“Mine
enemy’s dog,
Though he had bit me, should
have stood that night
Against my fire; and wast
thou fain, poor father,
To hovel thee with swine,
and rogues forlorn,
In short and musty straw?”
“We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgivness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of Court news; and we’ll talk with them too,—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out;—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by th’ Moon.”
“Henceforth
The white hand of a lady fever
thee,
Shake thou to look on’t.
Get thee back to Caesar,
Tell him thy entertainment:
look thou say
He makes me angry with him;
for he seems
Proud and disdainful, harping
on what I am,
Not what he knew I was:
he makes me angry;
And at this time most easy
’tis to do’t,
When my good stars, that were
my former guides,
Have empty left their orbs,
and shot their fires
Into th’ abysm of Hell.”
With these collate the following from Troilus and Cressida and King Lear, where, for aught I can see, the interweaving of Saxon and Latin words proceeds with just as much ease and happiness as the almost pure Saxon of the foregoing:
“How
could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods
in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable
shores,
The primogenity and due of
birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns,
sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic
place?
Take but degree away, untune
that string,
And, hark, what discord follows!
each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the
bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher
than the shores,
And make a sop of all this
solid globe:
Strength should be lord of
imbecility,
And the rude son should strike
his father dead:
Force should be right; or
rather, right and wrong—
Between whose endless jar
justice resides—
Should lose their names, and
so should justice too.
Then every thing includes
itself in power
Power into will, will into
appetite;
And appetite, an universal
wolf,
So doubly seconded with will
and power,
Must make perforce an universal
prey,
And last eat up himself.”
“Tremble,
thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged
crimes,
Unwhipp’d of justice:
hide thee, thou bloody hand;
Thou perjur’d, and thou
simular of virtue,