I see by him what excellence a right mean wit may come to in one craft, if in all his life he studieth and busieth his wit about no more but that one.  But I made afterward a solemn vow unto myself that if ever he and I were matched together at that board again, when we should fall to our flattery I would flatter in Latin, that he might contend with me no more.  For though I could be content to be outrun by a horse, yet would I no more abide it to be outrun by an ass.

But, uncle, here began now the game:  he that sat highest and was to speak last, was a great beneficed man, and not only a doctor but also somewhat learned indeed in the laws of the church.  A world was it to see how he marked every man’s word who spoke before him!  And it seemed that the more proper every word was, the worse he liked it, for the cumbrance that he had to study out a better one to surpass it.  The man even sweated with the labour, so that he was fain now and then to wipe his face.  Howbeit, in conclusion, when it came to his course, we who had spoken before him had so taken up all among us before that we had not left him one wise word to speak afterward.

ANTHONY:  Alas, good man—­among so many of you, some good fellow should have lent him one!

VINCENT:  It needed not, as it happened, uncle.  For he found out such a shift that in his flattering he surpassed us all.

ANTHONY:  Why, what said he, cousin?

VINCENT:  By our Lady, uncle, not one word.  But he did as I believe Pliny telleth of Apelles the painter, in the picture that he painted of the sacrifice and death of Iphigenia, in the making of the sorrowful countenances of the noble men of Greece who beheld it.  He reserved the countenance of King Agamemnon her father for the last, lest, if he made his visage before, he must in some of the others afterward either have made the visage less dolorous than he could, and thereby have forborne some part of his praise, or, doing the uttermost of his craft, might have happed to make some other look more heavily for the pity of her pain than her own father, which would have been yet a far greater fault in his painting.  When he came, therefore, to the making of her father’s face last of all, he had spent out so much of his craft and skill that he could devise no manner of new heavy cheer and countenance for him but what he had made there aleady in some of the others a much more heavy one before.  And therefore, to the intent that no man should see what manner of countenance it was that her father had, the painter was fain to paint him holding his face in his handkerchief!

The like pageant (in a manner) played us there this good ancient honourable flatterer.  For when he saw that he could find no words of praise that would surpass all that had been spoken before already, the wily fox would speak never a word.  But as one who were ravished heavenward with the wonder of the wisdom and eloquence that my lord’s grace had uttered in that oration, he set up a long sigh with an “Oh!” from the bottom of his breast, and held up both his hands, and lifted up his head, and cast up his eyes into the welkin, and wept.