Miles. Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum habitare libros in unum! (See how good and how pleasant it is to dwell among books together!)
Bacon. Now, masters of our academic state
That rule in Oxford, viceroys in your place,
Whose heads contain maps of the liberal arts,
Spending your time in depths of learnèd skill,
Why flock you thus to Bacon’s secret cell,
A friar newly stalled in Brazen-nose?
Say what’s your mind, that I may make reply.
Burden. Bacon, we hear that long we have suspect,
That thou art read in Magic’s mystery:
In pyromancy,[7] to divine by flames;
To tell by hydromancy, ebbs and tides;
By aeromancy to discover doubts,—
To plain out questions, as Apollo did.
Bacon. Well, Master Burden, what of all this?
Miles. Marry, sir, he doth but fulfil, by rehearsing of these names, the fable of the ‘Fox and the Grapes’: that which is above us pertains nothing to us.
Burd. I tell thee, Bacon, Oxford makes report,
Nay, England, and the Court of Henry says
Thou’rt making of a Brazen Head by art,
Which shall unfold strange doubts and aphorisms,
And read a lecture in philosophy:
And, by the help of devils and ghastly fiends,
Thou mean’st, ere many years or days be past,
To compass England with a wall of brass.
Bacon. And what of this?
Miles. What of this, master! why, he doth speak mystically; for he knows, if your skill fail to make a Brazen Head, yet Master Waters’ strong ale will fit his time to make him have a copper nose....
Bacon. Seeing you come as friends unto the friar,
Resolve you, doctors, Bacon can by books
Make storming Boreas thunder from his cave,
And dim fair Luna to a dark eclipse.
The great arch-ruler, potentate of hell,
Tumbles when Bacon bids him, or his fiends
Bow to the force of his pentageron.[8] ...
I have contrived and framed a head of brass
(I made Belcephon hammer out the stuff),
And that by art shall read philosophy:
And I will strengthen England by my skill,
That if ten Cæsars lived and reigned in Rome,
With all the legions Europe doth contain,
They should not touch a grass of English ground:
The work that Ninus reared at Babylon,
The brazen walls framed by Semiramis,
Carved out like to the portal of the sun,
Shall not be such as rings the English strand
From Dover to the market-place of Rye.
In this patriotic resolution of the potent friar the reader will trace the influence of the national enthusiasm awakened, only a few years before Greene’s comedy was written and produced, by the menace of the Spanish Armada.