SUM.  Thou know’st too much to know to keep the mean: 
He that sees all things oft sees not himself. 
The Thames is witness of thy tyranny,
Whose waves thou dost exhaust for winter show’rs. 
The naked channel ’plains her of thy spite,
That laid’st her entrails unto open sight.[51]
Unprofitably borne to man and beast,
Which like to Nilus yet doth hide his head,
Some few years since[52] thou lett’st o’erflow these walks,
And in the horse-race headlong ran at race,
While in a cloud thou hidd’st thy burning face. 
Where was thy care to rid contagious filth,
When some men wet-shod (with his waters) droop’d?[53]
Others that ate the eels his heat cast up
Sicken’d and died by them impoisoned. 
Sleptest, or kept’st thou then Admetus’ sheep,
Thou drov’st not back these flowings of the deep?

SOL.  The winds, not I, have floods and tides in chase. 
Diana, whom our fables call the moon,
Only commandeth o’er the raging main: 
She leads his wallowing offspring up and down,
She waning, all streams ebb:  in the year
She was eclips’d, when that the Thames was bare.

SUM.  A bare conjecture, builded on per-haps.[54]
In laying thus the blame upon the moon,
Thou imitat’st subtle Pythagoras
Who, what he would the people should believe,
The same he wrote with blood upon a glass,
And turn’d it opposite ’gainst the new moon,
Whose beams, reflecting on it with full force,
Show’d all those lines to them that stood behind,
Most plainly writ in circle of the moon: 
And then he said:  not I, but the new moon,
Fair Cynthia, persuades you this and that. 
With like collusion shalt thou now blind me;
But for abusing both the moon and me
Long shalt thou be eclipsed by the moon,
And long in darkness live and see no light—­
Away with him, his doom hath no reverse!

SOL.  What is eclips’d will one day shine again: 
Though winter frowns, the spring will ease my pain. 
Time from the brow doth wipe out every stain.
                                       [Exit SOL.

WILL SUM.  I think the sun is not so long in passing through the twelve signs, as the son of a fool hath been disputing here about had I wist.[55] Out of doubt, the poet is bribed of some that have a mess of cream to eat, before my lord go to bed yet, to hold him half the night with raff-raff of the rumming of Elinor.[56] If I can tell what it means, pray God I may never get breakfast more, when I am hungry.  Troth, I am of opinion he is one of those hieroglyphical writers, that by the figures of beasts, plants, and of stones, express the mind, as we do in A B C; or one that writes under hair, as I have heard of a certain notary, Histiaesus,[57] who, following Darius in the Persian wars, and desirous to disclose some secrets of import to his friend Aristagoras, that dwelt afar off, found out this means.  He had a servant, that