he is cut on the table, drinketh and represents the motions and voices
of a living creature. Such like foolish beasts are we who, whilst we are
cut, mocked, and flouted at, in every man's common talk, will
notwithstanding proceed to shame ourselves to make sport. No man
pleaseth all: we seek to please one. Didymus wrote four thousand books,
or (as some say) six-thousand, on the art of grammar. Our author hopes
it may be as lawful for him to write a thousand lines of as light a
subject. Socrates (whom the oracle pronounced the wisest man of Greece)
sometimes danced: Scipio and Laslius, by the sea-side, played at
peeble-stone: _Semel insanivimus omnes_. Every man cannot with
Archimedes make a heaven of brass, or dig gold out of the iron mines of
the law. Such odd trifles as mathematicians' experiments be artificial
flies to hang in the air by themselves, dancing balls, an egg-shell that
shall climb up to the top of a spear, fiery-breathing gores, _poeta
noster_ professeth not to make. _Placeat sibi quinque licebit_. What's a
fool but his bauble? Deep-reaching wits, here is no deep stream for you
to angle in. Moralisers, you that wrest a never-meant meaning out of
everything, applying all things to the present time, keep your attention
for the common stage; for here are no quips in characters for you to
read. Vain glosers, gather what you will; spite, spell backward what
thou canst. As the Parthians fight flying away, so will we prate and
talk, but stand to nothing that we say.

How say you, my masters? do you not laugh at him for a coxcomb? Why, he
hath made a prologue longer than his play: nay, 'tis no play neither,
but a show. I'll be sworn the jig of Rowland's godson is a giant in
comparison of it. What can be made of Summer's last will and testament!
Such another thing as Gyllian of Brentford's[20] will, where she
bequeathed a score of farts amongst her friends. Forsooth, because the
plague reigns in most places in this latter end of summer,[21] Summer