WILL SUM.  “Lord, have mercy on us,” how lamentable ’tis!

Enter VERTUMNUS, with CHRISTMAS and BACKWINTER.

VER.  I have despatched, my lord; I have brought you them you sent me for.

WILL SUM.  What say’st thou? hast thou made a good batch?  I pray thee, give me a new loaf![128]

SUM.  Christmas, how chance thou com’st not as the rest,
Accompanied with some music or some song? 
A merry carol would have grac’d thee well: 
Thy ancestors have us’d it heretofore.

CHRIST. Ay, antiquity was the mother of ignorance:  this latter world, that sees but with her spectacles, hath spied a pad in those sports more than they could.

SUM.  What, is’t against thy conscience for to sing?

CHRIST. No, not to say, by my troth, if I may get a good bargain.

SUM.  Why, thou should’st spend, thou should’st not care to get: 
Christmas is god of hospitality.

CHRIST. So will he never be of good husbandry.  I may say to you, there is many an old god that is now grown out of fashion; so is the god of hospitality.

SUM.  What reason canst thou give he should be left?

CHRIST. No other reason, but that gluttony is a sin, and too many dunghills are infectious.  A man’s belly was not made for a powdering beef-tub; to feed the poor twelve days, and let them starve all the year after, would but stretch out the guts wider than they should be, and so make famine a bigger den in their bellies than he had before.  I should kill an ox, and have some such fellow as Milo to come and eat it up at a mouthful; or, like the Sybarites,[129] do nothing all one year but bid guests against the next year.  The scraping of trenchers you think would put a man to no charges:  it is not a hundred pound a year would serve the scullion in dishclouts.  My house stands upon vaults; it will fall, if it be overladen with a multitude.  Besides, have you never read of a city that was undermined and destroyed by moles?  So, say I, keep hospitality and a whole fair of beggars bid me to dinner every day.  What with making legs[130], when they thank me at their going away, and settling their wallets handsomely on their backs, they would shake as many lice on the ground as were able to undermine my house, and undo me utterly.  Is it their prayers would build it again, if it were overthrown by this vermin, would it?  I pray, who began feasting and gormandis[ing] first, but Sardanapalus, Nero, Heliogabalus, Commodus? tyrants, whoremasters, unthrifts.  Some call them emperors, but I respect no crowns but crowns in the purse.  Any man may wear a silver crown that hath made a fray in Smithfield, and lost but a piece of his brain-pan; and to tell you plain, your golden crowns are little better in substance, and many times got after the same sort.

SUM.  Gross-headed sot! how light he makes of state!

AUT.  Who treadeth not on stars, when they are fall’n? 
Who talketh not of states, when they are dead? 
A fool conceits no further than he sees,
He hath no sense of aught but what he feels.