HELENA. I humbly thank you. Please it this matron and this gentle maid To eat with us tonight; the charge and thanking Shall be for me; and, to requite you further, I will bestow some precepts of this virgin, Worthy the note. BOTH. We’ll take your offer kindly. [_Exeunt._] SCENE VI. Camp before Florence. Enter Bertram and the two French Lords. FIRST LORD. Nay, good my lord, put him to’t; let him have his way. SECOND LORD. If your lordship find him not a hilding, hold me no more in your respect. FIRST LORD. On my life, my lord, a bubble. BERTRAM. Do you think I am so far deceived in him? FIRST LORD. Believe it, my lord, in mine own direct knowledge, without any malice, but to speak of him as my kinsman, he’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy your lordship’s entertainment. SECOND LORD. It were fit you knew him; lest, reposing too far in his virtue, which he hath not, he might at some great and trusty business, in a main danger fail you. BERTRAM. I would I knew in what particular action to try him. SECOND LORD. None better than to let him fetch off his drum, which you hear him so confidently undertake to do. FIRST LORD. I with a troop of Florentines will suddenly surprise him; such I will have whom I am sure he knows not from the enemy; we will bind and hoodwink him so that he shall suppose no other but that he is carried into the leaguer of the adversaries when we bring him to our own tents. Be but your lordship present at his examination; if he do not for the promise of his life, and in the highest compulsion of base fear, offer to betray you, and deliver all the intelligence in his power against you, and that with the divine forfeit of his soul upon oath, never trust my judgment in anything. SECOND LORD. O, for the love of laughter, let him fetch his drum; he says he has a stratagem for’t. When your lordship sees the bottom of his success in’t, and to what metal this counterfeit lump of ore will be melted, if you give him not John Drum’s entertainment, your inclining cannot be removed. Here he comes. Enter Parolles. FIRST LORD. O, for the love of laughter, hinder not the honour of his design: let him fetch off his drum in any hand. BERTRAM. How now, monsieur! This drum sticks sorely in your disposition. SECOND LORD. A pox on ’t; let it go; ’tis but a drum. PAROLLES. But a drum! Is’t but a drum? A drum so lost! There was excellent command, to charge in with our horse upon our own wings, and to rend our own soldiers. SECOND LORD. That was not to be blam’d in the command of the service; it was a disaster of war that Caesar himself could not have prevented, if he had been there to command. BERTRAM. Well, we cannot greatly condemn our success: some dishonour we had in the loss of that drum, but it is not to be recovered. PAROLLES. It might have been recovered. BERTRAM. It might, but it is not now.