BOOKS FOR MAGIC
Resolve you, doctors, Bacon can by books
Make storming Boreas thunder from his cave,
And dim fair Luna to a dark Eclipse.
The great arch-ruler, potentate of hell,
Trembles, when Bacon bids him, or his fiends,
Bow to the force of his Pentageron.
What art can work, the frolic friar knows,
And therefore will I turn my Magic books,
And strain out Necromancy to the deep.
I have contrived and framed a head of brass
(I made Belcephon hammer out the stuff),
And that by art shall read Philosophy:
And I will strengthen England by my skill,
That if ten Caesars lived and reigned in Rome,
With all the legions Europe doth contain,
They should not touch a grasse of English ground:
The work that Ninus reared at Babylon,
The brazen walls framed by Semiramis,
Carved out like to the portal of the sun,
Shall not be such as rings the English strand
From Dover to the market place of Rye.
R. Greene. The Honourable History of
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.