CAMIOLA. With your leave, I must not kneel, sir, While I reply to this, but thus rise up In my defence, and tell you, as a man (Since, when you are unjust, the deity, Which you may challenge as a king, parts from you,) ’Twas never read in holy writ, or moral, That subjects on their loyalty, were obliged To love their sovereign’s vices; your grace, sir, To such an undeserver is no virtue.(72) There are also passages in _The Emperor of the East_ which seem to attack the Government of the day and its agents.(73) I will quote the chief of these as a specimen of honest indignation: PULCHERIA. How I abuse This precious time! Projector, I treat first Of you and your disciples; you roar out, All is the king’s, his will above his laws; And that fit tributes are too gentle yokes For his poor subjects; whispering in his ear, If he would have their fear, no man should dare To bring a salad from his country garden, Without the paying gabel; kill a hen, Without excise; and that if he desire To have his children or his servants wear Their heads upon their shoulders, you affirm In policy ’tis fit the owner should Pay for them by the poll(74); or, if the prince wants A present sum he may command a city Impossibilities, and for non-performance Compel it to submit to any fine His officers shall impose. Is this the way To make our emperor happy? Can the groans Of his subjects yield him music? Must his thoughts Be wash’d with widows’ and wrong’d orphans’ tears, Or his power grow contemptible?(75) The Englishman’s love of liberty inspires a vigorous speech delivered by the British slave in _The Virgin Martyr_.(76) Further, the impatience which Englishmen felt from time to time at the poor part played by their country in the Thirty Years’ War is reflected in _The Maid of Honour_. Bertoldo there gets leave from the King of Sicily to go to help the beleaguered Duke of Urbin. He is, however, disavowed by the crafty, peace-loving king. In the debate Bertoldo describes Sicily in language which might easily be applied to England, and then proceeds in an eloquent passage to refer to England’s glorious naval tradition in the past: BERTOLDO. If examples May move you more than arguments, look on England, The empress of the European isles, And unto whom alone ours yields precedence: When did she flourish so, as when she was The mistress of the ocean, her navies Putting a girdle round about the world? When the Iberian quaked, her worthies named; And the fair flower-de-luce grew pale, set by The red rose and the white! Let not our armour Hung up, or our unrigg’d Armada make us Ridiculous to the late poor snakes, our neighbours, Warm’d in our bosoms, and to whom again We may be terrible.(77)