Page 1723 - Shakespeare - Vol. 2

BURGUNDY

My duty to you both, on equal love,
Great Kings of France and England! That I have labour’d
With all my wits, my pains, and strong endeavours, [25]

To bring your most imperial majesties
Unto this bar and royal interview,
Your mightiness on both parts best can witness.
Since then, my office hath so far prevail’d
That face to face, and royal eye to eye, [30]

You have congreeted, let it not disgrace me
If I demand before this royal view,
What rub or what impediment there is,

Why that the naked, poor, and mangled Peace,
Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births, [35]
Should not in this best garden of the world,
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Alas! she hath from France too long been chas’d

And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in it own fertility. [40]
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,

Unprunèd dies; her hedges even-pleach’d,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disorder’d twigs; her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory [45]
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts

That should deracinate such savagery;
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,

Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, [50]
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, keeksies, burrs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,

Defective in their natures, grow to wildness, [55]
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,

The sciences that should become our country,
But grow like savages − as soldiers will