CADOR. If bloody Mars do so extremely sway, That either son or sire must needs be slain, Give law the choice: let him die that deserves. Each impotent affection notes a want. No worse a vice than lenity in kings: Remiss indulgence soon undoes a realm. He teacheth how to sin that winks at sins, And bids offend that suffereth an offence. The only hope of leave increaseth crimes, And he that pardoneth one, embold’neth all To break the laws. Each patience fostereth wrong. But vice severely punish’d faints at foot, And creeps no further off than where it falls. One sour example will prevent more vice Than all the best persuasions in the world. Rough rigour looks out right, and still prevails: Smooth mildness looks too many ways to thrive. Wherefore, since Mordred’s crimes have wrong’d the laws In so extreme a sort, as is too strange, Let right and justice rule with rigour’s aid, And work his wrack at length, although too late; That damning laws, so damned by the laws, He may receive his deep deserved doom. So let it fare with all that dare the like: Let sword, let fire, let torments be their end. Severity upholds both realm and rule. ARTHUR. Ah too severe! far from a father’s mind. Compassion is as fit for kings as wrath. Laws must not low’r; rule oft admitteth ruth. So hate, as if there were yet cause to love: Take not their lives as foes which may be friends. To spoil my son were to despoil myself: Oft, whiles we seek our foes, we seek our foils. Let’s rather seek how to allure his mind With good deserts: deserts may win the worst. HOWELL. Where Cato first had saved a thief from death, And after was himself condemn’d to die, When else not one would execute the doom, Who but the thief did undertake the task? If too much bounty work so bad effects In thankless friends, what for a ruthless foe? Let laws have still their course: the ill-dispos’d Grudge at their lives to whom they owe too much. ARTHUR. But yet where men with reconciled minds Renew their love with recontinued grace, Atonement frames them friends of former foes, And makes the moods of swelling wrath to ’suage. No faster friendship than that grows from grief, When melting minds with mutual ruth relent. How close the severed skin unites again, When salves have smoothly heal’d the former hurts! CADOR. I never yet saw heart so smoothly heal’d, But that the scar bewray’d the former wound: Yea, where the salve did soonest close the skin, The sore was oft’ner covered up than cur’d: Which festering deep and fill’d within, at last With sudden breach grew greater than at first. What then for minds which have revenging moods, And ne’er forget the cross they forced bear? Whereto if reconcilement come, it makes The t’one secure, whiles t’other works his will. Atonement seld defeats, but oft defers Revenge: beware a reconciled foe.