STUDIOSO.
Who wishes death doth wrong wise destiny.
PHILOMUSUS.
It's wrong to force life-loathing men to breathe.
STUDIOSO.
It's sin 'fore doomed day to wish thy death.
PHILOMUSUS.
Too late our souls flit to their resting-place.
STUDIOSO.
Why, man's whole life is but a breathing space.
PHILOMUSUS.
A painful minute seems a tedious year.
STUDIOSO.
A constant mind eternal woes will bear.
PHILOMUSUS.
When shall our souls their wearied lodge forego?
STUDIOSO.
When we have tired misery and woe.
PHILOMUSUS. Soon may then fates this gaol[66]-deliver send us: Small woes vex long, [but] great woes quickly end us. But let's leave this capping of rhymes, Studioso, and follow our late device, that we may maintain our heads in caps, our bellies in provender, and our backs in saddle and bridle. Hitherto we have sought all the honest means we could to live, and now let us dare aliqua brevibus gyris[67] et carcere dignum; let us run through all the lewd forms of lime-twig, purloining villanies; let us prove coneycatchers, bawds, or anything, so we may rub out. And first my plot for playing the French doctor—that shall hold; our lodging stands here fitly[68] in Shoe Lane: for, if our comings-in be not the better, London may shortly throw an old shoe after us; and with those shreds of French that we gathered up in our host's house in Paris, we'll gull the world, that hath in estimation foreign physicians: and if any of the hidebound brethren of Cambridge and Oxford, or any of those stigmatic masters of art that abused us in times pass'd, leave their own physicians, and become our patients, we'll alter quite the style of them; for they shall never hereafter write, Your lordship's most bounden, but, Your lordship's most laxative.