Go. Let me beseech you, no, sir; the superfluity and cold meat left at their nuptials will with bounty furnish ours. The grossest prodigality is superfluous cost of the belly; nor would I wish any invitement of states or friends, only your reverent[38] presence and witness shall sufficiently grace and confirm us. 169
To. Son to my own bosom, take her and my blessing. The nice fondling, my lady, sir-reverence, that I must not now presume to call daughter, is so ravished with desire to hansell her new coach, and see her knight’s Eastward Castle, that the next morning will sweat with her busy setting forth. Away will she and her mother, and while their preparation is making, ourselves, with some two or three other friends, will consummate the humble match we have in God’s name concluded. ’Tis to my wish, for I have often read,
Fit birth, fit age, keeps long a quiet bed. 180
’Tis to my wish; for tradesmen, well ’tis known,
Get with more ease than gentry keeps his own.
[Exeunt.
[31] A hackneyed quotation from Tamburlaine.
[32] Old ed. “Am pum pull eo,” &c.
[33] A favourite quotation of Pistol’s (“Have we not Hiren here?”). It is supposed to come from Peele’s lost play The Turkish Mahomet and Hyren the Fair Greek.
[34] This line would seem to belong to the Spanish Tragedy, but it is not in the text that has come down. When Horatio is stabbed by the assassins, Bellimperia cries:—“Murder! murder! Help, Hieronimo, help!” She is forced off the stage, and then Hieronimo enters, exclaiming, “What outcries pluck me from my naked bed!” (a much-ridiculed line). But in a passage of Jonson’s Poetaster (iii. 1), where there is clearly an allusion to Jeronimo, we find the line (slightly altered) that Quicksilver quotes:—
“2d Pyr. Ay, but somebody must cry Murder! then in a small voice.
Tuc. Your fellow-sharer there shall do’t: cry, sirrah, cry!
1st Pyr. Murder, murder!
2d Pyr. Who calls out murder? lady, was it you?”
[35] “I.e., will make you go to Tyburn. So in Greene’s Second Part of the Art of Conny Catching, sig. 2:—‘And yet at last so long the pitcher goeth to the brooke that it cometh broken home: and so long the foists put their villainie in practice that Westward they goe, and there solemnly make a rehearsal sermon at tiborne.’ Again in the third part, sig. C, ‘the end of such (though they scape a while) will be sailing Westward in a carte to Tiborn.’”—Reed.
[36] “When this eternal substance of my soul
Did live imprison’d in my wanton flesh,
Each in their function serving other’s need,
I was a courtier in the Spanish court:
My name was Don Andrea.”
—Opening lines of the Spanish Tragedy.