As cedars beaten with continual storms,
So great men flourish; and do imitate
Unskilful statuaries, who suppose,
In forming a colossus, if they make him
Straddle enough, strut, and look big, and gape,
Their work is goodly: so men merely great,
In their affected gravity of voice,
Sourness of countenance, manners' cruelty,
Authority, wealth, and all the spawn of fortune,
Think they bear all the kingdom's worth before them;
Yet differ not from those colossic statues,
Which, with heroic forms without o'erspread,
Within are naught but mortar, flint, and lead.
as great seamen using all their wealth
And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths,
In tall ships richly built and ribb'd with brass,
To put a girdle round about the world;
When they have done it, coming near the haven,
Are fain to give a warning piece, and call
poor staid fisherman that never pass'd
His country's sight, to waft and guide them in;
So when we wander furthest through the waves
Of glassy glory, and the gulfs of state,
Topp'd with all titles, spreading all our reaches,
As if each private arm would sphere the earth,
We must to Virtue for her guide resort,
Or we shall shipwreck in our safest port.
There is a deep nick in Time's restless wheel
For each man's good, when which nick comes, it strikes: As rhetoric yet works not persuasion,
But only is a mean to make it work;
So no man riseth by his real merit,
But when it cries clink in his Raiser's spirit.
Difference of the English and French Courts.
HENRY. GUISE. MONTSURRY.
Guise. I like not their1 court fashion; it is too crest-fallen
In all observance, making demigods
Of their great nobles, and of their old queen2
An ever young and most immortal goddess.
Mont. No question she's the rarest queen in Europe.
Guise. But what's that to her immortality?
Henry. Assure you, cousin Guise; so great a courtier,
So full of majesty and royal parts,
No queen in Christendom may vaunt herself.
Her court approves it. That's a court indeed;
Not mix'd with clowneries used in common houses:
But, as courts should be, the abstracts of their kingdoms,
In all the beauty, state, and worth they hold.
So is her's amply, and by her inform'd.
The world is not contracted in a man,
With more proportion and expression,
Than in her court her kingdom.
Is a mere mirror of confusion to it.
The king and subject, lord and every slave,
Dance a continual hay. Our rooms of state
Kept like our stables: no place more observed
Than a rude market-place; and though our custom
Keep his assured confusion from our eyes,
'Tis ne'er the less essentially unsightly.
BYRON'S CONSPIRACY. BY GEORGE CHAPMAN.
Byron described.
he is a man
Of matchless valour, and was ever happy
In all encounters, which were still made good
With an unwearied sense of any toil;
Having continued fourteen days together
Upon his horse: his blood is not voluptuous,
Nor much inclined to women; his desires
Are higher than his state; and his deserts
Not much short of the most he can desire,
If they be weigh'd with what France feels by them.
He is past measure glorious: and that humour
Is fit to feed his spirit, whom it possesseth
With faith in any error; chiefly where
Men blow it up with praise of his perfections:
The taste whereof in him so soothes his palate,
And takes up all his appetite, that oft times
He will refuse his meat, and company,
To feast alone with their most strong conceit.
Ambition also cheek by cheek doth march
With that excess of glory, both sustain'd
With an unlimited fancy, that the king,
Nor France itself, without him can subsist.
Men's glories eclipsed when they turn traitors.
As when the moon hath comforted the night,
And set the world in silver of her light,
The planets, asterisms, and whole state of heaven,
In beams of gold descending: all the winds
Bound up in caves, charged not to drive abroad
Their cloudy heads: a universal peace
(Proclaim'd in silence) of the quiet earth:
Soon as her hot and dry fumes are let loose,
Storms and clouds mixing suddenly put out
The eyes of all those glories; the creation
Turn'd into chaos; and we then desire,
For all our joy of life, the death of sleep.
So when the glories of our lives (men's loves,
Clear consciences, our fames and loyalties),
That did us worthy comfort, are eclipsed;
Grief and disgrace invade us; and for all
Our night of life besides, our misery craves
Dark earth would ope and hide us in our graves.
Opinion the Scale of Good or Bad.
there is no truth of any good
To be discern'd on earth; and, by conversion,
Naught therefore simply bad: but as the stuff
Prepared for arras pictures, is no picture
Till it be form'd, and man hath cast the beams
Of his imaginous fancy thorough it,
In forming ancient kings and conquerors
As he conceives they look'd and were attired,
Though they were nothing so; so all things here
Have all their price set down from men's conceits;
Which make all terms and actions good or bad,
And are but pliant and well-colour'd threads
Put into feigned images of truth.
We must have these lures, when we hawk for friends;
And wind about them like a subtile river,
That, seeming only to run on his course,
Doth search yet, as he runs, and still finds out
The easiest parts of entry on the shore,
Gliding so slily by, as scarce it touch'd,
Yet still eats something in it.
The Stars not able to foreshow any thing.
I am a nobler substance than the stars:
And shall the baser over-rule the better?
Or are they better since they are the bigger?
I have a will, and faculties of choice,
To do or not to do; and reason why
I do or not do this: the stars have none.
They know not why they shine, more than this taper,
Nor how they work, nor what. I'll change my course,
I'll piecemeal pull the frame of all my thoughts:
And where are all your Caput Algols then?
Your planets all being underneath the earth
At my nativity,-what can they do?
Malignant in aspects! in bloody houses!
Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea
Loves to have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind,
Ev'n till his sail-yards tremble, his mast crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low,
That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man, that knows
What life and death is: there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law:
He goes before them, and commands them all,
That to himself is a law rational.
Vile Natures in High Places.
That under little saints suppose1 great bases,
Make less (to sense) the saints: and so, where fortune
Advanceth vile minds to states great and noble,
She much the more exposeth them to shame;
Not able to make good, and fill their bases
With a conformed structure.
Innocence the Harmony of the Faculties.
Innocence, the sacred amulet
'Gainst all the poisons of infirmity,
Of all misfortune, injury, and death:
That makes a man in tune still in himself;
Free from the hell to be his own accuser;
Ever in quiet, endless joy enjoying,
No strife nor no sedition in his powers;
No motion in his will against his reason;
Nothought 'gainst thought; nor (as 'twere in the confines
Of wishing and repenting) doth possess
Only a wayward and tumultuous peace:
But, all parts in him friendly and secure,
Fruitful of all best things in all worst seasons,
He can with every wish be in their plenty;
When the infectious guilt of one foul crime
Destroys the free content of all our time.
BYRON'S TRAGEDY. BY GEORGE CHAPMAN.
King Henry the Fourth of France blesses the young Dauphin.
My royal blessing, and the King of Heaven
Make thee an aged and a happy king!
Help, nurse, to put my sword into his hand.
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