Page 1610 - Shakespeare - Vol. 2

List his discourse of war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle render’d you in music:
Turn him to any cause of policy, [45]
The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,

Familiar as his garter; that, when he speaks,
The air, a charter’d libertine, is still,
And the mute wonder lurketh in men’s ears,
To steal his sweet and honey’d sentences; [50]

So that the art and practic part of life
Must be the mistress to this theoric:
Which is a wonder how his grace should glean it,
Since his addiction was to courses vain;

His companies unletter’d, rude, and shallow; [55]
His hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports;
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration

From open haunts and popularity.

ELY
The strawberry grows underneath the nettle, [60]
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality:
And so the Prince obscur’d his contemplation

Under the veil of wildness; which, no doubt,
Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night, [65]
Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty.

CANTERBURY
It must be so; for miracles are ceas’d;

And therefore we must needs admit the means
How things are perfected.

ELY
But, my good lord, [70]
How now for mitigation of this bill
Urg’d by the Commons? Doth his majesty

Incline to it, or no?