Free The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works by Thomas Nashe

serve?
Music and poetry, my two last crimes,
Are those two exercises of delight,
Wherewith long labours I do weary out.
The dying swan is not forbid to sing.
The waves of Heber play’d on Orpheus’ 65 strings,
When he, sweet music’s trophy, was destroy’d.
And as for poetry, words’ eloquence,
(Dead Phaeton’s three sisters’ 66 funeral tears,
That by the gods were to electrum 67 turn’d),
Not flint, or rocks of icy cinders framed,
Deny the source of silver-falling streams.
Envy envieth not outcry’s unrest:
In vain I plead; well is to me a fault,
And these my words seem the slight web of art,
And not to have the taste of sounder truth.
Let none but fools be car’d for of the wise;
Knowledge’s own children knowledge most despise.
    SUMMER : Thou know’st too much to know to keep the mean
He that sees all things oft sees not himself.
The Thames is witness of thy tyranny,
Whose waves thou hast exhaust for winter showers.
The naked channel plains her of thy spite,
That laid’st her entrails unto open sight.
Unprofitably born to man and beast,
Which like to Nilus yet doth hide his head,
Some few years since thou let’st o’erflow these walks,
And in the horse-race headlong ran at race,
While in a cloud thou hid’st thy burning face.
Where was thy care to rid contagious filth,
When some men wetshod; with his waters, droop’d?
Others that ate the eels his heat cast up
Sicken’d and died, by them empoisoned.
Sleep’st thou, or keep’st thou then Admetus’ sheep, 68
Thou driv’st not back these Sowings to the deep?
    SOL : The winds, not I, have floods and tides in chase.
Diana, whom our fables call the moon,
Only commandeth o’er the raging main.
She leads his wallowing offspring up and down;
She waning, all streams ebb; as in the year
She was edips’d, when that the Thames was bare.
    SUMMER : A bare conjecture, builded on perhaps!
In laying thus the blame upon the moon,
Thou imitat’st subtle Pythagoras,
Who, what he would the people should believe,
The same he wrote with blood upon a glass,
And turn’d it opposite gainst the new moon;
Whose beams, reflecting on it with full force,
Show’d all those lines, to them that stood behind,
Most plainly writ in circle of the moon.
And then he said: ‘Not I, but the new moon,
Fair Cynthia, persuades you this and that’
With like collusion shalt thou not blind me;
But for abusing both the moon and me,
Long shalt thou be eclipsed by the moon,
And long in darkness live, and see no light
Away with him, his doom hath no reverse.
    SOL : What is eclips’d will one day shine again.
Though Winter frowns, the Spring will ease my pain.
Time from the brow doth wipe out every stain. [
Exit Sol
.]
    WILL SUMMERS : I think the sun is not so long in passing through the twelve signs, as the son of a fool hath been disputing here about ‘had I wist’. Out of doubt, the poet is bribed of some that have a mess of cream to eat before my lord go to bed yet, to hold him half the night with riff-raff of the rumming of Eleanor. 69 If I can tell what it means, pray God I may never get breakfast more when I am hungry. Troth, I am of opinion he is one of those hieroglyphical writers that by the figures of beasts, planets, and of stones, express the mind as we do in A.B.C.; or one that writes under hair, as I have heardof a certain notary Histiaeus, who, following Darius in the Persian wars and desirous to disclose some secrets of import to his friend Aristagoras, that dwelt afar off, found out this means. He had a servant that had been long sick of a pain in his eyes, whom, under pretence of curing his malady, he shaved from one side of his head to the other, and with a soft pencil wrote upon his scalp, as on parchment, the discourse of his business, the fellow all the while imagining his master had done nothing but noint his head with a feather. After this, he kept him secretly in his tent,