[162]: Analogue aux pièces de Destouches.
[163]: Entendez la reine Élisabeth.
My light-feather-heel'd coz, what are you any more than my uncle Jove's pander? a lacquey that runs on errands for him and can whisper a light message to a loose wench, with some round volubility? one that sweeps the gods' drinking room every morning and set the cushions in order again, which they threw one at another's head over night?
(Cynthia's Revels, acte I, sc. i.)
See, see the mourning fount, whose springs
Th' untimely fate of that too beauteous boy weep yet,
That trophy of self-love, and spoil of nature,
Who, now transform'd into this drooping flower,
Hangs the repentant head, back from the stream....
Witness thy youth's dear sweets here spent untasted,
Like a fair taper with his own flame wasted!...
But with thy water let this curse remain,
As an inseparate plague, that who but taste
A drop thereof, may with the instant touch,
Grow dotingly enamour'd on themselves.
(Ibid.)
But knowing myself an essence too sublimated and refined by travel.... able to speak the mere extraction of language, one that was your first that ever enrich'd his country with the true laws of duello, whose optics have drunk the spirit of beauty in some eight score and eighteen prince's courts where I have resided, and been there fortunate in the amours of three hundred forty and five ladies, all nobly, if not princely descended.... In all so happy, as even admiration herself doth seem to fasten her kisses upon me.