Bid. How live you? 29
Slip. Miserably, complaining to your crack-ship: though we have light mistresses, we are made the children and servants of darkness. What profane use we are put to, all these gallants more feelingly know than we can lively express; it is to be commiserated, and by your royal insight only to be prevented, that a male monkey and the diminutive of a man should be synonima, and no sense. Though we are the dross of your subjects, yet being a kind of page, let us find your celsitude kind and respective
of our time-fortunes and birth’s abuse: and so, in the name of our whole tribe of empty basket-bearers, I kiss your little hands. 41
Bid. Your case is dangerous, and almost desperate. Stand forth, ordinary gallant’s page: what is the nature of your master?
No. He eats well and right slovenly; and when the dice favour him, goes in good clothes, and scours his pink colour silk stockings; when he hath any money, he bears his crowns; when he hath none, I carry his purse. He cheats well, swears better, but swaggers in a wanton’s chamber admirably; he loves his boy and the rump of a cramm’d capon; and this summer hath a passing thrifty humour to bottle ale; as contemptuous as Lucifer, as arrogant as ignorance can make him, as libidinous as Priapus. He keeps me as his adamant, to draw metal after to his lodging: I curl his perriwig, paint his cheeks, perfume his breath; I am his froterer[501] or rubber in a hot-house, the prop of his lies, the bearer of his false dice; and yet for all this, like the Persian louse, that eats biting, and biting eats, so I say sighing,[502] and sighing say, my end is to paste up a si quis.[503] My master’s fortunes are forced to cashier me, and so six to one I fall to be a pippin-squire. Hic finis Priami!—this is the end of pickpockets. 63
Bid. Stand forth, court-page: thou lookest pale and wan.
Trip. Most ridiculous Emperor.
Bid. O, say no more. I know thy miseries;—what betwixt thy lady, her gentlewoman, and thy master’s late gaming, thou mayest look pale. I know thy miseries, and I condole thy calamities. Thou art born well, bred ill, but diest worst of all: thy blood most commonly gentle, thy youth ordinarily idle, and thy age too often miserable. When thy first suit is fresh, thy cheeks clear of court-soils, and thy lord fall’n out with his lady, so long may be he’ll chuck thee under the chin, call thee good pretty ape, and give thee a scrap from his own trencher; but after, he never beholds thee but when thou squirest him with a torch to a wanton’s sheets, or lights his tobacco-pipe; never useth thee but as his pander; never regardeth thee but as an idle burr that stick’st upon the nap of his fortune; and so, naked thou camest into the world, and naked thou must return.—Whom serve you? 81
Hol. A fool!
Bid. Thou art my happiest subject: the service of a fool is the only blessed’st slavery that ever put on a chain and a blue coat; they know not what nor for what they give, but so they give ’tis good, so it be good they give; fortunes are ordain’d for fools, as fools are for fortune, to play withal, not to use: hath he taken an oath of allegiance—is he of our brotherhood yet?