Page 338 - Shakespeare - Vol. 3

If one could match you. The scrimers of their nation
He swore had neither motion, guard, nor eye, [100]
If you oppos’d them. Sir, this report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy

That he could nothing do but wish and beg
Your sudden coming o’er to play with you.
Now out of this −

LAERTES
What out of this, my lord? [105]

KING
Laertes, was you father dear to you?

Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart?

LAERTES
Why ask you this?

KING
Not that I think you did not love your father,
But that I know love is begun by time, [110]

And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it;

And nothing is at a like goodness still, [115]
For goodness, growing to a pleurisy,
Dies in his own too-much. That we would do,
We should do when we would: for this ‘would’ changes

And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents, [120]
And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift sigh
That hurts by easing. But to the quick of th’ulcer:

Hamlet comes back; what would you undertake
To show yourself in deed your father’s son
More than in words?