JUDICIO.  I would wish thee, Ingenioso, to sheathe thy pen, for thou canst not be successful in the fray, considering thy enemies have the advantage of the ground.

INGENIOSO.  Or rather, Judicio, they have the grounds with advantage, and the French crowns with a pox; and I would they had them with a plague too:  but hang them, swads, the basest corner in my thoughts is too gallant a room to lodge them in.  But say, Judicio, what news in your press? did you keep any late corrections upon any tardy pamphlets?

JUDICIO. Veterem jubes renovare dolorem, Ingenioso:  whate’er befalls thee, keep thee from the trade of the corrector of the press.

INGENIOSO.  Marry, so I will, I warrant thee; if poverty press not too much, I’ll correct no press but the press of the people.

JUDICIO.  Would it not grieve any good spirits to sit a whole month knitting out a lousy, beggarly pamphlet, and, like a needy physician, to stand whole years tossing and tumbling the filth that falleth from so many draughty inventions as daily swarm in our printing-house.

INGENIOSO.  Come, I think we shall have you put finger in the eye, and cry, O friends, no friends!  Say, man, what new paper hobby-horses, what rattle-babies, are come out in your late May morris-dance?

JUDICIO.  Fly[37] my rhymes as thick as flies in the sun; I think there be never an alehouse in England, not any so base a maypole on a country green, but sets forth some poet’s petronels or demi-lances to the paper wars in Paul’s Churchyard.

INGENIOSO.  And well too may the issue of a strong hop learn to hop all over England, when as better wits sit, like lame cobblers, in their studies.  Such barmy heads will always be working, when as sad vinegar wits sit souring at the bottom of a barrel; plain meteors, bred of the exhalation of tobacco and the vapours of a moist pot, that soar[38] up into the open air, when as sounder wit keeps below.

JUDICIO.  Considering the furies of the times, I could better endure to see those young can-quaffing hucksters shoot off their pellets, so they would keep them from these English Flores poetarum; but now the world is come to that pass, that there starts up every day an old goose that sits hatching up those eggs which have been filched from the nest of crows and kestrels.  Here is a book, Ingenioso; why, to condemn it to clear [fire,][39] the usual Tyburn of all misliving papers, were too fair a death for so foul an offender.

INGENIOSO. 
What’s the name of it, I pray thee, Judicio?

JUDICIO. 
Look, it’s here; “Belvidere."[40]

INGENIOSO.  What, a bell-wether in Paul’s Churchyard! so called because it keeps a bleating, or because it hath the tinkling bell of so many poets about the neck of it?  What is the rest of the title?

JUDICIO.  “The Garden of the Muses.”

INGENIOSO. 
What have we here, the poet garish, gaily bedecked, like fore-horses of
the parish?  What follows?