He, somewhat nettled, declares that she reads no books but of one sort, and doats on Sir Bevis and Owlglass, or Fashion's Mirror, and such like idle stuff, wherein he himself had never found so much as one word of profitable use or reasonable entertainment.
"I have read a fable," she said, "which speaks of a pasture in which oxen find fodder, hounds, hares, storks, lizards, and some animals nothing."
"To deliver you my opinion," said a lady who sat next to Polly's disputant, "I have no great esteem for letters in gentlewomen. The greatest readers be oft the worst doers."
"Letters!" cries Polly; "why, surely they be the most weighty things in creation; for so much as the difference of one letter mistaken in the order in which it should stand in a short sentence doth alter the expression of a man's resolve in a matter of life and death."
"How prove you that, madam?" quoth the lady.
"By the same token," answered Polly, "that I once did hear a gentleman say, 'I must go die a beggar,' who willed to say, 'I must go buy a dagger.'"
They all did laugh, and then some one said, "There was a witty book of emblems made on all the cardinals at Rome, in which these scarlet princes were very roughly handled. Bellarmine, for instance, as a tiger fast chained to a post, and a scroll proceeding from the beast's mouth—'Give me my liberty; you shall see what I am.' I wish," quoth the speaker, "he were let loose in this island. The queen's judges would soon constrain him to eat his words."
"Peradventure," answered Polly, "his own words should be too good food for a recusant in her majesty's prisons."
"Maybe, madam, you have tasted of that food," quoth the aforesaid lady, "that you be so well acquainted with its qualities."
Then I perceived that Mistress Ward did nudge Polly for to stay her from carrying on a further encounter of words on this subject; for, as she did remind us afterward, many persons had been thrown into prison for only so much as a word lightly spoken in conversation which should be supposed even in a remote manner to infer a favorable opinion of Catholic religion; as, for instance, a bookseller in Oxford, for a jest touching the queen's supremacy in ecclesiastical matters, had been a short time before arrested, pilloried, whipped, and his ears nailed to a counter, which with a knife he had himself to cut through to free himself; which maybe had not been taken much notice of, as nothing singular in these days, the man being a Catholic and of no great note, but that much talk had [{604}] been ministered concerning a terrible disease which broke out immediately after the passing of that sentence, by which the judge which had pronounced it, the jury, and many other persons concerned in it, had died raving mad; to the no small affright of the whole city. I ween, howsoever, no nudging should have stopped Polly from talking, which indeed was a passion with her, but that a burst of music at that time did announce the queen's approach, and we did all stand up on the tiptoe of expectation to see her majesty enter.