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.
A Duchess is 'brought to mortification,' before her strangling by the executioner, in this high fantastical oration:
Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste, &c. &c.
Man's life in its totality is summed up with monastic cynicism in these lyric verses:
Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.