_Slip._ Miserably, complaining to your crack-ship:
though we have light mistresses, we are made the children
and servants of darkness. What profane use we are put
to, all these gallants more feelingly know than we can
lively express; it is to be commiserated, and by your royal
insight only to be prevented, that a male monkey and the
diminutive of a man should be _synonima_, and no sense.
Though we are the dross of your subjects, yet being a
kind of page, let us find your celsitude kind and respective
of our time-fortunes and birth's abuse: and so,
in the name of our whole tribe of empty basket-bearers, I
kiss your little hands. 41
_Bid._ Your case is dangerous, and almost desperate.
Stand forth, ordinary gallant's page: what is the nature
of your master?
_No._ He eats well and right slovenly; and when the
dice favour him, goes in good clothes, and scours his
pink colour silk stockings; when he hath any money, he
bears his crowns; when he hath none, I carry his purse.
He cheats well, swears better, but swaggers in a wanton's
chamber admirably; he loves his boy and the rump of
a cramm'd capon; and this summer hath a passing thrifty
humour to bottle ale; as contemptuous as Lucifer, as
arrogant as ignorance can make him, as libidinous as
Priapus. He keeps me as his adamant, to draw metal
after to his lodging: I curl his perriwig, paint his
cheeks, perfume his breath; I am his froterer[501] or rubber
in a hot-house, the prop of his lies, the bearer of his false
dice; and yet for all this, like the Persian louse, that
eats biting, and biting eats, so I say sighing,[502] and sighing
say, my end is to paste up a _si quis_.[503] My master's fortunes
are forced to cashier me, and so six to one I fall to be a
pippin-squire. _Hic finis Priami!_--this is the end of
pickpockets. 63
_Bid._ Stand forth, court-page: thou lookest pale and wan.
_Trip._ Most ridiculous Emperor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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