Poor Painters oft with silly Poets join, To fill the world with strange but vain conceits: One brings the stuff, the other stamps the coin, Which breeds nought else but glosses of deceits. Thus painters Cupid paint, thus poets do A naked god, blind, young, with arrows two. Is he a god that ever flies the light: Or naked he, disguis’d in all untruth? If he be blind, how hitteth he so right? How is he young that tam’d old Phoebus’ youth? But arrows two, and tipped with gold or lead? Some hurt, accuse a third with horny head. No, nothing so; an old false knave he is, By Argus got on Io, then a cow: What time for her Juno her Jove did miss, And charge of her to Argus did allow. Mercury kill’d his false sire for this act, His dam a beast was pardon’d beastly fact. With father’s death and mother’s guilty shame, With Jove’s disdain of such a rival’s seed: {198} The wretch compell’d a runagate became, And learn’d what ill a miser-state doth breed: To lie, to steal, to pry, and to accuse, Nought in himself each other to abuse. Yet bears he still his parents’ stately gifts, A horned head, cloven feet, and thousand eyes, Some gazing still, some winking wily shifts, Whose long large ears, where never rumour dies. His horned head doth seem the heaven to spite, His cloven foot doth never tread aright. Thus half a man, with man he daily haunts, Cloth’d in the shape which soonest may deceive: Thus half a beast, each beastly vice he plants, In those weak hearts that his advice receive. He prowls each place still in new colours decked, Sucking one’s ill, another to infect. To narrow breasts, he comes all wrapped in gain: To swelling hearts he shines in honour’s fire: To open eyes all beauties he doth rain; Creeping to each with flattering of desire. But for that love is worst which rules the eyes, Thereon his name, there his chief triumph lies. Millions of years this old drivel Cupid lives, While still more wretch, more wicked he doth prove. Till now at length that Jove him office gives (At Juno’s suit, who much did Argus love) In this our world a hangman for to be Of all those fools, that will have all they see.