Clar. I attend you, sir.
Tha.[179] You’ll be constant? 450
[Exeunt all but Claridiana.
Clar. Above the adamant; the goat’s blood[180] shall not break me.
Yet shallow fools and plainer moral men,
That understand not what they undertake,
Fall in their own snares or come short of vengeance.
No; let the sun view with an open face,
And afterward shrink in his blushing cheeks,
Ashamed and cursing of the fix’d decree,
That makes his light bawd to the crimes of men.
When I have ended what I now devise,
Apollo’s oracle shall swear me wise. 460
Strumpet his wife! branch my false-seeming friend!
And make him foster what my hate begot,
A bastard, that, when age and sickness seize him,
Shall be a corsive[181] to his griping heart.
I’ll write to her; for what her modesty
Will not permit, nor my adulterate forcing,
That blushless herald shall not fear to tell.
Rogero shall know yet that his foe’s a man,
And, what is more, a true Italian!
[Exit.
[127] “What should we make here?” = What business have we here? See Middleton, i. 202.
[128] So ed. 1613.—Ed. 1631 “as.”
[129] Cf. Hamlet, i. 2:—
“Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,” &c.
[130] Cf. Hamlet, iii. 1:—
“The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns.”
[131] “Wall-ey’d”—having eyes in which the proportion of white is too large; fierce-eyed. “Œil de chevre. A whall, or over-white eye; an eye full of white spots, or whose apple seems divided by a streake of white.”—Cotgrave.