TAC.  Thus ’tis:  five hours ago I set a dozen maids to attire a boy like a nice gentlewoman; but there is such doing with their looking-glasses, pinning, unpinning, setting, unsetting, formings and conformings; painting blue veins and cheeks; such stir with sticks and combs, cascanets, dressings, purls, falls, squares, busks, bodies, scarfs, necklaces, carcanets, rebatoes, borders, tires, fans, palisadoes, puffs, ruffs, cuffs, muffs, pusles, fusles, partlets, frislets, bandlets, fillets, crosslets, pendulets, amulets, annulets, bracelets, and so many lets, that yet she’s scarce dressed to the girdle; and now there is such calling for fardingales, kirtles, busk-points, shoe-ties, &c., that seven pedlars’ shops—­nay, all Stourbridge fair, will scarce furnish her.  A ship is sooner rigged by far, than a gentlewoman made ready.

PHA.  ’Tis strange that women, being so mutable,
Will never change in changing their apparel.

COM.  SEN.  Well, let them pass; Tactus, we are content
To know your dignity by relation.

TAC.  The instrument of instruments, the hand,
Courtesy’s index, chamberlain to nature,
The body’s soldier, and mouth’s caterer,
Psyche’s great secretary, the dumb’s eloquence,
The blind man’s candle, and his forehead’s buckler,
The minister of wrath, and friendship’s sign,
This is my instrument:  nevertheless my power
Extends itself far as our queen commands,
Through all the parts and climes of Microcosm. 
I am the root of life, spreading my virtue
By sinews, that extend from head to foot
To every living part. 
For as a subtle spider, closely sitting
In centre of her web that spreadeth round,
If the least fly but touch the smallest thread,
She feels it instantly; so doth myself,
Casting my slender nerves and sundry nets
O’er every particle of all the body,
By proper skill perceive the difference
Of several qualities, hot, cold, moist, and dry;
Hard, soft, rough, smooth, clammy, and slippery: 
Sweet pleasure and sharp pain profitable,
That makes us (wounded) seek for remedy. 
By these means do I teach the body fly
From such bad things as may endanger it. 
A wall of brass can be no more defence
Unto a town than I to Microcosm. 
Tell me what Sense is not beholden to me? 
The nose is hot or cold, the eyes do weep,
The ears do feel, the taste’s a kind of touching: 
Thus, when I please, I can command them all,
And make them tremble, when I threaten them. 
I am the eldest and biggest of all the rest,
The chiefest note and first distinction
Betwixt a living tree and living beast;
For though one hear and see, and smell and taste,
If he wants touch, he is counted but a block. 
Therefore, my lord, grant me the royalty;
Of whom there is such great necessity.

COM.  SEN.  Tactus, stand aside.  You, sirrah Anamnestes, tell the Senses we expect their appearance.