Mal. Ay, all-wit. 130
Bil. Amphitryo was a cuckold.
Mal. Your lordship sweats; your young lady will get you a cloth for your old worship’s brows. [Exit Bilioso. Here’s a fellow to be damned: this is his inviolable maxim,—flatter the greatest and oppress the least: a whoreson flesh-fly, that still gnaws upon the lean galled backs.
Pietro. Why dost, then, salute him? 138
Mal. Faith,[523] as bawds go to church, for fashion’ sake. Come, be not confounded; thou’rt but in danger to lose a dukedom. Think this:—this earth is the only grave and Golgotha wherein all things that live must rot; ’tis but the draught wherein the heavenly bodies discharge their corruption; the very muck-hill on which the sublunary orbs cast their excrements: man is the slime of this dung-pit, and princes are the governors of these men; for, for our souls, they are as free as emperors, all of one piece; there[524] goes but a pair of shears betwixt an emperor and the son of a bagpiper; only the dying, dressing, pressing, glossing, makes the difference. Now, what art thou like to lose? 151
A gaoler’s office to keep men in bonds,
Whilst toil and treason all life’s good confounds.
Pietro. I here renounce for ever regency:
O Altofront, I wrong thee to supplant thy right,
To trip thy heels up with a devilish sleight!
For which I now from throne am thrown: world-tricks abjure;
For vengeance though’t[525] comes slow, yet it comes sure.
O, I am chang’d! for here, ’fore the dread power,
In true contrition, I do dedicate 160
My breath to solitary holiness,
My lips to prayer, and my breast’s care shall be,
Restoring Altofront to regency.
Mal. Thy vows are heard, and we accept thy faith.
[Undisguiseth himself.
Re-enter Ferneze and Celso.