Sir Oliver.—Then, sir, they are gentlemen. And the commission you bear from the parliamentary thieves, to sack and pillage my mansion-house, is far less vexatious and insulting to me, than your behaviour in keeping them so long at my stable-door. With your permission, or without it, I shall take the liberty to invite them to partake of my poor hospitality.
Oliver.—But, uncle Sir Oliver! there are rules and ordinances whereby it must be manifested that they lie under displeasure—not mine—not mine—but my milk must not flow for them.
Sir Oliver.—You may enter the house or remain where you are at your option; I make my visit to these gentlemen immediately, for I am tired of standing. If thou ever reachest my age,[14] Oliver! (but God will not surely let this be,) thou wilt know that the legs become at last of doubtful fidelity in the service of the body.
Oliver.—Uncle Sir Oliver! now that, as it seemeth, you have been taking a survey of the courtyard and its contents, am I indiscreet in asking your worship whether I acted not prudently in keeping the men-at-belly under the custody of the men-at-arms? This pestilence, like unto one I remember to have read about in some poetry of Master Chapman's,[15] began with the dogs and the mules, and afterwards crope up into the breasts of men.
Sir Oliver.—I call such treatment barbarous; their troopers will not let the gentlemen come with me into the house, but insist on sitting down to dinner with them. And yet, having brought them out of their colleges, these brutal half-soldiers must know that they are fellows.
Oliver.—Yea, of a truth are they, and fellows well met. Out of their superfluities they give nothing to the Lord or his Saints; no, not even stirrup or girth, wherewith we may mount our horses and go forth against those who thirst for our blood. Their eyes are fat, and they raise not up their voices to cry for our deliverance.
Sir Oliver.—Art mad? What stirrups and girths are hung up in college halls and libraries? For what are these gentlemen brought hither?
Oliver.—They have elected me, with somewhat short of unanimity, not indeed to be one of themselves, for of that distinction I acknowledge and deplore my unworthiness, nor indeed to be a poor scholar, to which, unless it be a very poor one, I have almost as small pretension, but simply to undertake awhile the heavier office of burser for them, to cast up their accounts; to overlook the scouring of their plate; and to lay a list thereof, with a few specimens, before those who fight the fight of the Lord, that his Saints, seeing the abasement of the proud and the chastisement of worldlymindedness, may rejoice.
Sir Oliver.—I am grown accustomed to such saints and such rejoicings. But, little could I have thought, threescore years ago, that the hearty and jovial people of England would ever join in so filching and stabbing a jocularity. Even the petticoated torch-bearers from rotten Rome, who lighted the faggots in Smithfield some years before, if more blustering and cocksy, were less bitter and vulturine. They were all intolerant, but they were not all hypocritical; they had not always "the Lord" in their mouths.
Oliver.—According to their own notions, they might have had at an outlay of a farthing.