QUAR. Hoy-day! how respective you are become o' the sudden? I fear
this family will turn you reformed too; pray you come about again.
Because she is in possibility to be your daughter-in-law, and may ask
you blessing hereafter, when she courts it to Totenham to eat cream!
Well, I will forbear, sir; but i'faith, would thou wouldst leave thy
exercise of widow-hunting once; this drawing after an old reverend
smock by the splay-foot! There cannot be an ancient tripe or trillibub
in the town, but thou art straight nosing it, and 'tis a fine
occupation thou'lt confine thyself to, when thou hast got one;
scrubbing a piece of buff, as if thou hadst the perpetuity of
Pannier-ally to stink in; or perhaps worse, currying a carcass that
thou hast bound thyself to alive. I'll be sworn, some of them that
thou art, or hast been suitor to, are so old, as no chaste or married
pleasure can ever become them; the honest instrument of procreation
has forty years since left to belong to them; thou must visit them as
thou wouldst do a tomb, with a torch or three handfuls of link,
flaming hot, and so thou may'st hap to make them feel thee and after
come to inherit according to thy inches. A sweet course for a man to
waste the brand of life for, to be still raking himself a fortune in
an old woman's embers! We shall have thee, after thou hast been but a
month married to one of them, look like the quartan ague and the black
jaundice met in a face, and walk as if thou hadst borrow'd legs of a
spinner, and voice of a cricket. I would endure to hear fifteen
sermons a week for her, and such coarse and loud ones, as some of them
must be! I would e'en desire of fate, I might dwell in a drum, and
take in my sustenance with an old broken tobacco-pipe and a straw.
Dost thou ever think to bring thine ears or stomach to the patience of
a dry grace as long as thy table-cloth; and droned out by thy son here
(that might be thy father) till all the meat on thy board has forgot
it was that day in the kitchen? or to brook the noise made in a
question of predestination, by the good labourers and painful eaters
assembled together, put to them by the matron your spouse; who
moderates with a cup of wine, ever and anon, and a sentence out of
Knox between? Or the perpetual spitting before and after a sober-drawn
exhortation of six hours, whose better part was the hum-ha-hum? or to
hear prayers, groaned out over thy iron chests, as if they were charms
to break them? And all this for the hope of two apostle-spoons, to
suffer! and a cup to eat a caudle in! for that will be thy legacy.
She'll have convey'd her state safe enough from thee, an she be a
right widow.
WINW. Alas, I am quite off that scent now.
QUAR. How so?
WINW. Put off by a brother of Banbury, one that, they say, is come
here, and governs all already.
QUAR. What do you call him? I knew divers of those Banburians when I
was in Oxford.
WINW. Master Littlewit can tell us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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