CORIN.
Besides, our hands are hard.
TOUCHSTONE.
Your lips will feel them the sooner. Shallow again. A more sounder instance, come.
CORIN.
And they are often tarred over with the surgery of our sheep; and would you have us kiss tar? The courtier’s hands are perfumed with civet.
TOUCHSTONE.
Most shallow man! Thou worm’s meat in respect of a good piece of flesh indeed! Learn of the wise and perpend. Civet is of a baser birth than tar, the very uncleanly flux of a cat. Mend the instance, shepherd.
CORIN.
You have too courtly a wit for me. I’ll rest.
TOUCHSTONE.
Wilt thou rest damned? God help thee, shallow man! God make incision in thee, thou art raw.
CORIN.
Sir, I am a true labourer. I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.
TOUCHSTONE.
That is another simple sin in you, to bring the ewes and the rams together and to offer to get your living by the copulation of cattle; to be bawd to a bell-wether and to betray a she-lamb of a twelvemonth to crooked-pated, old, cuckoldly ram, out of all reasonable match. If thou be’st not damned for this, the devil himself will have no shepherds. I cannot see else how thou shouldst ’scape.
Enter Rosalind as Ganymede.
CORIN.
Here comes young Master Ganymede, my new mistress’s brother.