Will is described as extravagantly free, not only to the maids of honour, but to the King’s sister. Patch, in this piece, is not the King’s fool, but Wolsey’s. “All the fools follow you, my lord,” he says to the Cardinal, when the latter observes the two fools near him: “I come to bid my cousin Patch welcome to court; and when I come to York House, he’ll do as much for me.” To which Patch, who seems here a natural rather then an artificial fool, replies, “Yes, cousin; hey, da, darry, diddel, day, day.” Will’s attempts to make the King merry are sometimes roughly recompensed. “He gave me such a box on the ear,” says the fool, “that strake me clean through three chambers, down four pair of stairs. I fell over five barrels in the bottom of the cellar, and if I had not well liquored myself there, I had never lived after it.” Patch, too, declares that the King had almost killed him “_with his countenance_.” This sort of fool’s flattery has been very acceptable, it may be observed, to all despotic princes, from Augustus down to the Czar Nicholas. The most amusing of Roman historians tells us that Augustus was always well pleased with those persons who, in addressing him, looked upon the ground, as though there were a divine splendour in his eyes, too dazzling for them to gaze upon. “Gaudiebatque,” says Suetonius, “si quis sibi acrius contuenti, quasi ad fulgorem solis, vultum submitteret.” His eyes nevertheless grew dim as he grew old, when the lustre of the left one, in particular, went out in a most ungodlike fashion.