yet unswaddled.  The little minutes will be continually striking, though no man regard them:  whelps will bark before they can see, and strive to bite before they have teeth.  Politianus speaketh of a beast who, while he is cut on the table, drinketh and represents the motions and voices of a living creature.  Such like foolish beasts are we who, whilst we are cut, mocked, and flouted at, in every man’s common talk, will notwithstanding proceed to shame ourselves to make sport.  No man pleaseth all:  we seek to please one.  Didymus wrote four thousand books, or (as some say) six-thousand, on the art of grammar.  Our author hopes it may be as lawful for him to write a thousand lines of as light a subject.  Socrates (whom the oracle pronounced the wisest man of Greece) sometimes danced:  Scipio and Laslius, by the sea-side, played at peeble-stone:  Semel insanivimus omnes.  Every man cannot with Archimedes make a heaven of brass, or dig gold out of the iron mines of the law.  Such odd trifles as mathematicians’ experiments be artificial flies to hang in the air by themselves, dancing balls, an egg-shell that shall climb up to the top of a spear, fiery-breathing gores, poeta noster professeth not to make. Placeat sibi quinque licebit.  What’s a fool but his bauble?  Deep-reaching wits, here is no deep stream for you to angle in.  Moralisers, you that wrest a never-meant meaning out of everything, applying all things to the present time, keep your attention for the common stage; for here are no quips in characters for you to read.  Vain glosers, gather what you will; spite, spell backward what thou canst.  As the Parthians fight flying away, so will we prate and talk, but stand to nothing that we say.

How say you, my masters? do you not laugh at him for a coxcomb?  Why, he hath made a prologue longer than his play:  nay, ’tis no play neither, but a show.  I’ll be sworn the jig of Rowland’s godson is a giant in comparison of it.  What can be made of Summer’s last will and testament!  Such another thing as Gyllian of Brentford’s[20] will, where she bequeathed a score of farts amongst her friends.  Forsooth, because the plague reigns in most places in this latter end of summer,[21] Summer must come in sick; he must call his officers to account, yield his throne to Autumn, make Winter his executor, with tittle-tattle Tom-boy.  God give you good night in Watling Street; I care not what you say now, for I play no more than you hear; and some of that you heard too (by your leave) was extempore.  He were as good have let me had the best part, for I’ll be revenged on him to the uttermost, in this person of Will Summer, which I have put on to play the prologue, and mean not to put it off till the play be done.  I’ll sit as a chorus, and flout the actors and him at the end of every scene.  I know they will not interrupt me, for fear of marring of all; but look to your cues, my masters, for I intend to play the knave in cue, and put you besides all your