch-bearers, advance to the great And then attend the Marshal of the Into the Royal presence. A Law Student. thou Of Indian seas; some like the new-born What thinkest And some like cars in which the Romans climbed Of this quaint show of ours, my agèd (Canopied by Victory's eagle wings out Even now we see the redness of the The Capitolian-See how gloriously Gasp to us on the wind's wave. It Like shapes of some diviner element comes! And their sounds, floating hither round the pageant, than The envious and admiring multitude. Second Citizen. Ay, there they areNobles, and sons of nobles, patentees, Monopolists, and stewards of this poor farm, On whose lean sheep sit the prophetic crows. Here is the pomp that strips the houseless orphan, Here is the pride that breaks the desolate heart. These are the lilies glorious as Solomon, Who toil not, neither do they spin,unless It be the webs they catch poor rogues withal. Here is the surfeit which to them who earn The niggard wages of the earth, scarce leaves The tithe that will support them till they crawl Back to her cold hard bosom. Here is health Followed by grim disease, glory by shame, Waste by lame famine, wealth by squalid want, A gentle heart enjoys what it confers, Even as it suffers that which it inflicts, Though Justice guides the stroke. And England's sin by England's punish- Accept my hearty thanks. ment. Queen. And, gentlemen, And, as the effect pursues the cause Call your poor Queen your debtor. foregone, Your quaint pageant Lo, giving substance to my words, Rose on me like the figures of past years, In Paris ribald censurers dare not move Their poisonous tongues against these sinless sports; And his smile Archy. Ay, and some are now smiling whose tears will make the brine; for the Fool sees-— Strafford. Insolent! You shall have Warms those who bask in it, as ours your coat turned and be whipped out of would do If... Take my heart's thanks: add them, gentlemen, the palace for this. Archy. When all the fools are whipped, and all the Protestant writers, To those good words which, were he while the knaves are whipping the fools Enriched by smiles which France can their craft); and the knaves, to marshal never buy. them, join in a procession to Bedlam, [Exeunt ST. JOHN and the Gentle-to entreat the madmen to omit their men of the Inns of Court. King. My Lord Archbishop, Mark you what spirit sits in St. John's eyes? Methinks it is too saucy for this presence. Archy. Yes, pray your Grace look: for, like an unsophisticated [eye] sees everything upside down, you who are wise will discern the shadow of an idiot in lawn sleeves and a rochet setting springes to catch woodcocks in haymaking time. Poor Archy, whose owleyes are tempered to the error of his age, and because he is a fool, and by special ordinance of God forbidden ever to see himself as he is, sees now in that deep eye a blindfold devil sitting on the ball, and weighing words out between king and subjects. One scale is full of promises, and the other full of protestations and then another devil creeps behind the first out of the dark windings [of a] pregnant lawyer's brain, and takes the bandage from the other's eyes, and throws a sword into the left-hand scale, for all the world like my Lord Essex's there. sublime Platonic contemplations, and manage the state of England. Let all the honest men who lie pinched up at the prisons or the pillories, in custody of the pursuivants of the High-Commission Court, marshal them. Enter Secretary LYTTELTON, with papers. These His Grace of Canterbury must take order You, Wentworth, Shall be myself in Ireland, and shall add Look Their that those merchants draw not without loss bullion from the Tower; and, Of shipmoney, take fullest compensation With Strafford. A rod in pickle for the Farthing exact from those who claim Fool's back! exemption From knighthood: that which once was a reward Ten minutes in the rain: be it your penance Shall thus be made a punishment, that To bring news how the world goes there. [Exit ARCHY. Poor Archy ! Yet with a quaint and graceful license- Flies at his throat who falls. Subdue For this once do not as Prynne would, Even to the disposition of thy purpose, And be that tempered as the Ebro's were he |