Ben Legend. Well, father, and how do all at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val?
Sir Sampson. Dick, body o’ me, Dick has been dead these two years, I writ you word, when you were at Leghorn.
Ben. Mess, that’s true; marry, I had forgot. Dick’s dead, as you say.
Act 3. sc. 6.
Falstaff speaking of Ancient Pistol,
He’s no swaggerer, hostess; a tame cheater i’ faith; you may stroak him as gently as a puppey-greyhound; he will not swagger with a Barbary hen, if her feathers turn back in any shew of resistence.
Second Part Henry IV. act 2. sc. 9.
Some writers, through heat of imagination, fall into contradictions; some are guilty of downright inconsistencies; and some even rave like madmen. Against such capital errors one cannot be warned to better purpose than by collecting instances. The first shall be of a contradiction, the most venial of all. Virgil speaking of Neptune:
Interea magno misceri murmure pontum
Emissamque hyemem sensit Neptunus, et imis
Stagna refusa vadis: graviter commotus, et alto
Prospiciens, summâ placidum caput extulit undâ.
Æneid. i. 128.
Again,