Your protestant is a hypocritical ass!" "Profligate! You blaspheme!" Up started Bame, A little unsteady now upon his feet, And shaking his crumpled pamphlet over his head! "Nay--if your pie be done, you shall partake A second course. Be seated, sir, I pray. We atheists will pay the reckoning! I had forgotten that a Puritan Will swallow Moses like a red-deer pie Yet choke at a wax-candle! Let me read Your pamphlet. What, 'tis half addressed to me! Ogs-gogs! Ben! Hark to this--the Testament Of poor Rob Greene would cut Will Shakespeare off With less than his own Groatsworth! Hark to this!" And there, unseen by them, a quiet figure Entered the room and beckoning me for wine Seated himself to listen, Will himself, While Marlowe read aloud with knitted brows. "'_Trust them not; for there is an upstart crow Beautified with our feathers!_' --O, he bids All green eyes open:--'_And, being an absolute Johannes fac-totum is in his own conceit The only Shake-scene in a country!_'" "Feathers!" Exploded Ben. "Why, come to that, he pouched Your eagle's feather of blank verse, and lit His Friar Bacon's little magic lamp At the Promethean fire of Faustus. Jove, It was a faery buck, indeed, that Will Poached in that greenwood." "Ben, see that you walk Like Adam, naked! Nay, in nakedness Adam was first. Trust me, you'll not escape This calumny! Vergil is damned--he wears A hen-coop round his waist, nicked in the night From Homer! Plato is branded for a thief, Why, he wrote Greek! And old Prometheus, too, Who stole his fire from heaven!" "Who printed it?" "Chettle! I know not why, unless he too Be one of those same dwarfs that find the world Too narrow for their jealousies. Ben, Ben, I tell thee 'tis the dwarfs that find no world Wide enough for their jostling, while the giants, The gods themselves, can in one tavern find Room wide enough to swallow the wide heaven With all its crowded solitary stars."