Places at court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower.
When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses are raised in the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders.
I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague than kiss one of you fasting.
A soldier is twitted with serving his master:
As witches do their serviceable spirits,
Even with thy prodigal blood.
An adulterous couple get this curse:
Like mistletoe on sear elms spent by weather,
Let him cleave to her, and both rot together.
A bravo is asked:
Dost thou imagine thou canst slide on blood,
And not be tainted with a shameful fall?
Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree,
Dost think to root thyself in dead men's graves,
And yet to prosper?
It is dangerous to extract philosophy of life from any dramatist. Yet Webster so often returns to dark and doleful meditations, that we may fairly class him among constitutional pessimists. Men, according to the grimness of his melancholy, are:
Only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
That, ruined, yield no echo.
O this gloomy world!
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!
We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded
Which way please them.
Pleasure of life! what is't? only the good hours of an ague.