“Time is like a fashionable host That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly, Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek Remuneration for the thing it was; For beauty, wit, High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin; That all with one consent praise new-born gawds, Though they are made and moulded of things past, And give to dust that is a little gilt More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.” As a last instance, from the _Winter’s Tale_ (act iv. sc. 4, l. 135, vol. iii. p. 383), take Florizel’s commendation of his beloved Perdita,— “What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I’ld have you do it ever: when you sing, I’ld have you buy and sell so, so give alms. Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs, To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, And own no other function: each your doing. So singular in each particular, Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, That all your acts are queens.” Our Prelude we may take from Le Bey de Batilly’s _Emblems_ (_Francofurti_ 1596, Emb. 51), in which with no slight zeal he celebrates “The Glory of Poets.” For subject he takes “The Christian Muse” of his Jurisconsult friend, Peter Poppæus of Barraux, near Chambery. POETARVM GLORIA. [Illustration: _De Batilly, 1596._] With the sad fate of Icarus, Le Bey contrasts the far different condition of Poets,— “_Quos Phœbus ad aurea cœli Limina sublimis Iouis omnipotentis in aula Sistit, & ætherei monstrat commercia cœtus; Et sacri vates & Diuûm cura vocantur. Quos etiam sunt qui numen habere putent._” [Sidenote: _i.e._] “Whom at heaven’s golden threshold, Within the halls of lofty Jove omnipotent Phœbus doth place, and to them clearly shows The intercourses of ethereal companies. Both holy prophets and the care of gods Are poets named; and those there are who think That they possess the force of power divine.” In vigorous prose Le Bey declares “their home of glory is the world itself, and for them honour without death abides.” Then personally to his friend Poppæus he says,—