With forcèd willingness; taking great joy,
If you will deign his faculties employ
But in the mean’st ingenious quality.
(How proud he’ll be of any dignity!)
Put it to music, dancing, fencing-school,
Lord, how I laugh to hear the pretty fool,
How it will prate! His tongue shall never lie,
But still discourse of his spruce quality, 230
Egging his master to proceed from this,
And get the substance of celestial bliss.
His lord straight calls his parliament of sense;
But still the sensual have pre-eminence.
The poor soul’s better part so feeble is,
So cold and dead is his Synderesis,
“That shadows, by odd chance, sometimes are got;
But O the substance is respected not!”
Here ends my rage. Though angry brow was bent,
Yet I have sung in sporting merriment. 240
[584] i.e. “Melancholy, get you to hell!”
[585] Seemingly a term for some sliding dance-movement.
[586] “Intellectual ... mincing capreal.”—These words are ridiculed by Ben Jonson in Every Man out of his Humour, iii. 1. See Introduction, vol. i.
[587] Sir John Davies’ excellent poem.
[588] “A hall, a hall!”—The cry raised when an open space was wanted for the dancers.
[589] There is no allusion to Will Kempe’s famous dance from London to Norwich, as that feat was performed in 1600. Kempe’s jig was the name of a popular dance; and there was a ballad that bore the same title.
[590] So in the Induction to the Malcontent:—“I am one that hath seen this play often: I have most of the jests here in my table-book.”—Dekker, in the Gull’s-Horn Book, advises a gallant to “hoard up the finest play-scraps you can get, upon which your lean wit may most savourly feed for want of other stuff, when the Arcadian and Euphuized gentlewomen have their tongues sharpened to set upon you!”
[591] The italicised words are technical terms in fencing. I cannot find the term finctures, but it doubtless has the meaning feints(otherwise called falses).
[592] The reference is to Vincentio Saviolo, a famous Italian master of fence, author of Vincentio Saviolo his Practise in two Bookes. The first intreating of the use of the Rapier and Dagger. The Second of Honor and Honorable Quarrels, 1595, 4to.