WIN.  Next them a company of ragged knaves,
Sun-bathing beggars, lazy hedge-creepers,
Sleeping face upwards in the fields all night,
Dream’d strange devices of the sun and moon;
And they, like gipsies, wandering up and down,
Told fortunes, juggled, nicknam’d all the stars,
And were of idiots term’d philosophers. 
Such was Pythagoras the silencer;
Prometheus, Thales, Milesius,
Who would all things of water should be made: 
Anaximander, Anaxamines,
That positively said the air was God: 
Zenocrates, that said there were eight gods;
And Cratoniates and Alcmaeon too,
Who thought the sun and moon and stars were gods. 
The poorer sort of them, that could get nought,
Profess’d, like beggarly Franciscan friars,
And the strict order of the Capuchins,
A voluntary, wretched poverty,
Contempt of gold, thin fare, and lying hard. 
Yet he that was most vehement in these,
Diogenes, the cynic and the dog,
Was taken coining money in his cell.

WILL SUM.  What an old ass was that.  Methinks he should have coined carrot-roots rather; for, as for money, he had no use for[’t], except it were to melt, and solder up holes in his tub withal.

WIN.  It were a whole Olympiad’s work to tell
How many devilish, ergo, armed arts,
Sprung all as vices of this idleness: 
For even as soldiers not employ’d in wars,
But living loosely in a quiet state—­
Not having wherewithal to maintain pride,
Nay, scarce to find their bellies any food—­
Nought but walk melancholy, and devise,
How they may cozen merchants, fleece young heirs,
Creep into favour by betraying men,
Rob churches, beg waste toys, court city dames,
Who shall undo their husbands for their sakes;
The baser rabble how to cheat and steal,
And yet be free from penalty of death:[109]
So these word-warriors, lazy star-gazers,
Us’d to no labour but to louse themselves,
Had their heads fill’d with cozening fantasies. 
They plotted how to make their poverty
Better esteem’d of than high sovereignty. 
They thought how they might plant a heaven on earth,
Whereof they would be principal low-gods;[110]
That heaven they called Contemplation: 
As much to say as a most pleasant sloth,
Which better I cannot compare than this,
That if a fellow, licensed to beg,
Should all his lifetime go from fair to fair
And buy gape-seed, having no business else. 
That contemplation, like an aged weed,
Engender’d thousand sects, and all those sects
Were but as these times, cunning shrouded rogues. 
Grammarians some, and wherein differ they
From beggars that profess the pedlar’s French?[111]
The poets next, slovenly, tatter’d slaves,
That wander and sell ballads in the streets. 
Historiographers others there be,
And they, like lazars, lie[112] by the highway-side,
That for a penny or a halfpenny