The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (20 page)

SUMMER
: Vertumnus, will Sol come before us?

VERTUMNIUS
: Sol, sol, ut, re, me, fa, sol,

Come to church while the bell toll.

[
Enter Sol, very richly attired, with a noise of musicians before him
.]

SUMMER
: Ay, marry, here comes majesty in pomp,
Resplendent Sol, chief planet of the heavens.
He is our servant, looks he ne'er so big.

SOL
: My liege, what crav'st thou at thy vassal's hands?

SUMMER
: Hypocrisy, how it can change his shape!
How base is pride from his own dunghill put!
How I have rais'd thee, Sol, I list
⁶¹
not tell,
Out of the ocean of adversity,
To sit in height of honour's glorious heaven,
To be the eye-sore of aspiring eyes;
To give the day her life from thy bright looks,
And let nought thrive upon the face of earth,
From which thou shalt withdraw thy powerful smiles.
What hast thou done deserving such high grace?
What industry, or meritorious toil,
Canst thou produce to prove my gift well-plac'd?
Some service or some profit I expect:
None is promoted but for some respect.

SOL
: My lord, what needs these terms betwixt us two?
Upbraiding ill beseems your bounteous mind:
I do you honour for advancing me.
Why, ‘tis credit for your excellence,
To have so great a subject as I am.
This is your glory and magnificence,
That, without stooping of your mightiness,
Or taking any whit from your high state,
You can make one as mighty as yourself.

AUTUMN
: Oh arrogance exceeding all belief!
Summer my lord, this saucy upstart Jack,
That now doth rule the chariot of the sun,
And makes all stars derive their light from him,
Is a most base insinuating slave,
The son of parsimony and disdain,
One that will shine on friends and foes alike,
That under brightest smiles hideth black showers,
Whose envious breath doth dry up springs and lakes,
And burns the grass, that beasts can get no food.

WINTER
: No dunghill hath so vild an excrement,
But with his beams he will forthwith exhale.
The fens and quagmires tithe to him their filth;
Forth purest mines he sucks a gainful dross;
Green ivy-bushes
⁶²
at the vintner's doors
He withers, and devoureth all their sap.

AUTUMN
: Lascivious and intemperate he is.
The wrong of Daphne
⁶³
is a well-known tale
Each evening he descends to Thetis' lap,
⁶⁴
The while men think he bathes him in the sea.
Oh, but when he returneth whence he came
Down to the west, then dawns his deity
Then doubled is the swelling of his looks.
He overloads his car with orient gems,
And reigns his fiery horses with rich pearl;
He terms himself the god of poetry,
And setteth wanton songs unto the lute.

WINTER
: Let him not talk, for he hath words at will,
And wit to make the baddest matter good.

SUMMER
: Bad words, bad wit; oh, where dwells faith or truth?
Ill usury my favours reap from thee,
Usurping Sol, the hate of heaven and earth.

SOL
: If Envy unconfuted may accuse,
Then Innocence must uncondemned die.
The name of martyrdom offence hath gained,
When Fury stopp'd a froward judge's ears.
Much I'll not say (much speech much folly shows),
What I have done, you gave me leave to do.
The excrements you bred, whereon I feed;
To rid the earth of their contagious fumes,
With such gross carriage did I load my beams;
I burnt no grass, I dried no springs and lakes,
I suck'd no mines, I wither'd no green boughs,
But when, to ripen harvest, I was forc'd
To make my rays more fervent than I wont,
For Daphne's wrongs, and scapes in Thetis' lap,
All gods are subject to the like mishap.
Stars daily fall (‘tis use is all in all)
And men account the fall but nature's course.
Vaunting my jewels, hasting to the west,
Or rising early from the grey-ey'd morn,
What do I vaunt but your large bountihood,
And show how liberal a lord I 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 heard
of 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, till his hair was somewhat grown, and then willed him to go to Aristagoras into the country and bid him shave him, as he had done, and he should have perfect remedy. He did so. Aristagoras shaved him with his own hands, read his friend's letter, and when he had done, washed it out, that no man should perceive it else, and sent him home to buy him a night-cap. If I wist there were any such knavery, or Peter Bales'
Brachy-graphy
,
⁷⁰
under Sol's bushy hair, I would have a barber, my host of The Murrion's Head',
⁷¹
to be his interpreter, who would whet his razor on his Richmond cap,
⁷²
and give him the terrible cut,
⁷³
like himself, but he would come as near as a quart pot to the construction of it. To be sententious, not superfluous, Sol should have been beholding to the barber, and not the beard-master. Is it pride that is shadowed under this two-legged sun, that never came nearer heaven than Dubber's Hill?
⁷⁴
That pride is not my sin, Sloven's Hall where I was born be my record. As for covetousness, intemperance and exaction, I meet with nothing in a whole year but a cup of wine, for such vices to be conversant in.
Pergite porro
,
⁷⁵
my good children, and multiply the sins of your
absurdities, till you come to the full measure of the grand hiss, and you shall hear how we will purge rheum with censuring your imperfections.

SUMMER
: Vertumnus, call Orion.

VERTUMNUS
: Orion, Urion, Arion!
My lord thou must look upon.
Orion, gentleman dog-keeper, huntsman, come into the court! Look you bring all hounds, and no bandogs.
⁷⁶
Peace there, that we may hear their horns blow!

[
Enter Orion like a hunter, with a horn about his neck, alt his men after the same sort hallooing and blowing then horns
.]

ORION
: Sirrah, was't thou that call'd us from our game?
How durst thou (being but a petty god)
Disturb me in the entrance of my sports?

SUMMER
: ‘Twas I, Orion, caus'd thee to be call'd.

ORION
: ‘Tis I, dread Lord, that humbly will obey.

SUMMER
: How haps't thou leftst the heavens, to hunt below?
As I remember, thou wert Hireus'
⁷⁷
son,
Whom of a huntsman Jove chose for a star,
And thou art call'd the dog-star, art thou not?

AUTUMN
: Pleaseth your honour, heaven's circumference
Is not enough for him to hunt and range,
But with those venom-breathed curs he leads,
He comes to chase health from our earthly bounds.
Each one of those foul-mouthed mangy dogs
Governs a day (no dog but hath his day),
And all the days by them so governed,
The dog-days hight
⁷⁸
Infectious fosterers
Of meteors
⁷⁹
from carrion that arise,
And putrefied bodies of dead men,
Are they engender'd to that ugly shape,
Being nought else but preserv'd corruption.
‘Tis these that, in the entrance of their reign,
The plague and dangerous agues have brought in.
They arre
⁸⁰
and bark at night against the moon,
For fetching in fresh rides to cleanse the streets.
They vomit flames, and blast the ripen'd fruits:
They are Death's messengers unto all those
That sicken while their malice beareth sway.

ORION
: A tedious discourse, built on no ground;
A silly fancy, Autumn, hast thou told,
Which no philosophy doth warrantize,
No old received poetry confirms.
I will not grace thee by confuting thee;
Yet in a jest (since thou railest so gainst dogs)
I'll speak a word or two in their defence.
⁸¹
That creature's best that comes most near to men:
That dogs of all come nearest, thus I prove.
First, they excel us in all outward sense,
Which no one of experience will deny;
They hear, they smell, they see better than we.
To come to speech, they have it questionless,
Although we understand them not so well.
They bark as good old Saxon as may be,
And that in more variety than we;
For they have one voice when they are in chase,
Another, when they wrangle for their meat,
Another, when we beat them out of doors.
That they have reason, this I will allege:
They choose those things that are most fit for them,
And shun the contrary all that they may;
They know what is for their own diet best,
And seek about for't very carefully;
At sight of any whip they run away,
As runs a thief from noise of hue and cry;
Nor live they on the sweat of others' brows,
But have their trades to get their living with,
Hunting and coney-catching, two fine arts.
Yea, there be of them, as there be of men,
Of every occupation more or less:
Some carriers, and they fetch; some watermen,
And they will dive and swim when you bid them;
Some butchers, and they do worry sheep by night;
Some cooks, and they do nothing but turn spits.
Chrysippus holds dogs are logicians,
In that, by study and by canvassing,
They can distinguish twixt three several things:
As when he cometh where three broad ways meet,
And of those three hath stay'd at two of them,
By which he guesseth that the game went not,
Without more pause he runneth on the third;
Which, as Chrysippus saith, insinuates
As if he reason'd thus within himself:
‘Either he went this, that, or yonder way,
But neither that, nor yonder, therefore this.'
But whether they logicians be or no,
Cynics they are, for they will snarl and bite;
Right courtiers to flatter and to fawn;
Valiant to set upon the enemies,
Most faithful and constant to their friends;
Nay, they are wise, as Homer witnesseth,
Who, talking of Ulysses coming home,
Saith all his household but Argus, his dog,
Had quite forgot him. Ay, and his deep insight
Nor Pallas' art
⁸²
in altering of his shape,
Nor his base weeds, nor absence twenty years,
Could go beyond, or any way delude.
That dogs physicians are, thus I infer:
They are ne'er sick, but they know their disease,
And find out means to ease them of their grief;
Special good surgeons to cure dangerous wounds,
For, strucken with a stake into the flesh,
This policy they use to get it out:
They trail one of their feet upon the ground,
And gnaw the flesh about, where the wound is,
Till it be clean drawn out; and then, because
Ulcers and sores kept foul are hardly cur'd,
They lick and purify it with their tongue,
And well observe Hippocrates' old rule;
The only medicine for the foot is rest,'
For if they have the least hurt in their feet,
They bear them up and look they be not stirr'd
When humours rise, they eat a sovereign
⁸³
herb,
Whereby what cloys their stomachs they cast up,
And, as some writers of experience tell,
They were the first invented vomiting.
Sham'st thou not, Autumn, unadvisedly
To slander such rare creatures as they be?